4 Key Parts Of An Effective Product Vision
Bold product visions are one of your key tools for generating leverage and creating great product outcomes.
There are 4 key characteristics of a great product vision: Aspirational, Detailed, Opinionated, and User-centric.
Aspirational means they aim to achieve a bold goal.
Detailed means it clearly outlines distinct solution elements that are needed.
Opinionated means that it clearly outlines a very specific point of view on how to solve the challenge.
User-centric means the vision heavily focuses on the benefits to your end user.
By creating a vision with these attributes, you ensure that you create the 3 key sources of leverage for vision: cultivating a needle-moving product ambition, empowering your team to make independent decisions, and gaining leadership buy-in to execute on longer-term wins that might not yield immediate results.
Just as a CEO has a vision for the company, you need a vision for your product work.
In this guide, from our Mastering Product Management program, we’ll walk through:
Why Do You Need A Product Vision?
Your product vision creates leverage in 3 ways, as stated above.
First, it cultivates a needle-moving product ambition.
Product Managers are constantly immersed in an environment that conditions them to think about what’s short-term feasible. Sprints and quarterly OKRs all emphasize what’s doable within 2 weeks or a quarter.
As a result, effort just gets funneled towards incremental wins.
Great Product Managers break this default mentality of incrementalism by pushing themselves to develop a strong scope vision.
Second, effective product visions also empower your team to make independent decisions.
Most Product Managers are responsive and involved, always making themselves available to answer questions, big and small, for their team.
However, they end up being the bottleneck in tactical decisions. The team defaults to the Product Manager to answer most decisions.
In contrast, Great Product Managers try to empower their teams to make their own call.
They create detailed product visions, enabling their teams to understand the rough outline of where they’re going.
When your team understands the ultimate destination they need to arrive at, they can eason for themselves the best route to get there.
Finally, product visions help you gain product leadership buy-in to execute longer-term initiatives that might not yield immediate results.
Great Product Managers invest significant time outside of just creating a great vision. They also spend lots of time socializing and getting leadership buy-in on it.
This creates leverage by giving you sufficient space to execute your longer-term initiatives that don’t produce immediate results.
Sachin Rekhi says “Products with an ambitious vision but without leadership, buy-in are given a short rope to thrive, maybe 1-2 quarters, and are often defunded before they can realize their vision.”
Now that we have outlined why you need a product vision, let’s break down what an effective product vision consists of.
Product Visions Are Aspirational
First, great product visions are aspirational. This means they aim to achieve a bold goal.
Most Product Managers conceptually understand they should aim for a bold goal. In practice, they struggle to put together a genuinely aspirational vision.
In fact, Sachin Rekhi says “One of the most common feedback that Product Managers get when presenting their vision to their manager or leadership is that it’s not aspirational enough.”
Most product environments, with their short sprint cycles, quarterly OKRs, and leadership pressure to put wins on the board, and bias the Product Manager towards smaller, more manageable problems.
When product visions aren’t aspirational, they fail to generate leverage. When a product doesn’t have an aspirational vision, it is often focused on a small problem.
Products that solve small problems often generate small impact, making it far less likely that your product work is needle-moving. When your work is not needle-moving, product leadership is not bought in.
This in turn means you don’t get the time and resources to execute that vision.
In contrast, visions that are highly aspirational generate leverage:
Larger goals tend to tackle big problems. Solving big problems tends to create needle-moving results. As a result, product leadership is much more likely to be bought in.
This then results in you getting the right amount of resources and time to go work on the vision.
Why Product Visions Are Detailed & Opinionated
Being aspirational isn’t enough. A strong product vision is also detailed, meaning it clearly outlines distinct solution elements that are needed, and opinionated, meaning that it clearly outlines a very specific point of view on how to solve the challenge.
Most Product Managers have the exact opposite initial instinct, however. They intentionally write their product visions to be somewhat vague so that they don’t limit themselves to what they can build several years down the road.
They want to make sure they have as much flexibility as possible to build and flex into what makes the most sense in any given moment.
Vague Visions Erode Leverage
While vagueness might provide flexibility, vague product visions erode away two sources of leverage: team empowerment and leadership buy-in.
First, vague visions fail to empower your team.
When your product vision is too vague, there’s a high risk that your team ends up with different interpretations of what exactly it means, and how you build towards it.
It's like interpreting clouds with a friend. You each see something different when the shapes are really large and vague.
Second, vague product visions often put you at risk of creating perceived, instead of true, alignment with leadership.
Lacking true alignment with leadership results in a lack of leadership buy-in late in the execution process, when it’s more difficult to pivot.
Vague visions allow Product Managers to get perceived alignment relatively easily because it’s easier to agree with a high-level plan.
However, when it comes down to project execution, Product Managers often realize they are not truly aligned with leadership on exact details.
Detailed Visions Drive Leverage
Making your vision detailed and opinionated creates these two sources of leverage.
First, your team is empowered to make independent decisions.
Because you’ve outlined a specific point of view on solution elements, your team has a clear picture of the milestones they have to work towards.
As such, they have a clear picture of where they’re going, and they can better reason for themselves regarding what trade-offs they should be making to get to key milestones.
This reduces the need to ask Product Mangers to make decisions, removing you as a bottleneck and restoring leverage.
Second, you get true alignment with leadership on your product vision, giving you the runway to execute without oversight on each product decision.
You’ve now front-loaded your detail alignment work. This means you can execute much more smoothly once you get started on the project.
Additionally, because you’ve given specific details on your vision, you can more clearly show how each of your roadmap items tie to the realization of your vision.
When leadership sees that you’re clearly chipping away at the vision realization, it’s easier for them to continue supporting it.
Making Product Visions User-Centric
Finally, strong visions are user-centric, meaning the vision heavily focuses on the benefits to your end user.
Product Managers sometimes forget to do this, because they’re too focused on how their vision helps:
Their company win without a clear user benefit
Them be the best in a specific technology
The problem with being so focused elsewhere is that they lose sight of what the end user actually needs.
Non-User Centric Visions Reduce Leverage
As a result, they lose a key type of leverage: developing a needle-moving ambition.
Because you’re not as focused on the end user’s needs, you’re at risk of developing a product that doesn’t deeply solve their problems.
This then results in low adoption and usage, failing to create needle-moving impact.
User-Centric Product Visions Move The Needle
Making your product vision user-centric helps ensure it’s needle-moving. Because you have the core user in mind, you’re much more focused on their needs and context.
With a tighter understanding of what your audience’s major pain points are, you build a more relevant, focused product.
This in turn leads to a more needle-moving outcome in adoption and usage.
Creating A Product Vision Narrative
Trying to compress the entirety of your vision into a single product vision statement often makes it too vague to make concrete decisions on.
For example, consider Microsoft’s vision statement: “To enable people and businesses throughout the world to realize their full potential.”
This vision is so high-level that it can be interpreted in a number of different ways.
If this is the only guiding vision, it could result in the team having an unclear picture of what they’re actually building towards, which in turn prevents them from being able to make smart trade-offs.
They have to instead turn to the Product Management team to clarify each decision, making the Product Managers a bottleneck.
In order to solve the conventional problems with vision statements, write a product vision narrative instead.
A product vision narrative is a 1-2 page written narrative that outlines your vision in detail.
Like a compelling story, there are three major phases in creating a great vision narrative.
In contrast to product vision statements, you have significantly more room to express how you think about solving the problem.
This in turn makes it far clearer to the team what they need to do in order to achieve that goal, removing you as a bottleneck.
Additionally, a product vision narrative creates the space for you to build up the tension of a big problem, and then sharply release that tension with a resolution, making it far more memorable and compelling a problem for leadership to remember.
How to Share Your Product Vision
Finally, you must effectively socialize your vision narrative; it is one of the most important and overlooked parts of getting leverage from leadership.
When Product Managers don’t effectively socialize their vision narrative, they fail to generate leverage from having true alignment with leadership.
Yet there are 2 common patterns Product Managers follow when socializing their vision:
The first is they don’t socialize their vision live at all. Instead, they might share their vision in an asynchronous channel, like a company wiki or Slack channel.
Another common mistake Product Managers make is not adjusting their presentation style to the stakeholders.
In order to solve this, when framing your vision narrative, make sure to assess what persuasion styles work best for your stakeholders.
To assess this, ask your boss or peers who’ve interacted with your key stakeholders using questions like:
Have you noticed a pattern in what presentations go well with the stakeholder?
What part of the presentation seemed to really convince the stakeholder?
Were there parts of the presentation the stakeholder seemed totally uninterested in or unconvinced by?
In closing, properly socializing your vision requires you to assess: who the key stakeholders you need to convince are, where is the forum you can use to convince them, and how to adjust to the persuasion styles that you can best leverage.
Conclusion
Effective product visions are aspirational, detailed, opinionated, and user-centric.
To write a great vision narrative: start with an aspirational problem, describe a detailed and opinionated solution, and close with a user-centric resolution.
Finally, to get buy-in on your vision, use the stakeholder-forum-style framework to: figure out the key stakeholders to convince, determine what forum to best convince them in, and what persuasion styles to use to convince them.
If you want to take your product vision to the next level, be sure to check out our Mastering Product Management program.
This program will help you go beyond product management foundations and learn how to truly separate yourself from other product managers and leaders.