How to Define a Compelling Product Vision

If you want a powerful product strategy, you need to know where it's leading you. Your product vision provides that guidance.

Most product managers value a properly formed product vision, yet few are comfortable creating one. This page is here to help and examines how your product vision points the way to truly solving user problems and creating customer delight.

What is a product vision?

A product vision communicates what customer problems your product team and organization hope your product will solve in the future. 

Your product vision provides insight into why you’re building the product and how it addresses customer needs in a way that’s beneficial to the organization.

A compelling product vision provides guardrails to guide your team's product decisions: when everyone understands the product vision, it becomes a North Star to align decision-making between stakeholders.

Why a product vision is important

You need a clear product vision when creating a new product to stay focused on the problem you’re trying to solve for your customer. 

A meaningful product vision is also important when working on an existing product. In fact, it may be even more important then: when you have an existing product, you also have an existing roadmap and backlog stocked with customer requests and stakeholder feedback. Your product vision acts as a compass to help you decide what feedback you’ll incorporate into your product. 

What does a good product vision look like?

A good product vision helps guide decisions and inspires your team to deliver an impactful product. To do that, your product vision needs to exhibit the following characteristics:

• Clear: your product vision should be easy for your team and stakeholders to understand

• Inspiring: your product team can recognize the link between their day-to-day activities and the product vision, and are inspired to keep that connection strong

• Concise: your product vision should be short and to the point so that people are more likely to pay attention to it

• Achievable: your product vision should represent a view of the future that your team believes in and is confident you can achieve

• Customer-focused: the product vision should clearly explain the customer needs that your product satisfies

Many product managers use a fill-in-the-blank approach to craft a product vision. One of the best-known templates that meets the above criteria is this structure from Geoffrey Moore, a venture partner and author:

For example, here’s what the vision statement for Contentsquare might look like:

But simply filling out a statement template doesn't mean the product vision will truly land. A better approach is to build a story around your product vision. Here are a couple of examples of how product people have used stories to craft a good product vision:

Ben Newell, VP of product at Sprout Social, likes to go beyond simple statements when crafting a product vision. He found that his team was most inspired by visions that featured “a prototype that includes a story of a typical user’s interaction” with his product.

Ezinne Udezue, Product & People Leader at ProductMind, says her product leadership team uses a Strategic Intent Document to help them craft a story and explain their product vision. The Strategic Intent Document “explicitly calls out why we're doing what we're doing as a product organization” and includes answers to the following questions:

• What are our priorities?

• How long do we think these will be our priority?

• What product metrics are we trying to move and why?

5 things to consider when building a product vision

On the surface, it may seem like product visions are easy to build since they're typically short, concise statements. Don’t be fooled—there’s a great deal involved in creating a product vision that guides and inspires.

Here are some of the key questions to ask when you build your product vision:

1. Who owns the product vision?

One of your responsibilities as a product manager is to craft the vision for your product—but you shouldn't do it in isolation. 

If you want your product vision to guide and inspire your team, you need to make sure the team is involved in building the product vision right from the start. Keep in mind, though, that it’s still your ultimate responsibility.

2. How does the product vision tie into the broader strategy?

The product vision is a connecting point between your wider organizational goals and product strategy.

The product vision explains how your product helps further your organization’s strategy. Once you understand your product's role for the broader organization, you craft your product strategy to lay out the steps needed to realize the product vision. 

Put simply, your product vision describes where you want your product to be, and your product strategy indicates how you’ll get there.

3. How do you build a truly customer-centric product vision?

To ensure you keep a core focus on your customer when crafting your product vision, ask your sales and customer success teams, “What do customers consider when they select our product?” Use this insight to think of ways to better reflect your customers' needs and wants in your product vision. 

Ben Newell learned the importance of understanding customer-centricity when he became a product leader in a new industry. He wanted to know more about the company and its customers before creating a product vision. “I wanted to take time to listen to everyone and really understand the challenges that our customers were facing.”

By asking colleagues from across your business about their experiences with customers, you build out a broader, more nuanced understanding of your product to better inform your overall vision—and ensure it’s one everybody can get behind.

4. How do you communicate the product vision?

Your product vision won't be helpful if no one’s aware of it. Once you’ve settled on a statement, you need to communicate it to everyone in your organization. 

Communicating your product vision should start in the early stages, as you're creating it. Again, the product vision shouldn't be built in isolation: include key teams and people in your organization. If you build the vision in isolation, stakeholders can often feel surprised, might be less likely to buy in, and may ignore the vision or strongly question it.

When Albert Lee, Co-Founder and former Head of Product at MyFitnessPal, was first asked to communicate his product vision, he did what most of us would do—he searched Google for examples. The examples he found were so abstract that they didn’t provide any helpful guidance. Albert then tried to convey a product vision by creating a product prototype, but it was too specific and didn’t leave the team enough room to innovate.

To find the middle ground between too abstract and too specific, Albert finally decided to use storyboards to help everyone on his team understand: "Here's how we see our customer. Here's how we see these fundamental things that they're dealing with …. Here are the types of experiences that we aspire to create … to allow them to be successful."

5. How do you keep your product vision fresh?

When you create your product vision, you create a hypothesis about what you think your product should be in the future. And since it’s a hypothesis, you might need to revise and iterate based on the feedback and responses you receive. 

You’ll also need to revisit the vision regularly with key stakeholders to verify that it still resonates with the current reality of your company and product. 

Look for ways to regularly update your organization about the product vision and how your product teams live up to it. This habit of sharing progress helps you remind people what the vision is and gather feedback to refine it. 

Ben Newell hosts regular meetings for his product teams to get in front of the whole company and share what they’ve been working on. The teams use this opportunity to share A/B test results and their tracking metrics. The updates give Ben’s teams a chance to explain their progress toward realizing the product vision and get input on where it may need to be revised.

🔥 Pro tip: one way to keep your product vision relevant is to avoid being so focused on the short term that you lose sight of the more distant future.

Gib Biddle, former VP of Product at Netflix and Chief Product Officer at Chegg, created the GLEe model (Get Big, Lead, Expand) to help product teams consider what’s next and think longer term.

Gib found the best way to achieve a product vision that stretches over multiple years is to break it into a series of steps:

• First, identify a customer problem that people will buy your product to solve. You’ll 'Get Big' in the market for that product to build competitive advantages. For example, Netflix started 'getting big' by providing mail-order DVDs.

• Then, determine the next trend you want to point your product toward. This may be a new problem you solve or a better way of solving the problem you already address. Take steps to 'Lead' in this area. For Netflix, this was streaming.

• Finally, use the foundation you built in the first 2 steps to grow your business and product. This is where you 'Expand'. Netflix expanded into worldwide distribution.

To build a product vision that helps you think long term, ask yourself (and your product team) the following questions:

1. What’s the initial solution that enables our company and product to gain market share (i.e. 'Get Big') over the first 3–5 years of its life? 

2. 3–5 years in the future, what’s the next wave your product will ride—what will you 'Lead'? 

3. Once your product has a leadership position, how can you 'Expand' even further? When you consider your brand, network effects, economies of scale, and unique technology your product has, what is the next wave of activity?

3 ways Contentsquare helps you craft your vision

Here’s how Contentsquare’s experience intelligence tools help you build a product vision that aligns with your users’ needs and desires.

1. Use Heatmaps to find out what works

Contentsquare Heatmaps gives you a broad overview of where people spend their time on your website so you can see where they pay the most attention—and where they get distracted. 

Use these insights to refine your product vision: ensure it focuses on features people really use, at the expense of ones that don’t seem to be a hit. 

Filter heatmaps to understand aggregate data on where users move, scroll, click or generally engage 

2. Conduct interviews to understand your user demographic  

Contentsquare’s Interviews capability streamlines the process of meeting your users 1:1—or, if you’re at an early stage, recruiting would-be users in your target market, from our pool of 200,000+ candidates. Meet interviewees face to face, and ask about their identity as it pertains to your product, as well as their experiences with competitor products. 

This provides input for your vision statement as to who your customers are and what, in their minds, would make your product stand out from similar offerings. 

Contentsquare Interviews helps you recruit for, host, transcribe, and share recordings from user interviews

3. Use Surveys to discover what people are trying to accomplish

Use Contentsquare Surveys to discover what users are trying to accomplish with your product, in their own words. Place them on key product pages, or trigger them to appear when users take important actions, such as engaging with key features. 

Ask respondents open-ended questions about what brought them to your product today, then once you’ve got a representative sample, use Contentsquare’s AI to synthesize the key findings into a report. Incorporate this user mission into your product vision statement. 

Contentsquare offers a library of survey templates to help you get started quickly

FAQs about product vision statements