A Product Vision People Can Repeat
If your engineers cannot restate the vision from memory, it is not doing any work.
Ask three people on your team to write down the product vision, separately, right now, without looking it up. Compare the three. Most teams get three different answers and one person who writes the company tagline. That gap is expensive, because vision is the thing that lets people make small decisions correctly when you are not in the room.
A vision is not a mission and it is not a strategy. Mission is why the company exists. Strategy is how you win given the obstacle in front of you. Vision is a concrete picture of what the world looks like for a particular user once you have succeeded, usually three to five years out. Its job is to be memorable and directional, which means it has to be specific enough to be wrong.
The test a vision has to pass
Unrepeatable
- To be the leading collaboration platform for modern teams
- Delight our users with world class experiences
- Empower everyone to do their best work
- Built on trust, speed, and scale
Repeatable
- A clinic runs a full day without anyone opening a spreadsheet
- A freelancer never chases an invoice again, because the invoice chases itself
- Any shift manager can rebuild tomorrow's rota in under five minutes on their phone
- A new engineer ships to production on day one
Look at what the right hand column does. Each one names a person, a moment, and a thing that stops happening. That is why people can repeat them. Abstractions are hard to remember because there is nothing to picture, and the ones on the left could belong to any company in any category, which is another way of saying they carry no information.
The four tests
- Concrete
- Someone can picture a specific person on a specific day. If your vision could be illustrated by stock photography of diverse people smiling at a laptop, rewrite it.
- Repeatable
- Under twenty words, or at least under twenty words when someone paraphrases it badly. Test this by telling it to someone and asking them to say it back a day later.
- Excluding
- It should make some obvious adjacent product feel wrong. A vision that welcomes every feature is decoration.
- Ambitious but reachable
- Far enough that you cannot ship it this year, close enough that this year's work visibly moves toward it. Ten year visions stop constraining anything.
Worked example
Hypothetical: Rota, scheduling software for restaurants
First draft: to be the operating system for hospitality workforce management. Nobody repeats this, and it justifies building payroll, hiring, training and inventory. Second draft: any shift manager can rebuild tomorrow's rota in under five minutes, on their phone, in the middle of service. Now the vision is doing work. Mobile first is settled without a debate. A desktop reporting suite for head office becomes a distraction the team can name. The five minute claim is measurable, so someone can walk up and say our current median is nineteen minutes, which turns the vision into a live scoreboard rather than a wall poster.
Write it as a scene rather than a claim, and it gets easier. Describe one user, one day, one thing that no longer happens. Cagan describes this as painting the picture of the future you want to create, and the emphasis on picture is the useful part. People do not remember positioning statements. They remember scenes.
Then use it in a decision, publicly, within a week of writing it. A vision earns its authority by visibly killing something. If the first time the team hears it invoked is at an all hands six months later, it has already become wallpaper, and you will need a new one nobody believes either.
One caution. A vision that is repeated but never revisited turns into dogma, and you can end up defending a picture of the world that the market moved past two years ago. Put a date on it. Once a year, ask whether you still believe the scene, and say so out loud either way.
Quick check
Which property most reliably makes a product vision useful in daily decisions?
The takeaway
A product vision is a specific scene a user lives in after you succeed, short enough to repeat and sharp enough to rule things out.
Try this tomorrow
Write your vision as one sentence describing one user, one moment, and one thing that stops happening. Ask a teammate to repeat it back tomorrow without looking.
Answer the check above, then bank the day.
Where this comes from
- Inspired, Marty Cagan
- Radical Focus, Christina Wodtke
Strategy is one of six tracks. These lessons summarise and build on the work above, they do not reproduce it. Buy the books, they are better.