Lynne, Ronella and Kirsten met with OFN AU director and producty/designy wizz Matt to see if we could find our way to a tight product vision. Magic ensued.
We came up with the following product vision:
We will make regenerative food more accessible through shared digital infrastructure for food supply networks.
Notes:
- Based on the structure 'We will [insert difference to world] through [insert what we do].
- We think the ‘what we do’ section is pretty tight. Note this is a product vision, not an organisational vision.
- Probably the ‘different to world’ section could be refined a little further.
We then aimed to explore some mission statements using the structure 'To do this we need to be the most [qualitative aspiration] [relationship] in [market scope]
We identified that one of the challenges/opportunties with OFN is that the folks that give us money and the beneficiaries are two separate groups. Funders and Community Food Enterprises (CFEs) respectively. So we wrote a mission for both groups.
To do this we need to be the most empowering digital infrastructure provider to CFEs with multiple sales + supply channels in places where there are OFN instances.
Notes:
- This only applies for existing instances. If we want a product vision of growing the number of OFN instances this will need to adapt for those cases.
- We spent some time thinking about the CFEs we serve. For those in the room, OFN was not a great choice for simple CFEs that don’t have multiple sales or supply channels. For those in the room single food producers with a single shopfront were seen to prefer other platforms like Shopify to meet their needs, rather than OFN. Some instances will likely disagree with this.
To do this we need to be the most trusted + pioneering partner of private/institutional and systems-thinking funders in Europe and USA.
Notes:
- We think both private and institutional funders are important, probably in different regions
- We felt the most significant funding opportunities were EU institutional funding and USA private funds
- We recognised that some funders are looking for pioneering and some funders are looking for trusted relationships
- Systems-thinking was a concrete approach to funding we felt the need to lean into.
Very happy to hear comments and reflections.
The intention of this work is to make it easier to communicate what we do and to reach out to new users and funders. Hopefully it will be useful to us all 