How to Prepare a Product Vision

Before we get started, let's talk about what a product vision is: a clear, specific picture of the better future you're trying to build for a real customer. Not a feature. Not a quarterly number. A destination, the place your whole team is supposed to be walking toward.

Most people assume you need to be one of those Steve Jobs types. An entrepreneur who can see the future. The vision... it finds you. You're in the shower, or driving home, or half asleep, and the whole thing arrives at once, fully formed, like a lightbulb clicking on over your head.

And underneath that is a quieter, more discouraging assumption: I'll never be that person. I'm not a visionary. One who's wired to see around corners. I've never had my shower moment. I'm waiting... But it's still not here.

Fortunately for you, that's not how it really works. A vision isn't a bolt of inspiration you wait around to be struck by. It's something you build, on purpose, piece by piece, starting from a customer and a problem you understand better than anyone else in the building. You don't need the lightbulb. You need a method. This page is the thinking behind that method. The next one turns it into steps you can follow.

As you work through this, don't forget one very important bit: a vision must be precise. "We're all going to Disneyland" felt about as clear as a sentence can get, and it still scattered thirty people across three continents. That gap, between what you think you said and what people actually heard, is what you're writing against.

Start with the customer problem, not the product

The most common mistake is writing a vision about what you're going to build. "We will build the best platform for X." That's a solution wearing a vision's clothes.

Most people do this backwards. They find an exciting technology or a solution first, then go hunting for a problem to justify it. I've watched that habit run through entire corporations like a hereditary trait.

Flip it. A real vision starts from a customer and a problem you're obsessed with solving for them. Fall in love with the problems. The product is only your current best guess at the answer, and that guess will change. The problem you're committed to is what stays constant and points the way.

For example:

• A business owner who loses an entire day to payroll every week as they reconcile hours, tips and overtime across 3 systems that don't talk to each other.

• A nurse who spends more of her shift documenting care given, than actually giving it.

• A job seeker who fires off 200 applications into the void and never learns why a single one didn't land.

So before you write anything, get clear on three things: who the customer is, what deep problem you're solving for them, and what their world looks like once you've solved it. If you can describe that future state vividly, you're most of the way there.

Make it aspirational and honest at the same time

A vision should describe a future worth chasing. Big enough that it doesn't feel finished next quarter, clear enough that people can picture it. But it also has to admit what's in the way. A vision that pretends the path is easy isn't inspiring. It's naive, and people can tell.

So name the hard things. A vision is not just a dream. It's a dream with an understanding of the obstacles that must be overcome. That honesty is what separates a vision people trust from words they forget.

A simple shape that works

You don't need a special format. You need three things on the page: a vision statement that captures who you serve and the future you're creating for them, an honest read on the challenges between here and there, and a sense of what success looks like, something you can eventually measure.

Here's a real vision statement. I wrote it for an internal customer portal:

Our portal will be the central hub that empowers employees to efficiently manage operations and collaborate with clients, while providing customers with a user-friendly platform to access critical information and educational resources, fostering trust and long-term partnerships.

Notice what it's made of. The product names itself once, as the vehicle. Everything after that is the people it serves, employees and customers, and the change it creates for each of them, ending on trust and partnerships. Not one feature. And in the full document that statement came from, features showed up nowhere either: the vision led, and business objectives and measures followed. The how comes later, in the strategy and the backlog. The vision just has to make the destination clear and worth reaching.

Keep vision and strategy separate

The section opener covered the split: vision is the destination, strategy is the route. The practical trap is letting them blur while you write. Mix them and you get a vision cluttered with tactics, or a strategy with no north star. Keep the vision clean and aspirational, and let real strategy do the work of figuring out how to get there. There is a separate portion of the playbook that outlines how to write strategy.

A vision is not a goal

9 times out of 10 when I discuss vision with someone I hear something like this: "We already know where we're going. We want to grow revenue 20% this year."

That's a goal. It's a number you want to hit, and it's fine to have one, but it tells you nothing about where you're going or why anyone should care. It doesn't name a customer, a problem, or a future worth building. A vision points at a destination. A goal just measures how far you got. Don't let the number stand in for the vision (or, even worse, call it a strategy).

Test it before you trust it

Being Agile is about empiricism. It's not 2-week sprints. With everything you create in this playbook, you need to test it. When you first build the vision for your product, treat it like a hypothesis.

Write it, then go learn what others think. Your team, your leaders, even customers. Watch what happens. Do they lean in? Do you see them get excited? Or does it just bounce off the walls like every other "vision" they've heard before...?

After they've had a moment to digest and you've read their emotions, ask them to repeat back what they heard. NOT the exact words, but how they interpret it. Are they going to Disneyland with you? Or are they heading to Disney World? Or maybe Universal Studios?

If it lands flat, that's not failure. That's data. Work on it and share it again. You're not looking for polite nods. You're looking for excitement. Something that confirms to them they're on the right team or that they want to abandon their team to join yours.

Go write one

This page is the what and the why. How to Write a Product Vision is the how: five steps from a blank screen to a tested draft, with a cheat sheet you can reuse every time after.