A product vision is an articulation of the future—a powerful, forward-looking statement designed to set clear north star guidance and link company strategy to the product day to day.
Product vision examples can help you shape your own vision. In this article we have collated the best product vision examples we could find.
The test of a good product vision is its ability to provide precise, long-term guidance to the team. It should remain durable over time and be ambitious enough to steer your company’s strategy for years to come. It should be big but achievable. We’ve tried to find product vision examples which embody those principles.
“Think of your product vision as a fuzzy vision: the exact steps, order, and timing may change over time. Even though your product vision is a rough plan, it helps bridge the gap between your company and product strategy.” - Gibson Biddle
Product vision examples typically come in 4 different formats
- 1 Line Vision Statement: A short, clear sentence that sums up what the product aims to do.
- Longer Form Write-Up: A detailed, strategy-led description of the product vision, which includes how the product will meet its goals and the associated guardrails.
- Mockups and storyboards: Visual designs or sketches of the product’s future look, showing how it will appear to users.
- Animations or Videos: A narrative-driven approach that illustrates the user's need and the problem the product will solve in the future.
They might also be at the company level, or the team level. They might be focused on business outcomes, things to achieve or user experience. They might be generated by teams or big leaps by CEOs. There’s a lot of variance.
We'll be taking you through product vision examples from companies like Google, Tesla, Zoom and Microsoft. All of the product vision examples have been created in different ways, hit different notes and have different strengths and weaknesses.
“We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details…. If you're not stubborn, you'll give up on experiments too soon. And if you're not flexible, you'll pound your head against the wall and you won't see a different solution to a problem you're trying to solve.” - Jeff Bezos
Get our Miro Board with 16x Product Vision Examples 1 line statement product vision examples
The strength of 1 line product vision statements is their quotable simplicity. They’re typically used by product led companies at the company level as a north star, cultural tool.
The strength of this product vision example is that it’s memorable, concise and everyone should be able to grasp it in the company.
The weakness of this product vision example type is that it doesn’t provide much detail and can create confusion about what steps teams should take to get to end goals.
V1: Push a button, get a ride
Later version: Push a button, go places and get things
Later version: Move things at the push of a button
Later Rides version: Tap a button, get a ride
“In the beginning, it was a lifestyle company. You push a button and a black car comes up. Who’s the baller? It was a baller move to get a black car to arrive in 8 minutes.” - Travis Kalanick, founder of Uber
Uber has never shifted from its core vision that transport should be as easy as pushing a button. The simplicity of that vision is powerful. It works for both sides of the marketplace by speaking to the experience of both riders and drivers.
It’s so powerfully flexible it can expand company possibilities:
‘OK, we’re a payments team and this is the broader vision...we came up with a couple of ideas that we all gathered around…another example is that we believed at some point you would be able to open up the Uber app and buy a train ticket….we wanted to make sure that…we as a payments team could support that [future] need’ - Ebi Atawodi, ex-Uber, speaking in 2021 about how she applied the Uber vision to her product work
It’s not only that as a vision it expands possibilities, it’s that it shapes what adjacent markets the company could explore:
‘What’s Uber Eats?’ ‘You push a button and you get lunch in 5 minutes.’ - Travis Kalanick, founder of Uber
Early vision: To make video communications frictionless
Current vision: The AI-first work platform for human connection
Founded in 2011 Zoom had the same vision for over a decade, until 2024. That vision is often credited with their explosive growth: Zoom was growing faster than competitors prior to the Covid pandemic, and was well placed to take advantage.
The recent shift in vision has courted controversy: it’s been suggested that their new focus is eroding their core value proposition.
Criticism levelled at Zoom in recent months:
- Frictionful UI: in a tear down of Zoom vs Teams and Gmeet UX lead Peter Ramsey of Built for Mars found that starting a meeting in Zoom takes multiple more clicks than in its competitors, and suggested that Zoom’s prompts to push users to download and use the app constitute dark patterns
- Unclear value proposition: Their platform offers a suite of services around video communications, but also includes documents, whiteboards, virtual agents and many more
“Zoom has made the same error - prematurely declared victory in its battle against friction. They have moved on to more grandiose goals, even as friction festers and grows in the absence of sustained focus on minimizing customer effort.” - ‘Has Zoom Abandoned Its ‘Frictionless’ Mission?’ - Forbes
Make work life simpler, more pleasant and more productive.
“What we are selling is not the software product — the set of all the features, in their specific implementation — because there are just not many buyers for this software product….However, if we are selling “a reduction in the cost of communication” or “zero effort knowledge management” or “making better decisions, faster” or “all your team communication, instantly searchable, available wherever you go” or “75% less email” or some other valuable result of adopting Slack, we will find many more buyers” - We Don’t Sell Saddles Here, Stewart Butterfield
This product vision example is focused on user value and delight, rather than product functionality or on business outcomes. It’s all about the human at the heart of the product, and what they will feel as a result of adopting Slack. Similar to the Uber vision, it’s durable and powerfully flexible.
It has been in place from the beginning - CEO Stewart Butterfield’s famous JBTD essay ‘We Don’t Sell Saddles Here’ written shortly before Slack launched contains the vision verbatim in one of its sentences.
Current Vision: Accelerating the World's Transition to Sustainable Energy
Early vision: To create the most compelling car company of the 21st century by driving the world’s transition to electric vehicles
The core components of Tesla’s early vision statement are:
- Most compelling: phrasing incorporates both Tesla’s strong brand positioning and implies effective matching of consumer demand for cars via ambitious product development in the electric space
- Car company: limits focus to the automotive industry. Note that it does not limit Tesla’s scope to electric vehicles
- The world’s: implies global operations, not only limited to the US, which was the launch market
- Driving: implies an active, change maker role in transitioning to sustainable energy
- Electric vehicles: states Tesla’s core proposition as a 100% electric car company, versus other models, such as hybrids
What makes it effective is that it delimits scope effectively (cars), emphasises that electric vehicles must compete globally and effectively with any other sort of car, and pushes for ambition, when it comes to product development and the brand proposition.
Tesla use a suite of tools to articulate future goals, from vision statements and longer form product vision and strategy statements which they call Master Plans. Vision statements and master plans are updated and replaced as the goals in them are achieved.
The Masterplans tie together the product strategy and vision for each phase of the company lifecycle, and link it to the company vision. The vision is adaptable according to the current strategy phase, which is articulated in the latest Master Plan, but it is always linked to the core goal of a sustainable energy future.
“The overarching purpose of Tesla Motors (and the reason I am funding the company) is to help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric economy, which I believe to be the primary, but not exclusive, sustainable solution.” - Elon Musk, The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan, 2006
Now that Tesla has achieved its initial vision of a compelling, global electric car company, they’re now working towards the broader vision, with the result that the company information page now states: ‘The Future is Sustainable: We’re building a world powered by solar energy, running on batteries and transported by electric vehicles.’
“Your mission is to balance speed with security to create frictionless experiences for customers…Our product vision is to provide a single source of decision making for loss prevention within Tesco, across any channel or market. We operate at the point of transaction, so Tesco chooses which transactions to allow, block or intervene in, to grow sales and manage losses.” - Tesco Loss Prevention team
This product vision example is a great one of where a product area has defined their own mission and vision and are working towards it. It’s listed in job descriptions and clearly defined. Other product areas at Tesco, at least from what we can see publicly, don’t seem to either have or to be driven by their mission and vision in the same way.
Product visions don’t only happen at the company level: they can also be created at the sub-team level.
[Short form] Building a more connected world, ride by ride
[Longer form] A world where cities feel small again. Where transportation and tech bring people together, instead of apart.
This product vision example manages to merge the user experience, the ‘job’ they’re hiring Lyft for, with the product vision.
Ride apps benefit from powerful network effects, where the supply distribution of drivers and the demand distribution of riders achieve liquidity, or a matching optimum. This is what allows the company to scale: more rides equals more drivers, and so on.
It also speaks to the user, since ultimately what they’re doing is using Lyft to get from A to B.
Understand Network Effects using the 7 Powers Framework
Longer form vision statements provide more guidance, and more guardrails.
The strengths of longer form vision write ups is that they can set out steps to achieve the vision more clearly than a 1 line statement, they can link the vision more tightly to the strategy, and they can articulate risks and set constraints and resource allocations.
The weaknesses are that they require more frequent updates, they’re easy to get wrong, and while some are very durable (10 years +) if they’re not articulated well, or properly thought through they can quickly use credibility as a document.
The Gitlab vision statement follows a clear prioritization: first make the DevSecOps platform work efficiently and effectively for users, including embedding AI.
This is priority 1 and the focus for the next 3 years. The second priority is to drive competitive advantage by making AI enablement core to the Gitlab proposition
The goal of ModelOps is to “extend the GitLab platform to enrich features with data science features while also enabling customers to build ML/AI workloads with GitLab”.
The 3rd priority is to compete more effectively with other ticketing solutions such as ZenDesk and JIRA.
What’s great about this vision is that it follows the McKinsey Horizons Model for resource allocation and idea exploration:
The Gitlab product vision squarely places majority focus on the core platform, followed by an emerging data science and machine learning opportunity and followed by a pilot program idea.
Although this product vision example confidently states that it is their vision for the next 10 years, it’s likely that it’s updated far more often than that. It’s most likely restated with edits every 1-2 years.
The everything app
“We’re rapidly transforming the company from what it was, Twitter 1.0, to the everything app. [An] all-inclusive feature set that you can basically do anything you want on our system…I think the fundamental thing that’s missing that would be incredibly useful is a single application that encompasses everything. You can do payments, messages, video, calling, whatever you’d like, from one single, convenient place.” - Elon Musk, X Company All Hands (2023)
Walter Isaacson, author of ‘Elon Musk’ on X
The original X.com is where Elon Musk got his first major break. Online bank X merged with Confinity, its major competitor in 2000, Peter Thiel then took the CEO seat, and in 2001 the combined company was renamed Paypal.
Elon Musk bought back the domain name from Paypal in 2017, reassigned it to Twitter in 2023, and started iterating Twitter towards his vision for an everything app. The vision is fundamentally for a product which shares similar characteristics to WeChat, the Chinese equivalent of Whatsapp, which contains a whole host of additional features, including payments.
“They have this in China, to some degree, with WeChat. We just don’t have that. It doesn’t exist outside of China. This doesn’t mean that we just want to copy WeChat. I think we can actually create something ultimately that exceeds WeChat. We can do some pretty incredible stuff here.”- Elon Musk, X Company All Hands (2023)
And X / Twitter have got to work on it. In January 2025 X announced a partnership with Visa to handle payments for its new X-money app.
Like the other Elon articulated visions we’ve covered here, it’s clear that the company steers to the product vision, so expect more financial features from X/Twitter soon.
Chegg & Netflix Product Vision | Gibson Biddle: GLEE model
Gibson Biddle is a big advocate of structuring visions around the GLEE model, which stands for
- Get Big…
- Lead…
- Expand
- Expand further…
Here’s an Netflix product vision example, Gibson’s old company:
And here’s a product vision example for Chegg, another company Gibson worked at:
Get Big on Textbooks [rental]
Lead eTextbooks
Expand into other student services (jobs, internships, etc.)
And here’s how he amended it when it turned out that unlike Netflix, Chegg (which made its money in textbook rental) was not transitioning from physical to digital:
Get Big on textbook rental.
Lead homework help.
Expand into other student services
The strengths of these product vision examples are that they are ordered around achievable sequential steps that set a long term, achievable future for the company, broken down into pieces. They’re based on disrupting a space and segment, and then using that to expand further once market dynamics catch up.
“Teams need to be reminded to “think big” and that anything is possible in the long-term. Sam Altman, the Chairman of Y Combinator, says this nicely: “Be more ambitious…Talk about that big vision and work relentlessly towards it, but always have a reasonable next step. You don’t want step one to be incorporating the company and step two to be going to Mars.” - Gibson Biddle
They follow a simple structure which allows teams to understand when to pursue which opportunity, and how small things now lead to big things later.
The weaknesses are that they are more business outcome focused than user experience focused, and step 1 tends to be a big step to achieve.
Tesla
“So, in short, Master Plan, Part Deux is:
- Create stunning solar roofs with seamlessly integrated battery storage
- Expand the electric vehicle product line to address all major segments
- Develop a self-driving capability that is 10X safer than manual via massive fleet learning
- Enable your car to make money for you when you aren't using it [via sharing]”
- Elon Musk, Master Plan, Part Deux, 2016
Tesla provide longer form product strategy and vision statements on their site under the category of Master Plans. They’re forward looking statements written by Elon Musk in a blog or report format, which articulate the vision for the company for the next 5-10 years. They set out a context, deep dive into each segment of the vision, and conclude with a wrap up of the strategy, articulated in short bullet points.
The first Masterplan outlined how Tesla would produce a desirable, but highly expensive electric vehicle which would bring in sufficient revenue for the company to be able to reinvest to drive electric vehicle costs down, produce another series of cars (and so on), and invest in solar power.
Musk shares many reasons for why he articulates the company vision in this way, from setting out a strategic roadmap for success under constraints, defending the company from attacks, and in order to contextualize Tesla’s current operating model and goals within the context of sustainable long term big picture goals.
“The main reason was to explain how our actions fit into a larger picture, so that they would seem less random. The point of all this was, and remains, accelerating the advent of sustainable energy, so that we can imagine far into the future and life is still good.” Elon Musk, Master Plan, Part Deux, 2016
The second Master Plan moves the first vision on: the goals are now to add solar roofs to vehicles, move out from cars to all vehicle segments, move into autonomous vehicles and create a car sharing economy.
MasterPlan, Part Three outlines an even bigger goal and vision for the future, by setting out a path to reach a sustainable global energy economy through end-use electrification and sustainable electricity generation and storage.
While these are long form essays, in substance the goals are close to the GLEE model from Gibson Biddle: they follow a do a thing, dominate a thing, expand into a thing structure, and are more tied to economic goals and strategic outcomes than user experience. They also sometimes articulate sequential steps (do this, then that) but sometimes set out a 4 point vision - which has to be progressed on all 4 fronts - introducing complexity.
Flyt
“Product vision is a lot like great parenting. Everyone talks about it, says you must absolutely do it well, but when pushed — no one knows exactly how to go about it. So we wanted to break the mould. We wanted to talk about “How”.” - Ricardo Clérigo, VP Product at Flyt
This is an example of using a step by step written format and representing it visually. Ricardo picked the slide format to make the vision clear, digestible and a point of focus.
The actual structure of this product vision example is similar to the GLEE model, but adds on two components:
- Timelines - by when. The GLEE model doesn’t state how long each step should take
- What it will look like and how it will be achieved: the model is very clear that, for example, the API will facilitate venue <> app connectivity in Y1
Ricardo sees a product vision primarily as a communication and belief tool. The presentation format, the timeline and the how statements are therefore there to enforce that belief.
“The good news is, when you now ask anyone at Flyt what we do, you start to get similar answers. People use the terms of our product vision in conversation. They talk about how something is part of “The Hub”, and how some design “is about The Marketplace”. It comes up in meetings. It inspires our customers to talk. It has helped frame scope discussions. It has helped make decisions. It helps us to say no.” - Ricardo Clérigo, VP Product at Flyt
Google Cloud’s Product Vision for AI Powered Security
“Our vision for AI is to accelerate your ability to protect and defend against threats by shifting from manual, time-intensive efforts to assisted and, ultimately, semi-autonomous security”
Google Cloud’s Product Vision
This product vision example is to use a specialized model to deliver the best security outcomes, train it to be able to take over complex security tasks over time, explained clearly.
This is a great example of a well organized written product vision which uses visuals to embed and explain key points. It sets out a near executive summary, sets context effectively and explains complex topics well with definitions. It’s tightly edited: there are only 2 strands to the vision which allows for focus.
How to set a compelling product vision
Mock ups and storyboard product vision examples
The beauty of slides and mock ups is they make a vision concrete. In a glance you can grasp the detail behind a grand statement.
The strengths are that you can pack a lot of information into a small space, while the overall vision is intuitively understandable. With a mock up or a storyboard there’s no confusion about where the CTAs will be, what screen the user sees next, or how information will be organized. They also allow teams to iterate towards a final option.
The weaknesses are that they are more iterative, and more complex, and it can be harder to grasp the big picture. They’re also more of a work in progress, than they are a future end concept.
Airbnb product vision example from their 2008 pitch deck
Airbnb are famously adherents of the ‘Snow White’ process, coined from the way that Disney de-risked investment in their ever full length film by drawing each scene and character moment in advance of animating the story.
Their CEO Brian Chesky started life as a UX designer, and whenever Airbnb design a visitor or host experience, they start from the user’s needs and motivations - the why behind their visit to Airbnb - and how their experience satisfies their needs.
Brian Chesky in a Snow White Storyboarding workshop
Airbnb craft their product vision by writing out every step on the journey a user takes. That starts from the moment they experience their need for your product, how they feel that need, how they discover your service, what questions and concerns they have, what screens they go through, how they feel as they do so and so on.
Storyboards are a critical collaborative tool for shaping robust product visions within Airbnb. They’re visible internally, they’re participatory and they help the company to shape the vision as a whole, while also being very clear to a high degree of granularity as to what it is. They credit this process with helping them engage teams internally to deliver robust outcomes for users.
“a product vision: a visual artifact that sets product direction over a longer term time horizon. Product vision is the critical bridge between strategy and execution. It’s the catalyst for getting teams moving with speed towards a compelling and coherent future state.” - Reinventing our wheel: The vision behind Intercom’s redesigned Messenger
Intercom are big proponents of a clear product vision, which they insist should be visual to be effective. They lay out the steps they follow, and the dimensions they assess.
What’s great about this product vision example is that it’s a vision for an existing product which is core to the business and already successful. This example is all about reinventing an already widely adopted product to extend its lifetime.
It’s also a great example of iterating towards a final product vision using a process, mock ups and workshops to critique the emerging concept. Below you’ll see several product vision examples which didn’t make the cut as well as the final version.
Dimensions they assess when evaluating a product and assessing where it stands today:
- Product: What does and can this product deliver? Where are the gaps?
- Market: What signals do we get from the market when we examine how customers are using similar tools? What is the competitor product landscape and do we have an advantage?
- Customers: What are their needs when they use these products? What are their expectations and how quickly are they changing?
- Business: How critical is this product to our business? What internal constraints or opportunities can we work with or towards?
Next they worked through the following steps to shape their product vision:
- Shape the product: Product a mock up at a high level of the product, broken down into iterative development steps
- Position the product: Articulate how the product’s value will be explained to the world, to ensure sales, marketing and development are aligned activities
- Validate the vision: Do discovery to iterate the vision based on customer feedback
- Build alignment: Share with stakeholders and get their buy in
- Unlock planning: Iterate towards a quarterly roadmap view, with rough resourcing
Finally they produced visual mock ups and iterated through these in workshops before taking them to stakeholders and customers for validation.
Some of these got ditched, and some made it into the final vision.
Here’s one which got ditched - Intercom Messenger as a customer engagement hub:
They felt it was too busy: but had the kernel of a great idea. They next iterated this concept with better information organization, and strengthened their concept of the product architecture:
After integrating conversational messaging as a core feature, finally they made it beautiful - and moved forwards with user validation and internal feedback. Here’s the final version that went to users for critique:
Buzzfeed’s 2008 product vision
Back in 2008 Buzzfeed had a vision for the future of online content - building on top of their successful content model, future trending terms would be algorithmically identified from user generated content and responses. They’d then pull it together into 1 killer interface, where the homepage would serve the top trending content from whichever source, making Buzzfeed the brand hub of web buzz.
What’s really killer about this product vision is it’s an end to end vision for a self replicating system. Referral and growth loops are addressed alongside feature sets.
Animations or Video product vision examples
Videos are often used to demonstrate product visions because they tell a great story about what this product will do - and why you should care. They humanise product visions, and tell a narrative that is centred on user need and product fit.
The strengths of a video format are of course that they’re the most intuitive way to ensure someone grasps your product and what it will do. They’re the logical output of a storyboard process, and to a degree, its end goal. They have other strengths as well: you can convey emotion, and demonstrate what the product will do for users. When you watch a video you buy into the narrative and you feel the potential of the product.
The weaknesses of a video are that they are, to a degree, fairytales. They are visions but they can feel like a made up production which will never come to pass. It can feel a lot like sci-fi, while the other formats we’ve shared feel more concrete. Finally if you’re making your own product vision, remember that they’re expensive and hard to produce.
Asana Product Vision
This is a fairly simple, straightforward example of a product vision. In this video Asana morphs from a project management tool to an end to end productivity hub. Your calendar, calls, goals and tasks will all be organised in one place.
It does a decent job of walking you through the user experience and demo’ing the future product features. It is great that it’s made public on their site, and easily shareable - you can imagine this being used as an effective sales and customer success resource - and is a reminder that fundamentally, a product vision is a stakeholder communication tool.
Microsoft 365 CoPilot product vision
In March 2023, Microsoft released their vision for how generative AI would transform the Microsoft 365 experience. As a suite, this product vision is feature and utility focused, rather than user experience focused. It’s also a great example of a product vision animation coupled with a longer form write up.
Both the write up and the animation cover the Microsoft 365 AI product vision from how Enterprise security will be managed, to how the full suite of Microsoft 365 products will evolve to new products which don’t exist yet: ‘with Copilot in Power Platform, anyone can automate repetitive tasks, create chatbots and go from idea to working app in minutes.’
As of writing, many of the features in the video have not yet been released, meaning it passes the product vision sniff test of being ambitious and durable for the long term.
SpaceX
SpaceX Product Vision Video: How the company will get to Mars
Few product vision examples create this type of awe: this is really product vision as science fiction.
What is however informative about SpaceX’s product vision video is that it does break down, step by step, how the company aims to achieve getting to Mars. The launch pad, ship design, booster, refuelling, and power generation are all covered.
As ever with an Elon Musk product vision, the company does work to it as a goal - we all watched in awe as SpaceX demonstrated they could catch the Starship booster in October 2024, as first seen in a SpaceX product vision animation in 2016.
SpaceX update their video as the company’s information evolves - so if you compare this one to the 2016 version you can see differences in ship design, propulsion and more.
4 More Animation Product Vision Examples: Microsoft, Apple, John Deere
Product Vision Examples Miro Board
