Vision for your website

While owning a website, it is very important that the product owner has a vision for his product ! If the product owner is of the kind who very frequently changes the design of the site, it annoys the team.
Under the influence of the social networks and a flurry of information coming your way everyday (thanks to the internet and the information sharing tools), it becomes all the more important to form your vision and not alter it frequently.
If a product owner say John is the owner of a site. John has 3 business analysts working under him helping him formulate the requirements. He has a development team working on the site. Even in the days of super fast agile and SCRUM and adaptable teams, it is important that the team gets to work on a story for sometime. John should courage and confidence in his team and let the team implement a certain feature.

 But consider this hypothetical case, John is addicted to Twitter and NYtimes.com. That is how he begins his day. When he comes to work, his mind is much used to these sites and keeps tracking all updates, functionality, usability changes, etc. When he opens his site, he now wants to have those same features there.

He calls the business analysts and tells them to design a feature like twitter, feature like the news widget, and so on. This design based on other sites is killing creativity. Also, the dev team who was working on certain features like forums now has to redo the site and make it accept only 140 characters because twitter does so.
The team is no longer interested in building the site for John because they know that tomorrow he might want to build something like foursquare.

This influence of other sites is creating a cluttered product and just too much overlap between all the different tools in a organization. Probably too much of information sharing has limited a person's identifying capacity and ability to focus on a plan for sometime.

At the end neither is John going to be happy with his site nor are the end users going to be able to it.
A word of caution -
Carry an exercise to create a vision for your product for atleast the next 5 months and stick to it. Believe yourself and do not alter it under the influence of other sites / products hastily.

Let the mind be focused and learn to stay focused...