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A product vision describes the future you’re trying to create. Not what you’re building this quarter, not your roadmap for next year - but the change in the world your product is working toward. It’s the north star that makes every prioritisation decision a little easier because the team knows what they’re ultimately pointing at 🌟

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What makes a good vision

A good product vision is:
  • Inspiring - it should make people want to be part of building it
  • Clear - anyone on the team should be able to repeat it and mean the same thing
  • Ambitious but not abstract - “make the world better” is not a vision; “give every small business owner the financial clarity to make confident decisions” is
  • Durable - a vision that changes every year isn’t a vision, it’s a goal
The test: if you read the vision and immediately know what you would and wouldn’t build, it’s working. If it could apply to any product in any category, it’s too vague 💡

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Vision vs. mission vs. strategy

These three get conflated constantly:
  • Mission - why the company exists, who it serves, what it does
  • Vision - the future state you’re working toward
  • Strategy - the choices you make about how to get there
You need all three, and they need to connect. A vision without a strategy is wishful thinking. A strategy without a vision is optimisation without direction.

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How vision guides product work

The practical value of a vision is as a decision filter. When the team disagrees about priorities, the question “which option moves us closer to the vision?” often breaks the tie. When a shiny opportunity appears that doesn’t connect to the vision, it’s easier to say no. Michael Hyatt’s The Vision Driven Leader makes the case that the leader’s job is to hold the vision clearly and communicate it relentlessly - because without that, teams default to reacting to immediate pressure rather than building toward something 🙌 Marty Cagan in Inspired is similarly emphatic: the product vision is the most important thing a product leader creates. Everything else is in service of it.

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Writing one

The simplest format: “We believe [type of user] deserves [better outcome]. We’re building [product] so that [change in the world].” It doesn’t need to be a single sentence - but if it takes three paragraphs to explain, it probably isn’t clear enough yet. Lesson learned: the most useful thing a product vision does isn’t inspire the team at the kick-off - it’s give them something to come back to six months later when the priorities have drifted and nobody can remember why they started.