How to Show Your Product Vision

Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

Sometimes you hear investors say that a founder has “incredible product vision”. Evan Spiegel of Snap, for instance, is so famous for this that he’s been jokingly called Facebook’s head of product because the social giant kept copying his creations.

But this provokes the same question I often ask investors about such personality traits: how can you tell that someone has “product vision”? How did the founder convey this?

In a recent episode of the Twenty Minute VC with Jeremy Liew — Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners and early Snap investor — he gave a fascinating answer to this question:

Insight — as in the unique perspective behind a founder’s approach to product-building.

Spiegel’s Insight

Liew said that when he met Spiegel, Snapchat already had phenomenal growth metrics, but this wasn’t enough for Lightspeed. There had to be a compelling insight behind the product as well.

And Spiegel had a hell of an insight.

Social media was creating “performance anxiety” in people, Spiegel observed, because it had become a highlight reel to the world that was permanent. But actually, this was contrary to the ephemeral nature of social interactions.

Liew recalled Spiegel saying:

“If you’re having a conversation with a friend, and afterwards you said hey, if you don’t mind, I just recorded that, they’d feel betrayed. But somehow the default changed from all the conversations you had with your friends being ephemeral, to them all being recorded for posterity, because they shifted to digital, and digital recorded everything.”

Spiegel’s insight was that we’re able to share our truest selves — the good, bad, and ugly — with our friends precisely because once the interaction was over, it was gone. Forever. But somehow social media had gone for the opposite.

So Spiegel built Snapchat to return to the ephemeral — whatever message, photo, or video you send to your contacts would disappear shortly after they’re seen, and thus stay faithful to the fleeting nature of our social exchanges.

And Liew said that this ability to reason from first principles — rather than iterating on what other people have built — is still a key reason for Snap’s success today.

This is also reminiscent of how Elon Musk reasons from “first principles” instead of deriving from what other people have done:

The Anatomy of an Insight

Spiegel’s insight was profound of course, but also very simple in the way it was communicated:

1. He observed something about the world today that doesn’t quite make sense— social media recording everything, forever.
2. He contrasted this against a first principle— the way we’ve always built relationships was fleeting, not permanent.
3. So he built a product upon that first principle, and entirely different from how the world works today.

Notice that he also used a real life scenario everyone knew — talking to a friend — and could instantly understand.

There’s no complicated theory and no obscure knowledge, just an insight that any one of us can understand intuitively.

To see this in action again, Liew offered up another superb example later in the episode:

1. Spiegel noticed that the news feed for most social apps were in reverse chronological order —with the most recent posts at the top, then tracing what happened backwards in time.
2. But that’s just not how people tell stories, right? From the beginning of time, from bedside tales to blockbuster films, humans have always told stories chronologically: from beginning to middle to end.
3. So Snap built a product to go back to the chronological way of storytelling, and called the product… Stories. It not just became a dominant format on social media, but was also quickly copied by Snap’s competitors.

Most people think that to show “vision”, they must look forward to an awesome but distant future.

But sometimes the most powerful visions are built upon old, fundamental truths about our world — like social interactions being ephemeral.

When you can use these “first principles” to point out something that doesn’t quite make sense in our world, and offer a new direction based on that fundamental truth, you tap into an infinitely more compelling form of communication.

And someone might just call you “visionary”.

*Just don’t label yourself visionary in your bio, resume, website, etc. Just DON’T.