The product vision describes the future we are trying to create, typically somewhere between two and five years out. For hardware or device‐centric companies, it's usually five to 10 years out.
Note that this is not the same as the company mission statement. Examples of mission statements are “organize the world's information” or “make the world more open and connected” or “enable anyone anywhere to buy anything anytime.” Mission statements are useful, but they don't say anything about how we plan on accomplishing that. That's what the product vision is for.
Note also that the vision is not in any sense a spec. It's mainly a persuasive piece that might be in the form of a storyboard, a narrative such as a white paper, or a special type of prototype referred to as a visiontype.
Its primary purpose is to communicate this vision and inspire the teams (and stakeholders, investors, partners—and, in many cases, prospective customers) to want to help make this vision a reality.
Its primary purpose is to communicate this vision and inspire the teams to want to help make this vision a reality.
When done well, the product vision is one of our most effective recruiting tools, and it serves to motivate the people on your teams to come to work every day. Strong technology people are drawn to an inspiring vision—they want to work on something meaningful.
You can do some amount of testing of the vision, but it's not the same as the testing of specific solutions we do in product discovery. In truth, buying into a vision is always a bit of a leap of faith. You likely don't know how, or even if, you'll be able to deliver on the vision. But remember you have several years to discover the solutions. At this stage, you should believe it's a worthwhile pursuit.
One of the most basic of all product lessons learned is that trying to please everybody at once will almost certainly please nobody. So, the last thing we should do is embark on a ginormous, multi‐year effort to create a release that tries to deliver on the product vision.
The product strategy is our sequence of products or releases we plan to deliver on the path to realizing the product vision.
I'm using the phrase “products or releases” here loosely. It might be different versions of the same product, a series of different or related products, or some other set of meaningful milestones.
For most types of businesses, I encourage teams to construct product strategy around a series of product/market fits. There are many variations on this (the strategy for the product strategy, if you will).
For business‐focused companies, you might have each product/market fit focus on a different vertical market (e.g., financial services, manufacturing, automotive).
There's no single approach to product strategy that is ideal for everyone, and you can never know how things might have gone if you sequenced your product work differently. I tell teams that the most important benefit is just that you decided to focus your product work on a single target market at a time.
For consumer‐focused companies, we often structure each product/market fit around a different customer or user persona. For example, an education‐related service might have a strategy that targets high school students first, college students next, and then those already working but who want to learn new skills.
Sometimes, the product strategy is based on geography, where we tackle different regions of the world in an intentional sequence.
And, sometimes, the product strategy is based on achieving a set of key milestones in some sort of logical and important order. For example, “First deliver critical rating and reviews functionality to developers building e‐commerce applications; next, leverage the data generated from this use to create a database of consumer product sentiment; and then leverage these data for advanced product recommendations.”
There's no single approach to product strategy that is ideal for everyone, and you can never know how things might have gone if you sequenced your product work differently. I tell teams that the most important benefit is just that you decided to focus your product work on a single target market at a time. So, all teams know we're tackling the manufacturing market now, and that's the type of customers we are obsessing on. Our goal is to come up with the smallest actual deliverable product that makes these manufacturing customers successful. Ideas that come up that pertain to other types of customers or markets are saved for future consideration.
Besides significantly increasing your chance of delivering something that can power your business, the product strategy now gives you a tool to align your product work with your sales and marketing organizations.
We want the sales organization to sell in the markets where we've demonstrated product/market fit. As soon as we demonstrate product/market fit for a new market (usually by developing an initial set of reference customers), we want the sales force to go out and find as many additional customers in that market as possible.
The difference between vision and strategy is analogous to the difference between good leadership and good management. Leadership inspires and sets the direction, and management helps get us there.
Let's get back to the concept of providing context to the product teams.
For a product team to be empowered and act with any meaningful degree of autonomy, the team must have a deep understanding of the broader context. This starts with a clear and compelling product vision, and the path to achieving that vision is the product strategy.
The more product teams you have, the more essential it is to have this unifying vision and strategy for each team to be able to make good choices.
And, just to be clear—the idea is not that every product team has its own product vision. That would miss the point. The idea is that our organization has a product vision, and all the product teams in that organization are helping to contribute to making that vision a reality.
Of course, in very large organizations, while the mission statement might apply to the full company, it's likely that each business unit would have its own product vision and strategy.
The difference between vision and strategy is analogous to the difference between good leadership and good management. Leadership inspires and sets the direction, and management helps get us there.
Most important, the product vision should be inspiring, and the product strategy should be focused.
In terms of prioritizing markets, all I said above was to prioritize your markets and focus on them one at a time. I didn't say how to prioritize them. There is no one right way to do this, but there are three critical inputs to your decision:
These are typically the three dominant factors for prioritizing your markets, but others can be important also. I typically suggest that the head of product, head of technology, and head of product marketing sit down together to work out your product strategy, balancing these various factors.