In the autumn of 2021 I joined an Israeli startup called Ottopia, which builds an end-to-end teleoperation solution for the autonomous vehicle market.
As my first day approached, I knew my soon-to-be boss would be out of the office. So I gave real thought to which of my roughly forty sarcastic, politically incorrect T-shirts would make the most memorable first impression. People who know me were not surprised. People who didn't, well.
The amusement on everyone's faces was worth the trouble.
Luckily for me, Ottopia's CEO was among the people who loved the choice. Why "luckily"? Because it told me something about his attitude toward free, creative, out-of-the-box thinking from his employees — himself included. When my new boss, the VP Product, heard about it, she was amused too. So I had the two most important people in the company, from my point of view, on my side about this.
The actual job
One of the major tasks I took on was creating the product vision. The timing mattered: the product had just reached its scaling point, both from a multi-user perspective — operators and vehicles — and from the customer and prospect funnel, which needed handling.
To build a long-term vision I ran four activities in parallel, repeatedly, for three months.
Customer and prospect interviews. Collecting feedback on missing features and capabilities in the current end-to-end solution, and on the surrounding and complementary problems they expected to face in future.
Internal brainstorming. At executive level and with people much further down, across every org in the company: the CTO's office, the CBO's office, R&D, tech support, operations, and the outsourced UX/UI shop. We did not always agree. But the discussions were open, emotional, and mostly productive.
Market research. Looking forward, trying to recognise which complementary market trends and services would matter later.
A different sarcastic T-shirt every day. This one sounds like a joke. It wasn't. The shirts generated comments from colleagues, and some of those comments sparked new ideas and new lines of thought. It kept my creative process moving. At one point I declared myself "Head of Motivation", purely to get a conversation started.
What came out of it
After three months I had more than a long-term vision. I had two additional complementary products the company could offer on top of its existing one, the operational model and the roles and responsibilities for each, the interactions between them, the first-level operator user journey, and the blueprint for the next levels.
I named it Tele-Vision. I used Customer-Value-Chain decoupling, which created a business model where customers could select any subset of the three products, including the full package — and which raised the barrier for current and future competitors trying to enter the overall market.
According to the company's CBO, that vision was credited with doubling Ottopia's valuation in investor conversations.
The point
Find what makes your creative process tick, and use it fully. You will probably arrive at ideas that surprise even you.
So don't hesitate to put yourself out there. And make sure your bosses are willing to let you fly reasonably high, trusting that you'll keep yourself in check and not stray too far.