Perhaps you’ve heard about the parable of the three bricklayers. When asked what they are doing one answers, “I’m a bricklayer, I’m working hard to feed my family.” The second answers, “I’m a builder, I’m building a wall.” And the third answers, “I’m a cathedral builder, I’m building a cathedral.”
Most people get into product management because fundamentally they are builders, and they want to build something dazzling for the community - they want to be cathedral builders, not bricklayers. A good product vision is a way of visualizing what the future could look like to inspire people around you and make sure everyone’s building in the same direction.
This article will demystify the process of creating a compelling vision, and break it down into logical steps that anyone can follow. We’ve also compiled a number of examples from companies like SpaceX, Asana, Uber and Intercom.
Why a product vision is important
A product vision has a number of benefits:
- Inspires greatness - product visions make people excited to get up and go to work in the morning. They describe what you’re trying to build, and why that’s important for customers. They are a collective dream of a better future.
- Align teams - product visions help different product teams build towards a coherent future state. This allows the sum of many teams’ work to be greater than the individual parts, rather than a jumbled mess.
- Develops understanding - visions are very effective for communicating to the whole company, senior executives or the board what you’re trying to achieve. Most people outside the product team don’t want to get into the nuts and bolts of every feature. But they do want to understand the highlights.
- Employee retention - a compelling product vision helps retain high performers. They want to be part of the exciting future you are building and to build something really amazing.
- Create efficiency - by having a longer term, signed off vision, teams can work efficiently every quarter and minimize waste.
Beyond that, product managers are tacitly expected to have a vision by the majority of the organization. Creating one, writing it down, and getting alignment helps your personal credibility in the long run, whilst not having one can limit how far you can progress.
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What is a product vision
But before we get going, let’s define our terms, and acknowledge that there are different approaches here.
What we mean by product vision
In this article, when we talk about a “product vision”, we mean a description of the future user experience that you’re building. The format and process we’ll go through in this article produces a storyboard or prototype for a given team or a global vision for a whole product. We believe this is the most effective format because it inspires and aligns teams in a way that written documents cannot, and we use other artfacts (e.g. product strategy doc) to capture commercial thinking elsewhere. This is the approach behind Airbnb’s Snow White project and evangelized by Sana.
For us, a product vision is an interactive prototype or a storyboard covering the key moments in the customer journey. It is a series of mockups, and might include an accompanying narrative to highlight specific features and explain what the user is doing and feeling. This approach is also known as a “visiontype” drawing as it does from both the concepts of a “vision” and a “(proto)type”.
You can have a vision that is just written words, but there’s a step change in how engaged people are when you show them something visual. The vision comes alive in a way that just isn’t possible through description. The level of detail you get into and how complete the vision is will vary considerably. Short term team visions are best as high fidelity prototypes. Long term global visions are best as storyboards and videos. But both bring the customer experience alive in a vibrant way.
Etsy investor presentation 
SpaceX vision videoExample visions Alternative vision formats to describe product vision
It’s worth noting that there are different formats to present a product vision, and the visiontype format we’ll be describing is one of several methodologies. Whilst each format helps align people before work begins, all have varying emphasis on the customer experience and business needs, and different levels of detail. Here are some alternatives.
A 1-line vision statement
- Tesla: “Create the most compelling car company of the 21st century.”
- Lyft: “A world where cities feel small again. Where transportation and tech bring people together, instead of apart.”
- Netflix: “Become the best global entertainment distribution service.”
These encapsulate the future user experience or the purpose for a product into a single sentence. This allows you to have something that is stable over a very long period of time (e.g. 20-30 years) and be very memorable at the expense of giving more detail about what this actually means. If you’ve got one of these then you need to be clear how it’s different and adds value to your mission.
Written principles
These expand upon the 1-line statement to describe the guiding principles or critical features of a product. This format starts to make what you’re building clearer, but will be slightly less stable over time. This is a great place to start if you don’t have much design capacity, but typically you can bring principles like this to life much more vividly by converting them into visuals.
A product vision board
These are business canvases, which help you map out and consider both customer and business needs. These are good for making sure you have a solid commercial case for your product vision, but don’t tend to be very inspiring or give you a clear picture of what the product will look like in the future.
PR / FAQs
As made famous by Amazon, this method combines an imagined press release and frequently asked questions. Overall, it focuses on the value proposition, and commercial and operational viability of new ideas. It’s a purely written format.
Scope of product visions
Visiontypes of the sort we are discussing are helpful at both the team level and the global product level. Indeed these two levels are related - in an ideal world the team vision is a zoomed in version (both time and scope) of the global vision, giving more detail. Both levels feed off each other. The global vision is the highlights of the teams it encompasses, whilst the team level exists to support the bigger picture.
In this article, we’ll describe a simple yet effective format for dramatizing your vision with a storyboard, much like a high-level, future version of a customer journey map:
- You introduce the target user, and their needs
- You cover the key steps in their user journey
- For each step, you describe how they feel, and give a high level outline of the touch points that will make them feel that way
