Heap Product Vision

Heap made product analytics software that shows companies how people use their websites and apps. Its bet was autocapture: record every click and view automatically, instead of making engineers tag each one by hand. Heap's thesis was that autocapture would win (spoiler: it did). Califa's vision turned that thesis into a story the whole company could see itself in, and kept the company pointed at it.

• Built from ideas Heap already had. Every company with passionate people has high-potential ideas floating around, unprioritized and half-articulated. Califa distilled the strongest of them into one cohesive platform story and iterated until it felt right.
• Fast on purpose. Defined, storyboarded, illustrated and presented in under two weeks. The illustrations stayed sketchy so nobody mistook it for a roadmap or a design proposal.
• The product it pointed to. Told as a day at a fictional customer matched to Heap's ideal customer profile, the story shows where autocapture leads: journeys that fill themselves in, session replay and customer feedback sitting on the same path as the numbers so teams get the why as well as the what, and OKRs, experiments and dashboards that explain themselves in one shared source of truth.
• A measured result. On Heap's employee survey, "the leaders at this company have communicated a vision that motivates me" went from 60% before the all-hands to 100% on the next survey.
• It came true faster than planned. A year later, the fiscal-year kickoff update showed the bets landing. Session Replay was a multi-year bet; within a year Heap was shipping the exact workflow from the vision, after an acquisition made with the vision in mind. Mobile went further than the original had imagined.
• What it did afterwards. It framed in-flight work inside the larger story, built excitement for roadmap items nobody had started, helped recruit people Heap couldn't otherwise land, and gave the company a North Star it actually stuck to.