How to write a Product Vision
Sharing your Why
Defining your Product Vision is the single most important thing for your product success.
With direction and purpose, you can overcome any challenge.
Product Vision statements are how we clarify and communicate our purpose. They set direction, align and guide development teams towards a common goal.
But it can be a hard thing to get right. This is a guide to help you articulate your vision.
1. What is a Product Vision?
A Product Vision is a simple statement that lays out the aspirational purpose of a product. It explains why a product exists.
Usually, a vision statement aims to articulate a fundamental, future-focussed, emotional state. It’s a description of how the future will feel, thinking about long-term aspirations.
A vision should be something fixed that holds true for many years:
“We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details…. We don’t give up on things easily. Our third-party seller business is an example of that. It took us three tries to get the third-party seller business to work. We didn’t give up.” — Jeff Bezos
Before going into what a specific Product Vision looks like, it’s worth considering company-level vision statements. Company visions often go hand in hand with a mission. If a vision explains the why, a mission describes the how — specifically what the company does that’s going to turn the vision into reality.
Here’s some examples:
Vision “Belong Anywhere.”
Mission “to help create a world where you can belong anywhere and where people can live in a place, instead of just traveling to it.”
Vision “To create a better everyday life for the many people.”
Mission “to offer a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them.”
Vision “To make the best products on earth and to leave the world better than we found it.”
Mission “Bringing the best user experience to its customers through innovative hardware, software and services.”
While a Vision Statement can be so high-level sometimes it’s hard to identify the company, we should be able to tell who they are from their Mission Statement as it should articulate what specific things the company does well that differentiate it. It’s a good test of a well-written Mission Statement — the above examples were AirBnB, Ikea and Apple, of course.
So with that background knowledge in place, what does a good Product Vision look like?
It can vary depending on the scale of the product. For startups, the above structure can work great. Often, the company = the product, so a full-scale vision and mission are appropriate.
For individual products within a brand portfolio, there’s no need to go to such lofty aspirations as “Belong Anywhere”. A more practical vision is suitable. Often, Product Vision statements can bring the best of both a vision and mission — why we’re doing something and how we’re going to do it.
2. Why do you need a Product Vision?
The fundamental reason to develop a Product Vision is because it clarifies and communicates your purpose.
Clarification of Purpose
This world is a noisy place. There are an infinite number of customer problems to solve. So what is it you want your product to do? How do you want it to change the world?
Shaping a Product Vision means taking the time to clarify your thinking. It gives structure to your efforts and a guiding principle to test decisions against and help you navigate events. As Marty Cagan puts it:
So many companies spend their time reacting — reacting to new sales opportunities, reacting to competitor’s offerings, reacting to customer requests, and reacting to price pressure. Yet in strong product companies, while they care about these factors, they are not driven by them.
What drives them is the pursuit of a product vision that can meaningfully improve the lives of their customers.
Communication of Purpose
Product development is a collaborative effort, and one of the key roles of a Product Manager is to ensure strategic direction and frame the target outcome in a way that enables product team members to apply their expertise and make their own decisions.
A Product lead shouldn’t be telling everyone what to do — that way lies disaster — but they should be laying out the space the team can operate in to deliver value over the long term.
The best way to do that is to define the Product Vision
3. How to create a Product Vision
There are five elements to consider when shaping a Product Vision: Scope, Timeframe, Form, Leadership and Value Context.
Scope
The first thing to think about when considering a Product Vision is the scope. As I pointed out above, companies and brands have visions. Do you need one for an individual product development team? Probably not.
There’s no right or wrong answer here but a general rule of thumb is make the vision as wide as possible, so long as it makes sense. Let’s go back to Amazon as an example.
This is Amazon’s company vision and mission:
Vision “To be Earth’s most customer-centric company”
Mission “Our mission is to continually raise the bar of the customer experience by using the internet and technology to help consumers find, discover and buy anything, and empower businesses and content creators to maximise their success”
That’s great, and we can see how this vision has guided Amazon to create AWS, Kindle, Alexa, Amazon Marketplace, and a lot more products units too.
But that vision isn’t going to be practically useful to guide direction and decision making for those individual product units. They need their own. And depending on the variety offered within each unit, they often need sub-visions as well.
Here’s a Product Vision for an image recognition product within the the AWS product unit:
Integrated with AWS, Amazon Rekognition provides a fast, scalable, reliable and secure image recognition platform to help customers cost effectively gain fast insight and new revenue opportunities from their image library at the scale of their business.
So we’ve gone three layers down to get to a useful Product Vision that meets the core need of clarifying and communicating the product purpose.
Let’s take the scope in the opposite direction. There are likely to be several product development teams working on different features of Amazon Rekognition at any one time. Would they have their own Product Visions? Absolutely not. They’d end up pulling in different directions and the product would not be coherent for the end user.
Timeframe
Timeframe is more straightfoward. The usual timeframe for a Product Vision is medium to long term. So think about 2–10 years depending on how fast your market moves.
It’s definitely not less than 2 years. That’s not future, it’s now.
Note, this doesn’t mean the Product Vision is created then set in stone for the next decade. It will be reviewed on a regular basis, as the product team learn and adapt. It might need tweaking, and that’s fine too.
Form
The form your Product Vision will take again varies on the scale and scope of what you’re trying to achieve. Here are a couple of models to consider — there are more out there but these are the simplest.
- Vision + Mission
As shown in the company examples above, this is composed of two statements which together paint a picture of why the product will change the world, and how it’s going to make the change happen. Good for startups and single-product companies where visionary ambition is the main engine driving the product forward.
2. What and Why Statement
This is a more specific breakdown of the Mission statement above, focuses on the specific features and differentiators of the Product and the value it will bring to solve customer’s problems. Here’s the breakdown of the Amazon Rekognition example:
What it does:
Integrated with AWS, Amazon Rekognition provides a fast, scalable, reliable and secure image recognition platform…
Why it does it:
… to help customers cost effectively gain fast insight and new revenue opportunities from their image library at the scale of their business.
This form is useful for products within a product portfolio, or digital services and products provided by non-digital companies like retailer’s websites or a bank app.
Leadership
A Product Vision is a statement of leadership, so it needs to be informed, shaped and agreed with the decision makers involved in the product.
This is not one to come up with on your own.
- Identify the stakeholders who will be investing and supporting the product.
- Consult with technology and design.
- If necessary, flex the facilitation muscles. Workshop out ideas and competing visions. Challenge assumptions. Achieve consensus.
Value Context
This is the most important element. A Product Vision must be grounded in value for the business and the customer.
Developing a vision can often be the first test of if we have a desirable product that customers will see benefit from and can generate value for the business.
It’s not full product Discovery, but at a minimum there has to be understanding of the market, the customer problems, the size of the opportunity and the technology. Some level of primary and secondary research is useful to validate thinking and ensure the target customer and their needs is centred in the Product Vision.
Here’s Marty Cagan’s list of insight needed:
- Business Objectives and Constraints
- Customer Problems
- Critical Insights
- Enabling Technologies
- Industry Trends
- Competitive Landscape
- Go To Market Considerations
- Our Own Capabilities
- Organisational Impacts
The skill in creating a Product Vision lies in being able to absorb and synthesise this context and capture it in a few words that can guide the product for the next few years. It is not an easy thing to do and can take quite a while to get right.
4. When to create a Product Vision
A Product Vision should be agreed early in the product development lifecycle. It’s purpose is to guide decision making so having it established early is critical. That said, there needs to be a level of knowledge in place to inform a good vision so do some initial research first. Often, Product Visions will be required to secure investment.
If there isn’t a Product Vision in place, there’s no wrong time to create one. It makes the product team’s job much easier.
Product Visions shouldn’t really change so an annual review is probably enough.
5. Challenges and Watch Outs
Defining a Product Vision is one of those activites that looks simple but is deceptively hard. Following the guidelines above to consider scope and leadership will help avoid the common watch outs, but there are two more to consider:
The Product Vision is a description of the goal, not the product
The product is the way a user makes their goal reality. It’s a means to that end.
As an example, I might want to create an app that lets groups of friends organise events more easily. Say it gives them a calendar, they can identify times they’re all free, book a slot in everyone’s diaries, draft task lists and assign tasks like booking restaurants and arranging birthday presents. That’s a lovely idea, but it’s not a Product Vision.
The Product Vision could look something like this:
Vision: Make it easier for people to come together.
Mission: Our mission is to seamlessly integrate into peoples busy lives and make it simple and easy to arrange to get together with friends and family.
Or using the more specific Why and What format:
We provide an organisational tool that integrates with existing communication and calendar apps to help customers simply and easily arrange to get together with friends and family and have enriching real life experiences.
Separate Product Vision and Product Strategy
Vision and Strategy are two related but different things. Often they’re mixed together, but keeping them separate is important to protect the long-term goals of the product.
Vision = Long term goal.
Strategy = Path to get there.
There are always multiple paths to get to a goal, and strategy has to be appropriately flexible to include the things we’re learning along the way.
6. Further reading to drill deeper
There are loads of great resources on creating a Product Vision.
A foundational book on Product Management, Inspired by Marty Cagan has a section on Product Vision:
Roman Pilcher has a useful template for integrating a Product Vision into a Product Vision Board, which helps to structure the research and thinking needed to form the value context:
And Melisa Perri has alternative thinking on crafting a Lean Agile Product Vision, which fully embraces the need to embed learning into the product strategy. You can get that on her website or her book Escaping the Build Trap:
Found this helpful? Check out some of my other Product Management tips:
