Ever heard the parable of ‘the six blind men and the elephant’? The story goes that a group of visually impaired men who’ve never heard about an elephant before came across one. They touched various parts of its body and described it in dramatically different ways.
The one who touched its trunk said it was like a thick snake. The one at the ear thought it was like a fan. The one near the leg likened it to a tree trunk. In essence, no one understood the animal in its entirety because they couldn’t access the big picture. As a result, everyone is convinced about the absolute truth of their perspective, while being completely wrong.
This parable serves as a valuable metaphor for various scenarios in business. In software development, this story is a perfect analogy for the fact that without a clear, articulate, and ambitious product vision statement, teams would be left groping in the dark.
In this blog post, let’s see what a product vision is, why it is important, and how you can create your own.
How to Create an Effective Product Vision Statement
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat Is a Product Vision?
A product vision is a statement that captures a product’s big picture over the long term. It outlines the foundational elements of the product:
- Who: The target users for the product, defined in demographic, psychographic, and professional terms
- What: The features and benefits of the product that solve the problem for the target users
- How: The differentiation of the product in the market and what makes it unique
- Why: Why the product exists
Why do products need vision statements?
For a product team, the key benefit of a vision statement is that it serves as the North Star, the guiding light for all decisions throughout the lifecycle. Other than that, it offers many advantages.
Alignment: Product vision helps the UX, design, development, and quality teams focus their efforts. It also brings stakeholders across sales, marketing, finance, and talent teams together and working toward common goals.
Direction: Product vision plays a critical role in designing the roadmap for the product. It articulates the strategic prerogatives of the product, which are then broken down into small tasks and milestones to be developed.
Clarity: The product vision describes elements and minimizes assumptions. It helps new team members immediately understand the product’s purpose and join in its development.
Standard: Should we prioritize feature A over B? Do we hire more engineers for the next quarter? What bugs do we fix in this sprint? The product vision statement serves as the scale on which such decisions are weighed. It helps build consensus based on agreed terms and ideas.
Who uses product vision statements?
Any team building and taking a product to market can gain great value from a vision statement.
- In agile software development, it serves as the common ground for the entire product team
- In marketing, it helps market-facing activities align with the intent of the product team
- In fast-moving startups, it ties together diverse teams. It helps organize the chaos toward their collective purpose
What is the distinction between product vision and product strategy?
Product vision is the dream—it is the final product you intend to develop over the next few years. It is aspirational, futuristic, and evolving.
Product strategy is the thoughtful approach to achieving that dream—it includes the resources, steps, and plans. It is still high-level and encompasses every aspect of the product.
| Product vision | Product strategy |
|---|---|
| Very long term (5- 10 year horizon) | Mid to long term (1-3 year horizon) |
| Aspirational in nature | Practical and achievable in nature |
| Intentionally nebulous and adaptable | Deliberately specific and actionable |
| Focuses on why the product exists | Focuses on how the product vision is pursued |
| Written in a short, simple, memorable sentence | Written in a long, detailed, instructive document |
Summarize this article for me pleaseThe Role of Various Entities in Product Vision
While the idea for a product often takes birth in the mind of one person, the vision is a collaborative effort. It impacts the lives of everyone involved, their everyday work, and every decision they make.
However, in reality, each stakeholder has a different role. Let’s see.
Who is responsible for defining the product vision?
The product owner/manager is responsible for defining the vision in collaboration with various other stakeholders. The product owner/manager’s responsibilities include:
- Collecting inputs from leadership and key stakeholders
- Exploring ideas with sales, marketing, market research, design, etc.
- Articulating the product vision in simple, memorable terms
- Gathering feedback from various stakeholders and fine-tuning the vision statement
In addition to defining the vision statement, product managers are also responsible for communicating and socializing it. It is their role to get the project team, Scrum team, sales, marketing, and customer success to understand and embrace the vision in their work.
The product manager achieves this by building a collaborative environment across cross-functional teams. They communicate the product vision in a way that gives every team a solid foundation to make decisions. For instance, if your product’s vision is to “help people practice mindfulness”:
- The Scrum team will prioritize meditation-related features over task management features
- The design team will create UI that is devoid of distractions and helps users stay in the present
- The content design team will write simple, compassionate, and wellness-first copy
- Marketing will build messaging around calmness over productivity
On the whole, the product vision helps every team serve the needs of the target customer in a differentiated and unique way. If that sounds like a great solution for many of your product-related challenges, here’s how you can create your own vision statement.
Summarize this article for me pleaseCrafting an Effective Product Vision
A product vision is a software development team’s guiding beacon. Well after the statement is defined and shared, people will remember its sentiment and use it to make decisions. So, you need to craft a product vision that’s effective and actionable to achieve product success.
Here’s how you can do that with a virtual collaboration and project management tool like ClickUp.
1. Explore the present
Understand the context in which your product operates across various internal and external aspects, such as:
Target users: Define who you’re designing for. Outline their needs, pain points, current solutions, and frustrations.
Competition: Understand the competitive landscape, including what exists, its price, features, benefits, user loyalty, etc. Remember, the competition needn’t be a similar product. It can be any product that solves the customer’s problem.
For instance, if you’re building a reminder app, a simple pen and paper combo is the primary competitive alternative you need to study.
Opportunity: Clearly pinpoint where the market gap exists. Explore how big this gap might be, what will fill this gap, and what customers might pay for doing so.
Business prerogatives: While you’re at it, also consider your company vision—the goals, needs, resources, and aspirations of your business. Also consider some core values examples to define who you are.
Make sure you document all your findings in a collaborative place like ClickUp Whiteboards. Add information in the form of text, images, connections, sticky notes, and more. Once you have a draft, bring all stakeholders to review and comment.
2. Imagine the future
Once you understand the current landscape, time to dream, i.e., imagine a future in which your product exists. As part of this, consider the following.
Purpose: Before anything else, define the overarching purpose that your product will serve. Ask ‘why’ the product needs to exist.
Approach: Think about how you might achieve your purpose.
For example, if your purpose is to help people practice mindfulness, you can build an app for meditation, or journaling, or online therapy, or habit formation. Choose your path.
Value: Explore what value it would deliver for your customers. Will your mindfulness app make customers more happy, calm, productive, healthy? Here, also think about how the customers will feel while using the product.
Differentiation: Clearly list all the ways in which your product is unique. This differentiation might be in features, target customers, user experience, customer support, or anything else you imagine.
A good vision-boarding exercise will help a great deal in this step. Use ClickUp’s Vision Board template to describe your product’s function and differentiation. This intermediate template is presentation-friendly, so you can take it directly to sponsors, clients, team members, and other stakeholders.
⚡️Template Archive: If you’re looking for a way to get product ideas flowing or something more specific to your needs, check out these vision board templates.
3. Craft the vision
Now is the time to actually put pen to paper or type words into a doc. Go through the current and future state documents again to prepare for crafting the vision statement.
A product vision is often a pithy, powerful statement. “At Netflix, we want to entertain the world,” says the streaming services company. They don’t mean films or documentaries or television, but entertainment in its entirety. So, when they ventured into games in 2023, it seemed like a natural extension of their offerings.
Before you choose the one that’s right for you, workshop a few options. Write down a few different ideas for testing. To write an effective vision statement, make it:
Expansive: Ensure it can cover and guide your ambition for several years to come. Don’t restrict it to something specific your product does. “Help people practice mindfulness” is more expansive and accommodative than “build a journaling app” or “Provide on-tap guided meditation.”
Ambitious: The ideal product vision needs to be something that no one has—or at least very few have achieved before. Make it challenging and aspirational so the team comes up with innovative ideas in pursuit of that vision.
Customer-centric: An internal-facing product vision will end up being self-serving. So, keep the vision statement customer focused. Draft it around what you can do for your customer, market, and the world at large.
Short: No one can remember a complicated and long vision statement. This means that they won’t apply it in practice, either. So, keep it short and simple. A best practice is to keep it to one sentence or phrase.
For a more organized approach to writing vision statements, try the ClickUp Vision Whiteboard Template. Use this template to lay out your vision with clarity and focus, gather feedback, and convert feedback into action items.
4. Test your vision statements
Once you have a few options, run it by key stakeholders to see how it feels. Survey a sample across customers, product development team, sales, marketing, and business leadership. Test it for:
- Alignment with organizational vision
- Clarity among various groups of people
- Relatability for various teams to embrace and use
- Disagreement from any corner
For instance, if your product vision statement is to help people practice mindfulness, but your organization is in the business of CRM software, you have an obvious misalignment. 👀
5. Refine the product vision
Based on the feedback you receive from various stakeholders, refine the product vision. Remember that sometimes, you might not be able to fix some misalignment by wordsmithing. In such cases, you might need to rethink your idea entirely.
Most often, you can collect feedback and refine the vision. For instance, the marketing team might suggest that it is better to draft the vision as “help people be mindful” instead of the indirect “practice mindfulness.”
As a product manager, your role is to make decisions on what feedback works and what doesn’t.
6. Document and share the product vision
A product vision is only as effective as the number of people who understand and embrace it. So, you need to be able to document it and share it as widely as possible.
ClickUp Docs is a great way to do this. Write your product vision—big and bold for anyone to see and grasp quickly. Add banners, buttons, dividers, and other formatting to present the vision in an attractive and memorable way.
Securely share it publicly, privately, and with advanced edit controls. Link the docs to various tasks to ensure every work is being done in line with the product vision.
7. Implement your product vision
Writing and sharing your product vision is a great start, but that’s not enough. A good product manager takes that vision to real-world implementation with ease.
The first step to that is to convert the vision into measurable and achievable goals. Any good OKR software will help set project management KPIs aligned with the vision and achieve them consistently.
With ClickUp Goals, you can set targets, connect them to the product strategy, and share them among all team members. Leverage the multiple project views on ClickUp to track progress and measure success.
📖 Bonus Read: Professional goals for work
The next step is to lay the steps to achieving those goals. Create ClickUp Tasks directly from your vision statement on ClickUp Docs, assign users, set deadlines, link to other documents, and manage your entire product development process in one place.
Periodically evaluate your progress for alignment with product vision. Use data from your product management dashboard to review. Also, consider whether your vision statement itself needs an update.
For instance, if you are an events management company with a vision that focuses exclusively on physical, in-person, or on-ground events, you might want to reconsider it, especially with how wildly popular hybrid and virtual events are.
If you’re new to creating a product vision, the above framework offers substantial support. But if you’re still struggling to conceptualize it, here is some inspiration.
Summarize this article for me pleaseProduct Vision Statement Examples
Some of the most successful technology businesses across the globe use inspirational product vision statements. Let’s look at a few.
Glitch
“We make Glitch so it’s easier for you to make the web.”
Technology startup Glitch has a simple, yet ambitious vision statement. The operative word here is easy. That is why they create ‘fast’ and ‘fun’ tools to build websites. Their tools work towards making the web open, diverse, and accessible to everyone.
What’s more? Their marketing efforts focus extensively on their community, offering tools, jams, project show-offs, and more, which also makes helping each other easy.
“Create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.”
Over the 20 years since its inception, LinkedIn has helped people find jobs, network, refer other people, build their personal brand, and eventually make (more) money.
LinkedIn’s vision to create economic opportunity guides their decisions across their multiple channels of revenue, such as memberships, ads, newsletters, and recruitment solutions. The word “every” defines their expansions across markets, languages, and more.
Tesla
“Accelerating the World’s Transition to Sustainable Energy”
While Tesla is often in the news for autonomous vehicles, its primary focus is on solar energy and battery-operated vehicles. Tesla’s vision guides them to build sustainable energy solutions beyond just the vehicles. In fact, Tesla is also making steady inroads into solar panels, solar roofs, power walls, and more.
For you to create a product vision that is as impactful, you might find help with any of of the following templates.
Summarize this article for me pleaseProduct Vision Templates and How to Use Them
Positioning-based product vision template
One of the most commonly used product vision templates is the one derived from Geoffrey Moore’s structure for a positioning statement. In practice, the template would look like this.
For [customer], who need [customer need], this [product] is a [category name] that [solution definition]. Unlike competition, [product] is [unique selling proposition].
For the previous example of a mindfulness app, the positioning statement would be:
For [urban professionals], who need [support with overcoming stress], this [product] is a [mobile app] that [guides them through mindfulness practices, such as meditation, journaling, and exercise]. Unlike existing apps, [product] is [designed to offer instant stress management through practices that take less than 120 seconds].
While this is a great structure to summarize the research and state the facts, it is a description of the present. It does not offer the ambitious, aspirational future that vision statements need to provide.
Purpose-based template
A purpose-based product vision statement template allows organizations to place their software in the context of its role in the world.
[Product] helps [customer] with [value]
Extending the same example, the product vision would be:
[Product] helps [stressed urban professionals] [live in the moment throughout a fulfilling life]
Transformation-based template
This format focuses on the change or disruption that the product brings to the world or the marketplace.
[Product] enables [change] in [context]
A transformation-based product vision for the app would be:
[Product] ends [dopamine addiction] for a [sustainably creative world]
While these templates offer some guidance, it is best to remember the first principles when writing your product vision. Try to incorporate answers to the following questions.
- Who is it for?
- How does it solve their problem?
- What does it do better or differently?
- Why does it exist?
Summarize this article for me pleaseTake Your Product Vision from Dream to Reality with ClickUp
A good product vision throws light on where the product is headed in the near and distant future. It enables everyone to see the elephant in the same way, with all it’s part. Knowing what you’re building helps you create the perfect strategy, plan, all the way to final launch.
For the engineering team, it makes product management a breeze. Beyond that, a good vision statement helps the entire organization. Marketing, sales, finance, HR, admin, and every other team aligns itself with the vision, moving together as a coherent, cohesive unit. A good product vision informs decisions and helps resolve conflict.
Creating a vision is just one part of the process. Documenting, sharing, and reiterating the mission statement is the more important part. Using a comprehensive project management tool like ClickUp empowers teams to create and execute the vision collaboratively.
Brainstorming tools like Whiteboards, thinking aids like Mind Maps, notetaking with Docs, project management with Tasks, and reviews with Dashboards — ClickUp offers a comprehensive workplace management platform for product teams.
Take it for a spin. Try ClickUp for free today.
Summarize this article for me pleaseFrequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
1. What best describes product vision?
An aspirational future state is the best way to describe product vision. It outlines what the product aims to achieve in the long term, acting as the North Star, guiding development.
2. Who defines product vision in Scrum?
In Scrum, the product owner defines the product vision in collaboration with business and technical stakeholders.
3. Who is accountable for communicating the product vision to the Scrum team?
The product owner or management is responsible for communicating the vision to the Scrum team.
4. What is the vision of a product method?
The vision of a product method is an approach to software development guided by a single, cohesive vision statement. Teams that follow this method typically start at the top with a product vision and then trickle down execution plans from there.
5. Who is responsible for mission and vision?
In software development, the product owner/manager is responsible for creating and distributing both the vision and mission.
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