Build an inspiring product vision and focused strategy

Product Vision

The product vision describes the future we are trying to create. Typically 2–5 years out. For hardware and device-centric companies, it's usually 5–10 years out.

This is not the same as the company's mission statement.

Examples for mission statements are, “Organize the world's information” or “Make the world more open and connected”.

Mission statements are useful but they don’t say anything on how we plan to accomplish that. That is what the Product Vision is for. The vision is not in any sense a specification. It's merely a persuasive piece of information.

The primary purpose is to communicate and inspire the teams, stakeholders, investors, partners, and in many cases prospective customers who wanna help make this vision a reality.

When done well, the product vision is one of our most effective recruiting tools and it serves to motivate the people on your team to come to work every day.

Strong technology people are drawn to an inspiring vision. They want to work on something meaningful. Buying into a vision is a leap of faith. You likely don’t know if you would be able to deliver on the vision but hey, you’ll have several years to discover the solutions.

At this stage, you should believe it's a worthwhile pursuit.

Product Strategy

“Trying to please everyone at once will certainly please nobody”

So the last thing we should do is embark on a ginormous multi-year effort to create a release that tries to deliver on the product vision.

A Product Strategy is a sequence of product releases we plan to deliver on the path to deliver on the product vision.

For most types of businesses, it's effective to construct product strategies around the series of product-market fits. There are many variations on this.

• For business-focused companies, you might have each product-market fit focus on a different vertical market. Example: financial services, automobile, manufacturing, etc.
• For consumer-focused companies, we often focus on structuring each product-market fit around the different customers or user personas. For example, an education-related service might have a strategy that focuses on high school students first, college students next, and then working class who want to learn more skills.
• Sometimes product strategy is based on geography. we take regions of the world in an intentional sequence.
• Sometimes the product strategy is focused on achieving a set of key milestones in some sort of logical and important order.

There is no single approach to product strategy that is applicable to everyone. It’s always best to focus your work on a single product market at a time. So all teams know we are tackling the manufacturing market now, and that's the type of customers we are obsessing on.

Product vision should be inspiring and the product strategy should be focused.