Stakeholder alignment is the real work of a vision

Most visions fail before anyone tests the ideas inside them, because someone whose buy-in mattered was never actually consulted, and finds out the same day everyone else sees the deck. When I led the North Star vision process for Careem's Captains, the people who deliver every order on the platform, most of the real work happened before a single concept existed.

Start with what the business already believes

Vision work rarely starts from nothing. Somewhere in the organisation there's already research, support data, and half-finished past initiatives, spread across teams that rarely compare notes. Before running a workshop, I pulled all of it together, separating what the business actually knew about Captains from what it was only assuming.

Get the room to agree on the problem

The part most teams underweight is the room, not the research. I sat down directly with stakeholders across the business to align on goals and outcomes, and separately with product to agree, honestly, on where the experience stood and where the real gaps were. There was no plan yet for anyone to react to, so the only thing on the table was agreement on the starting point: what's true, what's broken, what actually matters to the business. Most of the risk in a vision gets resolved, or created, in that room, long before anyone starts sketching ideas.

Then synthesise

Once research and stakeholder input were both in hand, individual pain points got grouped into a small number of themes. A list of complaints tells you what hurts; a handful of themes tells you what to actually fix. Those themes became guiding principles, a small set of statements every later decision could be checked against.

Then ideate

The North Star workshop came last. Structured sessions asked what the experience should become over the next several years, grounded in the guiding principles and the problems already surfaced. Ideas were generated and voted on by the group in the room, not handed down afterward as a finished deck.

Outcome

The guiding principles became an active filter. Later roadmap decisions were checked against them directly, giving the team a shared reference for what mattered instead of a fresh judgment call each time. That's the kind of result that decides whether a vision survives past the quarter it was written in.