The product vision is an integral part of your product strategy. It allows everyone on the product team to understand what they’re building and why. Not having a vision can lead to a host of issues that prevent you from meeting your goal. To help you craft your product vision, we’ll take you through the core steps of putting one together.
In addition to guiding you through the main steps, we’ll share the meaning behind the product vision, plus some examples from the world’s leading companies. We’ll also provide some tips on picking the best project management software to brainstorm, create and share your product vision with your team.
What Is Product Vision?
A product vision is a statement that clearly defines the core purpose of a product. It highlights who will use it, why they need it and how it will function for the end user. Rather than a collection of potential ideas, the product vision is a refined statement that puts development teams in the best position possible to build the product.
The product vision also allows product managers to build a product roadmap. Think of the vision as your destination and the road map as the clear path to get there. During the course of your mission, your strategies are likely to change. However, your product vision will remain the same and help keep you on the right track.
How Is Product Vision Different From Agile Vision?
An Agile vision is the same as a product vision but is more applicable to Agile teams. As outlined by the Kanban Zone, stakeholders and scrum teams use the Agile vision to ascertain what they’re building and why.
What Is a Product Vision Statement?
The reality is that companies use the terms “product vision” and “product vision statement” interchangeably. We’ll use this section to dig a little deeper into what a product vision statement is by sharing some real-world examples from the world’s leading companies.
Coca-Cola’s product vision statement is “to craft the brands and choice of drinks that people love, to refresh them in body & spirit”. 1 Nike’s, on the other hand, is “to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world. If you have a body, you are an athlete.” 2
These are short and snappy statements, but you can also create long-form versions. It should be customer-focused, detailing who the customer is, what they do and why they need the product. Your statement should outline why the end product is attainable, how it differs from similar products and the long-term goal of the product.
Why Is Product Vision Important?
Let’s dive into why a product vision is important and the benefits it brings to your team.
1. The Product Vision Creates Clarity
Having a clearly defined vision helps your team understand their goals and create a workflow that helps them achieve those goals. Offering a certain level of clarity will result in fewer disruptions and issues.
What’s more, the product vision helps solidify the purpose of the product and its unique value. This helps your team remain focused, even if the strategies to achieve the vision change throughout the project.
2. It Unifies the Team
The product vision motivates stakeholders and the wider team. It encourages them to discuss company goals, what they want to offer and their long-term mission. It’s the catalyst for great ideas and building a company identity. It’s also an opportunity to dig deep to understand what customers want and why you’re the right company to provide it.
3. It Allows You to Plan Long Term
Your vision allows you to think long term. By setting an overarching goal, you can put milestones in place that help you get where you’re heading. A defined product vision allows you to explore future iterations of the product and how you would like it to be. If you think only about the here and now, you’re not giving your product room to grow.
Who Defines the Product Vision?
Product managers will collaborate with stakeholders, the product owner and other team members to create and define the product vision. This involves meetings, documentation and questions in order to collect as much information as possible before sharing it with the rest of the team.
How to Create a Product Vision
1. Ask Questions
The process of developing your product vision begins with gathering information. To do that, it’s important to ask as many questions as possible when liaising with the product owner. Don’t hesitate to ask for more clarity if necessary.
It’s also a good idea to raise any potential issues you envision with the product’s development. Stakeholders have dreams for their products, but sometimes they can be hyperbolic and unrealistic. If you notice this in the early phases, bring it to their attention before creating the official vision.
2. Market Research
The product vision is as much about the customer as it is about your in-house objectives. It’s important to know what the customers in your specific niche want. During the process of creating a product vision, do your research and try to find out what customers need. You can do this through surveys and by analyzing market trends.
3. Define Your Product
You should include certain criteria in your vision, such as the problem your product solves and for whom, what competitors are doing and why now is the right time to launch. You should also factor in longer-term ambitions for the product, how it will evolve and what it will look like.
4. Draft and Seek Feedback
You don’t need to nail your vision right away. Instead, create a first draft and seek opinions from other team members. Product owners can also contribute during the development process. The main benefit of working this way is that it promotes collaboration and ensures everyone understands and agrees with the direction of the product’s development.
5. Keep It Brief
The best product visions are concise and to the point. They should deliver all the important details to offer clarity as quickly as possible. Ideally, a product vision should be no more than a page in length. This ensures the product team is not overwhelmed with too much information and can easily visualize the direction of the product.
Product Vision Statement Examples
A good statement explains the company’s objectives in a single sentence.
We’ve highlighted a couple of product vision statements already, but below are more examples from some of the world’s leading organizations. You can use them as inspiration for your own vision statement.
- Apple: “To bring the best user experience to customers through innovative hardware, software and services.”
- Amazon: “To be Earth’s most customer-centric company, Earth’s best employer and Earth’s safest place to work.”
- Fujifilm: “To build an environment for the creation and effective utilization of knowledge.”
- BBC: “To act in the public interest, serving all audiences through the provision of impartial, high-quality and distinctive output and services which inform, educate and entertain.”
- Google: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Product Vision Statement Template
To give you further guidance, we’ve developed a product vision template. Feel free to fill in the bracketed parts, or use it as a framework to structure your own statement.
To [insert what you want to provide] to [for whom you want to provide it] because [why your customer needs this product] and [why you’re the best company to provide it].
We will [state why you’ll be different from your competitors] and will achieve this by [insert your ways of differentiating your product from the rest].
How to Choose a Product Vision Software
You’ll want to select software that goes beyond the vision and
supports each key area of product management.
Plenty of the best Agile tools come with features to help you with your vision and full product management. However, they’re not one-size-fits-all — below are some tips for choosing the right tool for your team.
- Templates: Services like monday.com offer product management templates that can help craft your company product vision. You can learn more about the platform in our monday.com review.
- Communication: Look for services that help promote strong communication with your team. This will help you seamlessly refine your vision when you need to ask questions. ClickUp is a great option for this — learn why in our ClickUp review.
- Scrum tools: Thinking beyond the vision, you’ll want software that also helps with the popular Scrum framework for building products. Jira is excellent for this, as it incorporates common Scrum terminology. Learn more in our Jira review.
- Easy to use: Some Agile-based tools can be overly complicated. Your software is for your whole team to use, so you’ll need a solution with a flat learning curve that doesn’t require too much training time. Asana is a good example of this; it is very user-friendly, as we highlight in our Asana review.
Most of the leading providers offer free trials of their software. It’s best to take advantage of this and try your options out before making a long-term commitment. If you do find a service you like, we recommend paying annually rather than monthly, as it will save your company money in the long run.
Final Thoughts
As important as the product vision is, it doesn’t need to be complicated. Remember, the product vision addresses key points such as your company objectives, why you should build the product, who it’s for and why they need it.
One aspect the world’s leading producers have in common is simple vision statements. Keep that in mind when developing yours. You won’t win any awards for using complex language, but you will succeed if you stick to the basics and write with clarity.
What helps you when developing a product vision? What are some examples of bad product vision statements? Is there another aspect of product management that you would like us to cover? Let us know in the comments. Thanks for reading.
FAQ: Agile Product Vision
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A snappy, direct product vision works best. Take Disney’s, for example, which outlines the company’s objective “to entertain, inform and inspire people around the globe through the power of unparalleled storytelling.
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Amazon’s product vision statement is simply “to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, Earth’s best employer and Earth’s safest place to work.”
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A five-year product vision is an outline of how you would like a product to evolve and look within a five-year timeframe.
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You create a product vision by documenting the overall purpose of the product you are building.
Sources
- Purpose & Vision – Coca Cola Company
- What Is Nike’s Mission? – Nike
