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A Product Vision communicates where your product is heading in the long term and says why and broadly how. It’s a motivational and galvanising tool for internal communication, although it might occasionally be used to inspire customers about the future you are building. It is not the same as the company mission and is different to marketing messages published on your website. This is probably why it’s quite hard to get hold of good examples of product visions. 

Marty Cagan gives examples here. Notably, Marty’s examples are not documents, and it may be that video or images are better ways of bringing to life something meant to inspire and describe the better future state your product will enable.

Product Visions are hard to create, especially at already established companies that don’t have one. This can be because incoming product leaders can feel like they don’t have the authority or history to create or articulate a vision.

In small companies, if you only have one product or the entire business is the product, the company vision may be the same as the product vision. Also, in a small company, the product vision may be communicated verbally and not exist in a document.

Product visions:

  • Describe a change you want to bring about in the world (this may be the same as the company vision if your company only has one product)
  • Describe how, in big-picture terms, your product will help bring about that change 
  • Describe a future state. You can refer to what you do now, but you are essentially pointing to the future 
  • Are aspirational and inspirational
  • Are general enough that should your strategy change, it does not need to change

I couldn’t find a template I really liked, so I created one myself. It is:

Today [the situation you would like to change].  At [company name], we [what you do] by [how you do it] so that in the future [how you see the world changing for the better in the future].

To bring this to life, imagine our company is a organic, vegan toothpaste company. Our product vision would be something like this:

‘Today, most toothpaste is harmful to your teeth and cause water pollution. At Natural Smile we make toothpaste using natural ingredients so that in the future toothpaste is good for people and the environment.’

Geoffrey Moore’s positioning statement template is often cited as a template for product visions.

For [our target customer], who [customer’s need], the [product] is a [product category or description] that [unique benefits and selling points].

Unlike [competitors or current methods], our product [main differentiators].

It’s a very helpful template, but it isn’t a vision—it’s a positioning statement. The vision needs to be broader so that if the company strategy changes (because perhaps the market or the competition changes) and the product line changes, the vision does not need to change. 

Roman Pichler’s template is between the Geoffrey Moore example and Marty Cagan’s example. It’s useful because it clearly explains who the future product is for, what their needs are, what the product is and how that ties back to the business goal, which is some of the work you need to do to come up with the vision in the first place.