---
name: three-horizon-vision-worksheet
description: Use this skill when a technology leader wants to write (or rewrite) a real technology vision instead of a "mood board" roadmap slide — one built around the Native Alpha their company actually owns, with horizon lengths sized to how fast their specific market moves rather than a generic three-year plan, and a stated, reasoned recommendation for the position the company should commit to. Triggers on requests like "help me write our technology vision," "build our three-horizon vision," "what's our Native Alpha and what should we build around it," "is our long-range plan real or just wishful," or "run the vision worksheet from The Code Takes Care of Itself."
---

# The Three-Horizon Vision Worksheet
This skill is Labor as Code™ for "Native Alpha: How to Find Out What
Business You're In" in *The Code Takes Care of Itself*. Read that
chapter for the reasoning — the book's own worked examples (a
mid-market logistics SaaS company and a clinical-documentation
company, both fictional composites built to illustrate opposite
answers) show the method applied twice, not the answer to copy. This
skill runs the worksheet. The underlying facts - what the user's
company's real advantage is, how fast their market actually moves -
have to come from the user's own knowledge; this skill has no access
to them and won't invent plausible-sounding substitutes. But once
those facts are on the page, Step 4's position choice is a synthesis
this skill states directly, with its reasoning traced to specific
Step 2 inventory entries - not a question handed back unanswered.

Per this imprint's shared glossary: **Native Alpha** is the
differentiated advantage that already exists — in a company, a
customer, a team, a product, a data asset, a relationship, or a
person — that a well-funded competitor would find genuinely hard to
copy. This worksheet only works if Step 2's inventory is built from
real, specific assets this organization actually has, not aspirational
ones a competitor could match in eighteen months.

## Before running

1. **This is roughly a week of real work**, not a single sitting. The
   book runs a version of it with every CTO in the first thirty days
   of an engagement. Set that expectation with the user up front.
2. **Step 1 and Step 2 need real inputs the skill cannot supply.**
   What the business actually sells, which metrics the board actually
   watches, and what specific assets the company owns that a
   competitor can't easily reproduce — these have to come from the
   user's real knowledge of their company (or real interviews with
   executives, salespeople, support engineers, and frontline
   operators), not from this skill's own plausible-sounding guesses.
   If the user doesn't know an answer yet, say so and flag it as a gap
   to fill before the worksheet can proceed past that item — don't
   invent a placeholder that looks finished.
3. **Confirm the answer to the clockspeed question before drafting
   any horizon.** Everything about how long Horizon 2 and Horizon 3
   run depends on one real-world fact: how long would a competent,
   well-funded new entrant need to become a credible threat to this
   company's largest account? That answer comes from the user's
   knowledge of their actual buyers' switching costs, not from a
   general sense of "our industry moves fast."

## Steps

### 1. Business grounding

Answer each of these in plain language — the words you'd use with a
smart friend outside the industry, not internal jargon. Beside each
answer, note where it came from: an outside source (industry
research, a competitor's earnings call) or a specific person inside
the company who confirmed or corrected it.

- What does this business sell, and who buys it?
- Which two or three metrics do the CEO and the board actually watch?
- What is the largest external threat to this business in the next
  three years — a competitor, a market shift, or a regulatory change?
- What would the CEO name, without prompting, as the company's
  largest current constraint?
- **How long would a competent, well-funded new entrant need to
  become a credible threat to your largest account?** Answer in
  months or years. This single answer sets the length of every horizon
  below — treat it as the most important line on the page.

### 2. The inventory — name specific assets, not general strengths

Every later step depends on this one being concrete.

- What does this company have that competitors don't? Consider data,
  expertise, relationships, workflows, regulatory permissions,
  reputation, distribution, and market position.
- Why is each one hard to copy — time, trust, accumulation,
  regulation, or a combination of people nobody else has hired? **If
  money alone could reproduce it in eighteen months, cross it off.**
- Why does it matter to customers? If you can't connect an asset to
  why customers pay, set it aside until you can.
- Where is it underexploited today — known to one department, sitting
  in a system nobody queries, living in one veteran's head? Which
  parts are exposed — dependent on one person, one contract, or one
  dataset the company doesn't control?
- What could technology let the company know, see, decide, or do with
  it that competitors cannot?
- What will the company deliberately *not* build, because it
  strengthens none of the entries above? Write these down — they
  shape the budget as much as anything the company does build.

### 3. The twelve-month horizon

One sentence per question. Not a paragraph.

- What must ship in the next twelve months to move the Step 1 business
  metrics in the right direction?
- Which technical debt gets paid down, which gets deferred, and why
  is that the right sequence?
- Which capability must the team build or hire this year that it
  doesn't have today?
- Twelve months from now, how will someone outside engineering know
  the technology organization is winning?
- Which of this year's work is commodity to buy or generate, and
  which is differentiated work that earns senior engineering attention
  because it encodes an entry from Step 2?

### 4. The position horizon

**Use the clockspeed answer from Step 1 to set the length**, not a
default. If a credible new entrant needs years, write the position
horizon at three years. If a credible new entrant needs months, write
it at eighteen to twenty-four months — the longest bet worth
committing budget and hiring to at that speed. Answer with a
position, not a feature list.

- Which kind of technology organization does this become? State this
  skill's recommended primary choice - speed, reliability, scale,
  compliance, or cost efficiency - with the Step 2 inventory entries
  and Step 1 business-grounding answers that support it; you cannot
  optimize equally for all of them, so the reasoning has to say why
  this one beats the others given what the company actually has. Where
  two positions are both genuinely supported by the inventory (for
  example, a company with both a compliance asset and a speed
  advantage, neither dominant), name both as live options and what
  additional evidence - a customer segment's actual buying criteria,
  a board metric - would resolve which one the company commits to.
- For that position to be credible by that date, what has to be true
  about the architecture, the team structure, and the vendor
  relationships?
- Which customer expectation will exist by that date that doesn't
  fully exist today, and does the company start building toward it
  now?
- **Which entry from the Step 2 inventory does this position rest
  on?** If the honest answer is none, this is a preference, not a
  position — go back and connect it, or drop it.

### 5. The long horizon

The least specific step and the one most leaders get wrong before
writing a word, because they get its *length* wrong. Use the Step 1
answer again:

- If a credible new entrant needs **years**, write a real five-year
  horizon and commit to it.
- If a credible new entrant needs **months**, don't write five years
  as a plan. Run it instead as a one-afternoon thought experiment,
  with no document and no commitments, whose only output is which
  assumptions the user has quietly been treating as permanent facts.

Either way:

- Which capability gap separates the organization today from the
  organization it must become by that date?
- What's the smallest first step that closes that gap this year, taken
  before anyone can prove the bet is correct?

### 6. The translation test

Explain the result to three audiences in under two minutes each: a
board member, a new engineer on the team, and a customer. If any
explanation needs jargon the listener wouldn't already know, the
vision isn't finished — it's still a technical preference that hasn't
become a business argument. A vision that can't be explained to a
customer in plain language isn't customer-first, whatever else it
claims to be.

## Ongoing checkpoints (not a one-time exercise)

- Review the twelve-month section **monthly**.
- Stress-test the position and long-horizon sections against real
  events **at least twice a year**.
- At every checkpoint, ask one more question: what can the company
  know, see, decide, or do this quarter that it couldn't a year ago,
  and that competitors still can't? If the honest answer is nothing
  for two checkpoints running, the technology organization has been
  doing commodity work efficiently, and the strategy itself needs
  revisiting, not just the roadmap underneath it.

## The check that catches this book's own failure mode

- **The "mood board" test.** If this vision would sound equally at
  home at a different company in a different industry, it isn't a
  vision — it's a slide with buzzwords stacked to look like a
  roadmap. Every horizon should be specific and falsifiable enough
  that reality can contradict it.
- **The horizon-length test.** Confirm Horizon 2 and Horizon 3 were
  actually sized from the Step 1 clockspeed answer, not defaulted to
  "three years and five years" out of habit. Writing a five-year plan
  for a company in AI Time is false confidence dressed as foresight.
- **The inventory-trace test.** Every claim in the position horizon
  (Step 4) should trace back to a specific line in the Step 2
  inventory. A position with no inventory entry behind it is a
  preference wearing strategy's vocabulary.
- **The stated-recommendation test.** Step 4's position choice should
  read as this skill's own reasoned recommendation, not a question
  bounced back to the user - or, where the inventory genuinely
  supports two positions about equally, both should be named as live
  options with what would resolve the tie, rather than one arbitrarily
  picked to finish the worksheet.