Updated: December 10, 2024- 14 min read
Product Vision is a strategic roadmap for a product's future. It fuels team motivation, aligns stakeholders, resonates with customers, and forms the foundation for Product strategy, roadmaps, and measuring success.
In this article, we’ll explore how to create a Product Vision, summarize it with a statement, and write it all up in a document that serves as a single source of inspiration for the entire organization. With free templates and real-world examples, your product vision will be 20/20 by the time you’re done reading!
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What Is Product Vision?
Product Vision is a strategic concept that provides a long-term, overarching goal of Product in a company. It’s a high-level framework and serves as a common north star for the entire Product function. Of course, for very large companies like Amazon and Google, different products will have distinct visions.
The Product Vision answers the question: What direction does my product need to take to stay aligned with long-term customer and business needs? Vision does not provide exact next steps, but it will serve as a compass.
A good Product Vision describes what the product should look like and do in the future, in a longer timeline of 2-5 years for software products and 5-10 years for hardware products. It should remain stable. Product strategy and roadmaps can change to address market and business developments, whereas the Product Vision is more stable.
“It's the thing that you use in a candidate interview. It is the thing that you talk to investors about. It's the thing that wakes you up every morning.”
-Ebi Atawodi, Director of Product Management, YouTube Studio
Why is Product Vision important?
Why do top companies go out of their way to establish a vision for their product? Why is it important?
Product Vision:
Inspires and persuades: Show your team how they will change users’ lives for the better with the products they’re creating. When team members understand the ‘why,’ their performance on the 'what' and 'how' improve dramatically.
Serves as a foundation: The Product Vision is far removed from features and functionality. It’s a guidepost for decision-making and strategic planning throughout the product development process.
Makes your efforts effective: Operating without a vision is dangerous. Without a vision, you have no direction. Working without direction means your team is pouring its energy and resources into initiatives that are not proven or strategic. Vision helps you identify your priorities and make more effective use of your time.
Aligns stakeholders: It brings everyone—Product Management, engineering, marketing, sales, and others—onto the same page about the direction and purpose of the product. This alignment is crucial for the coherent development and successful launch of the product.
Resonates with customers: Above all, the Product Vision must resonate with the customers. It should reflect the customers' needs and aspirations and explain why the product is a must-have for them.
A clear Product Vision has a multi-faceted impact, influencing the team's motivation, strategic decision-making, customer connection, long-term success, and the broader business impact. It's a guiding star that directs the course of the product's journey and influences all strategic and tactical decisions, from the ideation phase through to development, marketing, and post-launch enhancements. Without a clear and compelling Product Vision, organizations can easily lose their way in the market, wasting valuable resources on irrelevant features or misaligned initiatives.
How to Create a Product Vision in 6 Steps
1. Deep Market Research
Before formulating your Product Vision, it's crucial to understand the market you're operating in. This includes analyzing your competition, understanding market trends, and recognizing opportunities and threats in the industry. Deep market research provides insights that help you develop a vision that's not only inspiring but also relevant and feasible.
2. Identifying the Target Customer
Every product is created with a specific user in mind. Therefore, identifying your target customer is an essential step in creating a product vision. You should understand your customer's needs, desires, and pain points, as well as their demographic, geographic, and psychographic characteristics. Your Product Vision should ultimately aim to address the needs and wants of this customer group.
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3. Developing the Value Proposition
Once you understand your market and target customers, the next step is to identify the unique value your product will offer. Your value proposition should answer the question: why should customers choose your product over others? It should highlight the unique benefits your product will provide and how it will solve your customers' problems or enhance their lives.
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4. Defining the Unique Selling Points
Unique Selling Points (USPs) are the features or characteristics that distinguish your product from the competition. These could be anything from innovative features, superior quality, lower cost, excellent customer service, or anything else that makes your product stand out. These USPs should be prominently reflected in your product vision.
5. Setting the Vision Statement
With all the groundwork done, you can now draft your Product Vision Statement. It should be clear, concise, and inspiring, effectively communicating your product's future direction. Remember to ensure it aligns with your company's overall mission and goals.
6. Draw it all up in a Product Vision Document
The Product Vision Document acts as a single source of truth and outlines the product's purpose, its target market, the problems it aims to solve, and the key differentiators that set it apart from competitors.
Who Owns the Product Vision
The Product Vision is front of mind for everyone in Product Management, from Associate PMs to CPOs. Who owns the Product Vision will depend on the company and how the Product function is structured. Generally speaking, the CPO, VP of Product, or someone in Product Leadership is responsible for defining the Product Vision and communicating it. They also socialize the Product Vision across the company, achieve alignment, and advocate for it when the team seems to be losing sight of it.
Here are four steps Product Leadership can take and/or delegate to Product Managers to create and uphold a strong Product Vision:
1. Collaborate with Stakeholders
A Product Manager has to work closely with various stakeholders, including the executive team, engineering, marketing, sales, and customer service, to gather input and secure buy-in for the Product Vision. This collaboration ensures a well-rounded perspective and encourages shared ownership of the vision across different teams. It also fosters alignment and a clear understanding of the strategic direction.
2. Lead Market and Customer Research
A key role of the Product Manager is to conduct comprehensive market research and deeply understand customers' needs and wants. This includes identifying target customers, understanding their pain points and preferences, and staying updated on market trends and competition. This research helps create a Product Vision that resonates with customers and is relevant in the market.
3. Translate Business Strategy into Product Strategy
Involving business strategy in the Product Vision is absolutely essential. However, business targets have to be massaged to fit into a product context, and it’s the product manager’s role to act as a translator between business and product.
Product Vision owners need to understand the overall business goals, such as market positioning and revenue targets, and then formulate a Product Strategy that aligns with these goals. This includes defining the product's value proposition, key features, unique selling points, and roadmap, all of which should be guided by the Product Vision.
4. Communicate the Vision to the Team and the Entire Organization
After the Product Vision is defined, the Product Manager plays a crucial role in communicating it to the Product Team and the entire organization. This requires crafting a clear, compelling narrative that conveys the essence of the vision and sharing it widely across the company. Regularly reinforcing the vision helps keep everyone aligned and motivated and ensures that all product decisions are consistent with the vision.
Product Vision Statement: Examples and Template
The Product Vision statement is a clear and inspiring sentence that succinctly captures the essence of the Product Vision. They share the “what” and also the “how” of your products. It serves as an at-a-glance reminder of the overall Product Vision.
As a general rule, Product Vision statements address the target customer, what they are trying to accomplish, and how the product differentiates itself from competitors.
Real Examples of Product Vision Statements
Every book ever printed in any language all available in 60 seconds.
To make, distribute, and sell the finest-quality ice cream and euphoric concoctions with a continued commitment to incorporating wholesome, natural ingredients and promoting business practices that respect the Earth and the Environment.
Create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.
Make work life simpler, more pleasant and more productive.
One platform delivering limitless human connection.
If you’re a Product obsessive like we are at Product School, you may have noticed that Zoom recently changed its Product Vision statement from “Make communications frictionless.” Not everyone is a fan of the new Vision statement, and some have posited that it reflects a decisive change in Product Strategy.
Whatever you think of the change, it’s a clear example of the iceberg effect that these simple statements have. They are part of the Product Vision and strategy that sticks out above the water (they are made publicly available on company websites and are quoted in the press), but the interests of many stakeholders are all there under the surface. Product Vision statements represent a vast structure that incorporates business objectives, market realities, and customer needs.
Free Product Vision Statement template
Product School’s Product Vision statement template (part of the Product Strategy template) guides you in applying a product vision framework that addresses the who, what, and why of your product in order to help you define its purpose and intended impact on the market and customers.
Elements of a Product Vision Document
A Product Vision Document is a strategic document that outlines the long-term vision for a product or service. It provides a clear and compelling description of what the product will achieve and how it will meet the needs of its users or customers. The document captures the essence of the product's purpose, its target market, the problems it aims to solve, and the key differentiators that set it apart from competitors.
The Product School Strategy template is designed to help PMs define every aspect of Product Vision and create one source of truth:
Product Strategy Template
The higher you go up on the Product career ladder, the more strategic skills matter. This template helps you define the why and how of product development and launch, allowing you to make better decisions for your users, team, and company.
Download Template1. Clear and Inspiring Product Vision Statement
The Product Vision statement is a clear and inspiring sentence that succinctly captures the essence of the product's future. They share the “what” and also the “how” of your products. It serves as an at-a-glance reminder of the overall Product Vision.
2. Connection to Customer Needs and Market Reality
The Product Vision should reflect a deep understanding of customer needs, desires, and pain points. It should also take into account the realities of the market, including competition, regulatory environment, and technological trends. This ensures that your vision is not only aspirational but also grounded in reality and achievable.
3. Alignment with the Company's Values and Goals
An effective Product Vision aligns with the company's broader values and goals. It should support and enhance the overall business strategy and resonate with the company's mission and ethos. This alignment helps ensure consistency across different product lines and reinforces the company's brand identity.
4. Envisions Long-term Success and Scalability
A strong Product Vision anticipates the product's long-term success and scalability. It sets the stage for future growth and evolution, envisioning how the product can scale, adapt, and remain relevant as it grows and as market conditions change. It considers not just the product's immediate impact but its potential to drive enduring success.
5. Adaptability to Market Changes
While a Product Vision provides a long-term direction, it should also allow for flexibility and adaptability in the face of changing market dynamics. It should be resilient enough to stay relevant in changing circumstances and agile enough to pivot when necessary. This adaptability helps ensure the product's survival and success in an ever-evolving market landscape.
6. Success Metrics
Criteria and metrics that will be used to measure the product's success and hold team members accountable. These might include customer satisfaction, usage rates, retention, or other KPIs relevant to the product's objectives. Product OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are helpful for establishing quarterly goals that are attainable but aspirational.
Product Vision boards
Product Vision boards showcase the key elements of the Product Vision document at a glance. They usually include:
The Product Vision statement
The target audience
Customer needs
Product details
Relevant business objectives
Product Vision vs. Product Roadmap
The Product Vision and Product Roadmap are both essential tools in product management, but they serve different purposes and operate at different levels of detail and timeframes.
As explained above, the Product Vision document is a high-level, long-term guiding statement that defines the overarching goal and purpose of the product. It articulates what the product aspires to achieve in the long run, the value it will deliver to customers, and how it will impact the market or solve specific problems.
Key Characteristics:
Long-Term Focus: The vision is typically oriented towards the future, often looking several years ahead.
Inspiration: It is designed to inspire and motivate the team by providing a clear and compelling purpose.
Broad and High-Level: The vision statement is broad and does not go into specifics about features or implementation details.
Strategic: It provides a strategic direction that guides the overall product development and decision-making process.
Product Roadmap:
The Product Roadmap is a more detailed, tactical plan that outlines the specific steps and milestones required to achieve the product vision. There are many types of roadmaps, but all provide a timeline for when key features, improvements, or releases will be delivered, aligning short-term actions with long-term goals.
Product Roadmap Template
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Key Characteristics:
Medium to Short-Term Focus: Roadmaps typically cover a period of months to a couple of years, depending on the product's development cycle.
Detail-Oriented: The roadmap breaks down the vision into specific, actionable steps, often including feature sets, releases, and timelines.
Time-Bound: It includes dates or timeframes for when certain features or milestones are expected to be delivered.
Flexible and Evolving: While the roadmap provides a plan, it is often subject to change based on new information, market conditions, or shifting priorities.
How Product Vision and Product Roadmaps intersect:
Vision Guides the Roadmap:
The product vision provides the strategic context for the roadmap. It sets the long-term goals that the roadmap aims to achieve. When creating a roadmap, product managers refer to the vision to ensure that the planned features and releases align with the overall purpose and direction of the product.
Roadmap Realizes the Vision:
The roadmap is the actionable plan that translates the abstract vision into concrete steps. It shows how the team will move from the current state towards the envisioned future, breaking down the vision into manageable, time-bound tasks.
Alignment and Prioritization:
The product vision helps prioritize what should go into the roadmap. If a particular feature or project doesn't contribute to the vision, it might be deprioritized or excluded from the roadmap. This alignment ensures that the team is always working on what matters most for achieving the long-term vision.
Adaptation and Iteration:
While the vision is relatively stable, the roadmap is more fluid. As the product evolves and new insights are gained (e.g., user feedback, market shifts), the roadmap may need to be adjusted. However, these changes should still align with the product vision, ensuring that the product remains on the right path despite tactical shifts.
Communication:
The vision communicates the "why" behind the product, while the roadmap communicates the "how" and "when." Together, they provide a comprehensive view of where the product is headed and how it will get there, which is essential for keeping stakeholders informed and aligned.
Product Vision: The Destination that Guides Product Strategy
A clear Product Vision illuminates the strategy that will lead your product to success. If your strategy is the route you’re taking and the Product Roadmap is the map (what else?) that helps you follow it, then the Product Vision is the final destination. It’s just over the horizon, keeping everyone headed in the same direction. You’ll never get where you’re going if you don’t have a destination!
So before you jump in the car and stock up on gas and junk food, take a moment to remember where you’re going and why. You’ll be glad you did.
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Updated: December 10, 2024
