Software Product Series: What is Product Vision?

Before I jump into Product Vision, let us define what a product is? A Product could be a feature, set of features, an entire product or a set of products.

Vision is nothing but "How the world would be a better place if you succeed" or "What the future you are dreaming about would be, after your plan is successful", "How your product would change the world in a meaningful way, after your idea succeeds". Vision is usually aspirational, phenomenal and close to the founder's heart & dream.

You can dream of big vision but your vision needs to be credible. The vision is credible when we can clearly see the company is progressing a tiny bit of the whole shift that they dream of and contributing one step closure to the vision.

Let us take a look at Amazon's vision statement “ To be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online".

What the vision implies? It shows a futuristic world, where everyone in the earth can buy from amazon (Amazon has a plan to reach global markets), customer is priority (one of the top stakeholder in Amazon), it will cater large range of products.

How we can say Amazon vision is credible? They started online e-commerce in US, today they expanded in many countries & markets and also provide global shipments. This is clear step towards their global reach vision. They have started mainly as a bookstore in 1994, later to sell DVDs,CDs, Video, software, video games, electronics and now they have added grocery delivery in India thus providing a wider range of products that customers needs. Amazon treats customer as a stakeholder, they understands their needs and wants of customer in different geo in depth, provide great personalised experience while shopping, awesome customer support, customer friendly policies and so on. Amazon making all moves towards its vision.

Typically, once the vision set, it is not changed. The product vision is about articulating the vision, inspiring the entire team and see if they are sync in. One way to do it is to repeat in all possible meetups, town halls, all hands about the goal and how it has been driven so far and right now. It is not enough to publish the vision in the website and company handbook, it has to be reflected in every mind in the company. We can do a litmus test to see if a team member understands how he is contributing to the overall goal of the company, indeed he might be proud to realise his contribution and boost self-confidence.

If you are a product manager, typically you need not create the vision, you ask the founder what he dreamt of, what he was thinking while conceptualising, your job is drive the vision and bring all stakeholder together towards it.

Asha Satapathy Co-Founder, DocEngage, Product Geek (Built 10 Software Products, Maintained over 50 products)

My Next Article is What is Product Strategy?

P.S: Good read : Elon Musk Vision