How to create a product vision?

Product vision is formed at the beginning of the product journey to identify clients and verify their motivations, determine product’s identity, and guide the product team in its product management endeavor. It is a product owner’s responsibility to own, create, and maintain product vision. However, product vision is not authored solely by the product owner and is to be heavily influenced by major groups of product stakeholders (clients (ultimate clients, clients of clients), users, product team, other stakeholders).

Product vision provides a vivid picture of how a product aims to deliver value to the clients by prioritizing and addressing their key motivations, describes reasons for creating the product, and covers core product’s benefits and features. It develops a long-term outlook on the product’s ultimate state to be reached and thus is a starting point for developing a product roadmap (product strategy).

To fulfill its communication and guidance functions for different audiences product vision might be prepared at various levels of depth / detail, e.g. a lighter version for executive attention, a regular version to communicate with clients and users, and a deep, extended version to be used by the product team on a daily basis.

Thus, a product vision is a product’s strategic ideal. Product visioning is performed in accordance with SPACE protocol.

Purpose of the product vision: to evaluate and decide whether a right product is to be developed and delivered. This evaluation comes from assessing product’s expected value:

• the product team correctly identified the clients and their problems, needs, and motivations
• the proposed product addresses client’s needs
• the proposed product provides the clients with meaningful benefits

Extra functions of the product vision: product vision also helps the product team to:

• visualize future (literally)
• convey purpose and motivate product team
• filter and prioritize change initiatives
• provide focused direction while avoiding product drift

Qualities of a product vision: for the product vision to be valuable for the team as the key guiding principle it should be:

• reasoned — focused on clients’ needs, addressing clients’ problems
• big — long-term, ambitious, linked to company’s vision and strategy
• complete — comprehensive, focused, relevant, meaningful
• specific — concise, short, clear, easily communicated
• powerful — emotional, engaging, aspirational, motivational
• deliverable — achievable, actionable, measurable, adaptive

Vision statement formula: to make vision statement short and clear one of the following templates can be used:

• For a <client/user>, who has <certain problems, needs, or other motivations>, a <product> is a <product type> that provides <benefits> while <other competitive products> fail at <description of product’s superiority>.
• For a <client/user>, a <product> is a <product type> that provides <benefits> by addressing <client’s certain problems, needs, or other motivations>, and outperforms <other competitive products> by <description of product’s superiority>.

Areas covered by the product vision: to produce an appealing and thorough product vision following product-related areas would be covered:

• clients, users and other key stakeholders — What are the target markets, clients, and users of the product? Who are other stakeholders of the product? Who is the ultimate client? Who are the clients of the product team’s clients?
• client area of struggle — What fields of activities of the client require attention and provide an opportunity for improvement and change with the help of the product?
• clients’ problems, needs and other motivations — What are the ultimate client’s (or clients of the product team’s clients’) motivations, needs and objectives? How do they see, approach, and employ the direct clients of the product? What do they expect of them? What are the clients’ primary objectives which drive their motivation for change? What is blocking the client now from achieving these objectives? What problems and issues can the product address and what needs can it satisfy?
• benefits of the product — What benefits will the product bring to address clients’ motivations? What are the key functions and features of the product?
• value proposition — What is the vision statement of the product? How would the product create value for the clients? What feelings would clients’ experience in the course of owning, using, and associating with it?
• timing — When does the client need the product? How long will the client use the product? What are expected changes in the environment that might affect the client and hence, his expectations from the product and the way the client would use it? What are the major stages of product lifecycle and expected rollout milestones? How long the product will be supported?
• product performance — What are measures of product’s success? How do we define product goals and identify key value indicators to measure them?
• (extra) alignment — How the product fits with overall corporate vision and strategy? What are the benefits of the product for the company?
• (extra) competition — How does the product perform against and differentiates itself from one the client is using now and other market products? What are the current strengths and weaknesses of the product? What are the coming opportunities and threats to the product?
• (extra) channels — How will the clients get access to the product? Is the product positioned for specific channels or will be universally accessible?
• (extra) price — What is the price the clients are willing, aiming, and able to pay for the product? What price structure would be offered? What are the key drivers of the price upon accessing and while using the price? How does the pricing of the product compare to that of competitors’ offerings?

What needs to be done: product vision creation follows a design thinking approach built around product vision questionnaire above:

• general recommendations — focus on the client, look beyond the product, develop iteratively and incrementally, establish and support teamwork, lead and let for the creative flow, build consensus, write everything down
• tuning in — identify your clients and users, approach them, see them, talk and listen to them
• scoping — identify the topic to address (e.g. client’s problems and why they are worth solving, current solutions and why they fail), structure approaches to researching and exploring the topic (e.g. product vision questionnaire), define the expected results of topic exploration
• ideating — propose ideas on the topic addressed (e.g. create a motivation (problem) statement, define key product properties (pillars) that address motivations (problems), assign ultimate values to those properties (pillars)), filter, prioritize and sort out proposed ideas
• formulating — decompose and distill proposed ideas, find patterns, group around similar themes, synthesize a final topic result (e.g. a proposed product’s vision statement, set higher-level objectives to achieve product vision statement), assemble and review the product vision draft
• completing — share and validate the product vision with clients, users and other stakeholders, update product vision upon consultations, finalize the product vision
• moving on — start developing a product roadmap!

Tools that can be used:

• Product vision canvas
• Product vision board
• Product vision box