Creating a strong product vision is one of the most impactful things you can do as a product leader or startup founder.
A clear and compelling product vision will motivate and inspire your team. Like a north star, it guides everyone towards a common purpose.
Unfortunately, most product visions aren’t very compelling. They’re either too fluffy or too solution-focused to be useful. Either ‘making the world a better place’ or ‘building AI-powered blockchain solutions’. Look at this gem of a mission statement from WeWork (a company that rents out office space):
“Our mission is to elevate the world’s consciousness” - WeWork S-1 filing
The problem is that most product visions are internally focused. They start with the product and build a vision from there.
The best product visions aren't really about the product at all. They are all about the customer. Your product vision shouldn't be a vision of your product's future. It should be a vision of your customers’ future.
Your customers’ future
To create this customer-centric vision, you need to put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Instead of imagining what your company or product will be like in the future, imagine what your customers’ lives will be like in the future.
Envision all of the ways your customers’ lives will be meaningfully better in the future because of your company and your product.
How will their lives improve? Will they be happier? Smarter? More successful?
Will they save money? Will they make more money?
Will they be more productive and effective at work?
Will they get that promotion or meet the love of their life?
It’s important that you really clearly envision what this future will be like. How will the wider world be different? What will change about your customers’ daily lives? What needs to change from today to make this future a reality?
By building your product vision like this (and communicating it effectively) you are doing something that's critical to success. You are focusing your entire team on what's most important - the customer. Instead of focusing on building product and shipping features, the focus is on creating as much customer value as possible.
A shared vision
It’s important that this is a vision you share with your customer. It’s not something you dream up entirely by yourself. It should emerge from conversations with your customers as you gain a deeper understanding of their problems, needs, wants and desires.
But it also shouldn’t be completely customer-driven. It’s often said that customers are experts in problems, not solutions. But customers are also experts in the present, not the future. Any vision of your customer’s future will require strong opinions about how the world will change. What the world will be like in that future. These should be your opinions, not your customers’.
To create a strong product vision, you need both a deep understanding of your customers and strong opinions about the future.
As startup investor, David Sacks said:
“I think the best startups are movements for change. They want to change the world in some way, they diagnose something that's wrong with the world as it stands today, and they want to move the world to a better place.”
Putting it all together
The specifics of your product vision will depend on your customers and your company. So instead of a one-size-fits-all template for a vision statement, here are the 5 key inputs that go into creating a strong, customer-focused product vision:
A timeframe. Is this a 5, 10 or 50 year vision?
A deep understanding of your customers and their current problems/needs.
Broad trends that you believe will meaningfully change the future. These could be work trends, social trends, technology trends etc.
Strong opinions about how these trends will chang your customers' lives in the future. Will they make certain problems more pronounced? Will they create new problems for your customers? Will they allow you to solve problems for your customers in ways that you can't today etc?
The tangible benefits that you plan to provide to customers in this future.
Once you have these 5 key inputs mapped out, you should be able to create a detailed, compelling vision of your customers' future.
Building a bridge to the future
We already touched on how a vision of your customers' future focuses teams on the customer experience. But it does something else really important too - it gives product teams a clear goal and purpose. Their goal is to make this customer future a reality.
To do this, the product team must build a bridge to that future. They need to continually identify, and solve, the most important customer problem that gets you closest to that future, building the bridge brick by brick.
Instead of using frameworks like RICE to prioritise features, there is one clear prioritisation parameter for the team - which option gets us closer to our vision of our customers’ future?
This doesn’t mean that product teams don’t experiment or iterate. But there is a huge difference between blind iteration and iterating to find the best path towards a clear goal.
Another way to think of it is like a map. The product team knows their destination (the customers’ future), but they need to experiment and iterate to find the best route to take. Sometimes they might hit a road block. But they always know where they are trying to get to. They know the destination.
Key takeaways
The best product visions are customer-focused. Your product vision should be a vision of your customers' future.
To create a customer-focused product vision, you need to combine a deep understanding of your customers' needs with your own strong opinions about how the world will chang in the future.
Customer-centric product visions help teams to focus on customer value over features and code. They also help teams to make better product prioritisation decisions.
Finally, they provide teams with a clear goal and focus. Their goal is to make this vision of the customers’ future a reality.