Hey!

Chris here. Welcome to Blueprint—the newsletter to help you build a winning engineering team.

Listen, most vision documents fail because nobody reads them. Not your CEO. Not your engineers. Not even the people who need the information most. 

And it's not because they don't care—it's because most vision docs are 27-page monsters nobody has time for.

I talk to CTOs every week, and the same question keeps coming up: "How do you drive major organizational changes when the technical details are so complex?"

The problem isn't your ideas. It's how you communicate them. Your brilliant technical vision is worthless if it stays trapped in dense documents nobody opens.

I've spent years refining a system that actually works. And today I'm breaking down exactly how to create vision documents people will actually read and act on.

Shall we?

📒 DEEP DIVE

Creating Vision Documents People Actually Read

Most vision documents die because they're too long, too vague, and nobody has time for them.

The tech field is a wide-open space with no established playbook for CTOs.

I see this with the CTOs I consult with—they have brilliant technical solutions but struggle to get buy-in from both executives and engineering teams. The ideas are sound. The execution plan exists. But the communication approach fails them.

Let's face it: Technical details are complex. The topics are nuanced. And you're trying to communicate with audiences who have radically different technical backgrounds.

A CEO needs to understand the business impact without getting lost in the weeds. Engineers need enough technical depth to implement without losing sight of the big picture. And somehow, you need to speak both languages simultaneously.

Here's my framework for making technical visions actually stick.

Step 1: Dual-direction communication

Vision requires communicating in 2 directions simultaneously:

Communicating UP: Your CEO and executive team won't understand technical jargon. You can't assume they understand the specialized language of tech—they don't live in your world. 

Before writing anything, have open conversations to confirm you're actually solving problems they care about.

Ask yourself: "Why would we address this problem instead of some other one?"

If you can't answer that clearly, your vision will fail before it starts.

Communicating DOWN: Your VPs, managers, and engineers need different levels of detail. This requires multiple communication channels:

• Direct communication with your management team

• Skip-level meetings to get direct feedback from people further down the org chart

• All-hands meetings specifically for your engineering organization

Yes, I know we hate disturbing engineers with meetings. We talk about it all the time. But when you have a crystal clear vision of something that needs to happen, that's precisely when an all-hands meeting is justified.

The key is finding the right level and frequency of communication. Too much and you waste engineering time. Too little and your vision never takes root.

Step 2: Create an actual vision DOCUMENT (not just a statement)

I've always thought vision statements were nonsense. They're just not clear enough to help people visualize what the future might actually look like—which is the entire point.

This is where vision docs come in. Let me break down the 6 key components of every well-crafted vision doc:

1) Vision Statement: What could the future look like without the problems we currently face? This needs to be concrete and specific, not fluffy corporate speak.

2) Value Proposition: What value would this new world bring to our business? This has to focus on business value first. Customer value follows, but if you can't explain why this matters to the business that's paying the checks, you're already losing.

3) Missing Capabilities: What do we need that we don't currently have? This is crucial and often overlooked.

If you're thinking about your team, your product, and your infrastructure (which covers most of engineering), what gaps would prevent you from executing this vision?

Maybe it's skills your team doesn't have. Maybe it's the infrastructure you haven't built. Document these explicitly.

4) Solved Constraints: What limitations would this vision remove? This is where you make the vision concrete.

For example, if developer time is currently eaten up by bugs, that's a constraint—you can't build new features because you're fixing bugs all day. If your vision reduces bugs by 90%, you've solved that constraint and opened new opportunities.

Be specific about which constraints disappear in your vision.

5) Future Constraints: What new problems will we face in this vision? This is absolutely critical—there's no utopia on the other side of these solutions. Your reward for solving problems is a new set of problems.

When people hear a vision, their BS detector activates immediately. "Oh great, such-and-such is talking about some idea they had again."

If you can explain in detail the new constraints you'll run into, you immediately come across as more honest. You're not claiming to fix everything—just this specific set of problems. Then you'll have new problems to solve.

This honesty builds credibility like nothing else.

6) Reference Materials: For technical visions, you need data and external validation to back your claims. But here's the key: Push all of it to an appendix.

Get all that technical detail out of the main document. Some people will want to dig deeper—"Wait, he said X and Y, and I'm not sure that's true"—so you need the backup. But it doesn't belong in the main vision.

Step 3: The One-Pager Rule

All the components above are prep work. You're creating a working document with notes that cover all these elements. But here's the most important part—the part almost everyone gets wrong:

Create a ONE-PAGE document. Not 27 pages. ONE.

I can't stress this enough. I have to say this so many times to people because they start writing and end up with these massive vision documents.

No one has ever read your 27-page document. I know you think they do—that your writing is so awesome that someone will read all 27 pages. They won't. 

You have to condense. You have to get all that information down to one page.

And here's what's shocking: even at one page, some people still won't read it. That's why you need the TLDR—a one-liner that captures the essence. 

Put that in the email subject line or Slack message. Push all those reference materials into an appendix or a completely separate document. The vision itself must fit on one page, or it fails.

Why This Approach Works When Others Fail

The reason this approach works is that it forces clarity. If you can't distill your vision to one page, you don't understand it well enough yourself.

The process of creating the one-pager forces you to identify what truly matters versus what's just interesting to you as a technical person.

It also maps to how organizations actually consume information:

• Executives need the one-liner and maybe the one-pager

• Middle management needs the one-pager and some specific reference materials

• Technical implementers need the one-pager plus deep dives into relevant technical sections

When you structure vision this way, people actually engage with it. They understand it. And most importantly, they can act on it.

🎙 EPISODE OF THE WEEK

This week on Build Your Business, Matt walks me through his game plan system for scaling businesses: The G.A.M.E. Plan.

What I like about Matt's system is how it breaks complex growth challenges into chronological action steps. You complete action one before moving to action two, measuring your progress the entire way.

We put this to the test using Surton as the case study. If you want a practical framework for turning big growth goals into daily execution, don't miss this one.

Listen wherever you listen to podcasts: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Youtube

BEFORE YOU GO…

Nobody was born knowing how to translate complex technical needs into organizational change. It took me years of failing before I understood what actually works.

The difference between mediocre CTOs and exceptional ones isn't technical knowledge—it's the ability to communicate vision in a way that resonates with both business leaders and engineers.

Your brilliant ideas don't matter if they stay trapped in your head or buried in docs nobody reads.

Start with that one-pager and make your vision so clear and compelling that people can't ignore it.

But vision alone isn't enough—you need execution. 

Next week, I'll show you how to create strategy documents—the tactical roadmaps that turn that one-page vision into reality. 

Because having a destination is useless without a clear path to get there.

Talk soon,

Chris.