8/30: How to Craft a Product Vision
Just when you thought there was nothing more confusing than product strategy — enter product vision.
The arena where good ideas come to die.
I’m being facetious, of course, but product vision statements are often the purple prose of product: fluffy, feel-good, mean-nothing affirmations.
Now, I’m not trying to be dismissive.
Developing a product vision and crafting a statement to encapsulate it is genuinely difficult. So it’s little wonder we sometimes get it wrong.
What’s going on here?
While strategy is often mistaken for ambition, product vision is confused with *what* a product itself is supposed to become.
But a product vision should describe the change our product brings about for its users and the environment around them, and ultimately our business, too.
It’s not enough to describe a future product.
Product vision should focus on:
Who we are solving a problem for
Why we are solving the problem to begin with
What exactly we intend to do about it
How we are going to get there
A product vision is, therefore, a statement about an imagined future world where we’ve solved our users’ problem through our product. It should include an understanding of the what and the why behind that effort.
And it should imagine the environment we’re creating and the effects our work has on our users, not just the product itself.