How to Define a Product Vision (With Examples)

There’s the assumption that the “average” person has about 10 ideas in their life that could/would change the world. Very successful people have about 15-20 of these ideas. That’s interesting, isn’t it?

How do you really know that an idea could become a life-changing billion-dollar product or service?

I don’t have the answer to this question. What I do know is that continuous product discovery and a clear product vision helped many successful companies to get there. Ok, some companies made it with shit loads of money… but that’s a different topic altogether. 😉

In this article, I’ll focus on how to define a product vision. I want to highlight that creating a vision for your product is one of the hardest challenges. It has a lot of implications for the organization and the teams within it. I’ll break it all down into simple segments from the definition to the creation process underlined with real-world examples.

What is a Product Vision?

A product vision describes the future state of a product that a company or team desires to achieve. You can also define that future state as a goal.

But, the product vision isn’t just that! It’s a foundation for other big topics such as the

A great product vision will ease up the definition and alignment process for all of the above topics.

Before we jump into the definition process, let’s clarify a few pieces of core information that surround the product vision.

What Information Does a Product Vision Contain?

1. The reason every company exists is because of its customers. Whether they’re end-customers (B2C) or businesses (B2B). That’s why the most important characteristic of a product vision is that it’s focused on the customer!

2. It’s looking into the future and outlining a clear state of the product/goal that the company and team(s) want to achieve. I recommend setting a big and bold goal! As I mentioned in 5 Best practices to make your OKRs awesome:

“We don't fail because we aim too high and miss. We fail because we aim too low and hit." – Les Brown

3. This goal should be underlined with the motivation behind it. This motivation should answer the “why” (not how!).

4. The art of defining a great product vision that people want to follow is to make it catchy. Something that makes you want to pitch it to other people no matter if you’re the founder or an employee.

5. (optional) A product vision can have a time constraint, although, it’s better to define it as “timeless.”

Product Vision Time Frame

As mentioned, the product vision defines the future state of the product that you want to achieve. Bold and achievable.

What is the best time frame though?

I believe a timeframe of 1-2 years is too short because people tempt to focus too much on legacy issues. A product vision that looks 6-7 years into the future might be too much “science fiction.”

Therefore, I recommend going with something in between. A timeframe of 3-5 years isn’t too close and not too far away.

Important note: The timeframe depends a lot on your industry! The tech industry for example is moving very fast. If you are in the automotive industry or agricultural industry you might think about much longer time frames. This can go up to a century!

What a Product Vision Isn’t!

A product vision isn’t a detailed plan that explains how to reach the goal. It’s important to leave the goal kind of “open” with some room for interpretation. It’s also not a sentence that you just hang on the wall or toilets!

Let’s have a look at the product vision for Google Calendar. The team realized in about 2006 that no other company offered a great calendar product and experience. Therefore, the team came up with a simple 4 point vision:

Fast, visually appealing, and joyous to use
Drop-dead simple to get information into the calendar
More than boxes on a screen (reminders, invitations, etc.)
Easy to share so you can see your whole life in one place

It contains no detailed explanation on a feature level, although the goal is clear. It may not be sexy, but it helped the team to build the most popular calendar application on the planet.

There’s a difference between a company vision and a product vision. The company vision isn’t necessarily the product vision. Especially in multi-product companies. Google, for example, offers many different products, such as its search engine, Google Adwords, Google Calendar, GSuite, and more.

Each product has its own product vision. Ideally, the product vision should be connected to the company vision. Google’s company vision statement is: “to provide access to the world's information in one click.” because that’s Google’s core business.

In single-product companies, the product vision is usually the company vision and vice versa.

Note: The whole topic of company vision is a bit more complex. I’ll write about it in more depth in a separate article soon.

To summarize, it’s important for us (especially Product Managers) to understand the definition and core information a product vision needs to contain. With that in hand, we’ll always have a good foundation to start defining our own product vision.

How to Define a Product Vision (Examples)

To me, product vision creation is a two-part creation process

Defining key product information.
Phrasing the product vision in one inspiring sentence.

Let’s take a deeper look at each step.

1. Defining Key Product Information

Before defining a product vision, it’s important to have some valid data. The whole product discovery process is obviously a great way to get data and find answers to open questions. Without the data, it doesn’t make sense to define a vision for the next couple of years. I

It’s, however, important to remind ourselves that a product vision needs to be regularly challenged, evaluated, and updated based on new data.

According to Roman Pichler’s product vision board, it’s important to answer 4 key questions:

What’s the target group?
What are the customer needs?
What is and will be the product and its USP(s)?
What are the business goals?

Alternatively, you can work with other models, e.g. the lean business model canvas focusing on the product.

What’s most important is gaining a clear picture of your customer, your market, the problems you want to solve, and your business goals. You can build a product vision based on that.

Let’s look at the data we have for our example product (simplified example):

A single-product company producing card readers (credit & debit cards)
The buying persona/target customer is between 35-45 years old, owning a small business (max 20.000€ revenue p.a.),
- They live in Germany, UK, Italy, or France
- They want to be able to accept card payments
- They want to have as little administrative effort as possible (billing, tax declaration, etc.)
- Payments have to be super fast (faster than cash)
The business goal is to move up to a 10% market share across the 4 mentioned countries (bold)
Provide the fastest and easiest onboarding (for business owners) and payment experience (for customers)

Depending on the state of your product and research you may have more or less information. For the product vision statement/sentence, it’s important to focus on the most important ones.

2. Phrasing the Product Vision in One Inspiring Sentence

Before we think about a final sentence it’s important to ask ourselves two important questions:

1. What are the Key Values/Attributes of our Product?

Our card readers enable merchants and customers to make fast and safe cashless payments.

Looking at the Google Calendar application the main category is time management or self-organization.

For the Spotify app, it’s music streaming. We could go deeper and connect music with creativity, joy, freedom, and many other things. I’m pretty sure you and the Spotify Product Managers know more than I do. 😉

The reason I’m looking at this question is to identify the key value and connect it with strong verbs and adjectives that we can use for our vision statement.

2. What Will Our Product Do Better/Make Outstanding in the Future?

I look at topics such as:

additional value/problem-solving features
improved performance/quality
competitive advantage
better usability/experience
… and more

Are you familiar with the typical bold CEO product requirements that ignore all technical difficulties, legal requirements, or other important things :

“It must be a super-fast transaction, less than a second!”
“We need a great one-click checkout like Amazon!”
“The data must be accessible at any time, even without an internet connection!”?

Great! These statements can be perfectly implemented into your product vision.

Phrasing the Inspiring Product Vision Statement (Templates)

Going back to our card reader example, we do have the following key information in place:

Our customers are owners of small/medium-sized businesses (SMBs)
We empower the owners to accept card payments
End-customers will have a great, fast, and safe payment experience (faster than cash)
It’s easy to use and has a minimal administrative effort

A way to phrase the vision statement could be:

“We believe in a world where small businesses can offer a super fast and safe payment experience to their customers, for minimal costs with no administrative efforts.“

Obviously, that’s one way to phrase a vision. The way you phrase it depends on the length, complexity of the sentence, and your personal preferences.

I’d like to share my three favorite vision statement templates:

We believe (in) a [noun: world, time, state, etc.] where [persona] can [verb: do, make, offer, etc.], for/by/with [benefit/goal].
To [verb: empower, unlock, enable, create, etc.] [persona] to [benefit, goal, future state].
Our vision is to [verb: build, design, provide], the [goal, future state], to [verb: help, enable, make it easier to...] [persona].

I’ve mentioned earlier that my learnings on defining a product vision and product strategy have fundamentally changed.

If you’d like to try out a new way of defining a product vision check out the product manifestation guide.

Frequently Asked Product Vision Questions

I regularly get asked questions by Product Managers or Product Teams I coach around the product vision. Therefore, I summarized the main questions and answers below.

If you have more questions don’t hesitate to contact me.

Why is Having a Product Vision Important?

I’ve worked for companies with and without a product and company vision. There’s always a big difference in companies that work with visions. It gives teams a clear direction and fosters a common understanding of where they want to be in the future. Product Managers and their teams can make better decisions and prioritize based on the product vision.

Who Creates and Owns the Product Vision?

That’s a tricky question and it depends. In early-stage startups, the product vision is defined by the founders. That doesn’t mean that the first employees are excluded from the definition process.

In growing and bigger companies, the Product Manager and Teams define the vision together with their Development Team. Nevertheless, it’s not owned by them in my opinion. Neither by the founder(s) nor by the Product Managers. Every employee should feel responsible when contributing to and challenging the vision at any time.

As an employee, if you don't contribute towards the vision, then don't be surprised if it turns out to be something you don't agree with. The same concept applies to a Founder or Product Manager. If you don't engage your colleagues in the vision, don't expect them to follow it.

Is There a Process for Creating a Product Vision?

That depends on how you work as a Founder/Product Manager. I’m always a fan of going the “formal” way and inviting people to a meeting. Sharing an agenda and documents with the attendees beforehand will help them to better prepare upfront. If you want to learn more about the process from discovery to product vision and strategy definition follow this link.

If you want to learn more about the process I recommend listening to this podcast episode:

Is Working With a Product Vision “Agile?”

The product vision is definitely compatible with the agile mindset and methodologies such as Scrum, Kanban, and others. The vision shows a clear direction and teams can decide how they get there. They can adjust the plan and the vision at any time if needed.

How to Use the Product Vision After Its Creation?

It’s crucial to regularly share and repeat the product vision process. Especially in backlog grooming sessions and sprint planning sessions. I always tell product people to regularly align with the Leadership Team and challenge if

the company is on track and heading in the right direction
the vision is still valid or needs to be adjusted.

Syncing on this topic once a quarter for an hour isn’t too much.

Last but not least I’ve got one more important product vision secret to share.

The Most Important Product Vision Secret

What’s most important is to not copy any fancy product vision one by one! It’s important to define a vision everyone buys into, believes in, and works toward. Look at successful companies:

They spend a lot of time and money on offsites, meetings, fights, time with coaches and consultants, etc. to come up with their own unique vision. Alignment and a clear direction is the key! Make sure your product vision has an individual touch to it. I can tell you from my experience, that people love that most. That’s it. That’s all the magic. ✨

If you think I should mention this on top of the article and delete the rest of it please tell me on Linkedin.