Product Vision

In early 2026 I ran a workshop with about thirty people at a Fortune 100 company. I opened with something that sounds almost too simple. "Imagine we're all going to Disneyland. I'd like you to take 20-30 seconds and think about how you'll get there. Don't discuss at your table. Just think to yourself."

Then I asked: how many of you are heading to Florida? Seven hands went up.

Disneyland is in California. Disney World is in Florida. Right away, seven of thirty were on the wrong coast. And it got better. One person was planning a trip to France. Another to Japan. Another to Hong Kong. There are Disneylands in all of them. Thirty people, one short sentence, five destinations on three continents.

That was the point of the question. To most of us "Let's go to Disneyland" feels like a crystal clear direction, and it still fractured the moment it left my mouth. When a vision isn't precise, people don't stop and ask. They quietly fill the gap with their own version of it, then march confidently in different directions.

Case in point... Not one person in that entire group raised their hand and asked me to clarify which one I meant.

Once the side-discussions and laughter finished up, we all agreed we were going to Disneyland in California. I asked again - "How will you get there?" The answers were a mixture of planes, trains and automobiles, but... this time, we were all going to the same place. That's what matters most.

Each person had the autonomy to pick the route they thought best. In work terms, the route is the strategy: the actions that get you to the destination. The vision is fixed; the route is each team's to choose. More on strategy later in this playbook, but I bring it up because people conflate the two constantly.

What a vision is

A vision is the destination. It's the think-big of where you want to be in two to five years, described so clearly that nobody can mistake it for somewhere else.

Think about the way a painter works. The finished picture exists in their head before the first brushstroke, and that's what tells them what belongs on the canvas and what doesn't. A vision does the same job.

Most teams aren't short on effort. They're short on a destination compelling enough to organize that effort around. Set a weak vision, or none at all, and people end up working on projects and tasks that don't matter. Not because they're lazy. Because nothing told them what mattered.

A good vision does four things at once:

• It aspires. It describes a future worth working toward, not next quarter's deliverables.
• It's honest. It names the hard things between here and there instead of pretending the path is easy.
• It's obsessed with the customer. The best visions chase a customer problem, not a product or a technology.
• It aligns. Shared well, everyone aims at the same point and understands the why behind the work.

Maybe you're thinking your company already has one. There's a statement on a wall somewhere, or on slide two of the strategy deck.

Here's the test. Ask ten people where the product is going. Count the different answers. Anything more than one means it's not clear enough, and you've got work to do. And that thing on the wall is likely a company vision anyway, not one for your product. The two can co-exist, but your product needs its own. The wall doesn't count. The only place a vision exists is in people's heads.

A clear vision is how you focus

Here's where this earns its keep. The clearer your destination, the easier it is to say no. Every request that comes in gets held against the vision: does this move us toward it or not? If it doesn't, you say no. Without that filter, the unimportant crowds out the important.

And the most seductive form of the unimportant is your competitor's roadmap. "They shipped it, so we need it too." I call this the perils of feature parity, and it's a trap. I know because I've been caught in it.

My product and engineering team was once responsible for another department's SaaS product. A real product, with real paying customers, and real competitors. And that department's backlog requests came straight from their main competitor's release notes: every major feature that competitor shipped became the next thing we built. Nobody was talking to our customers or hunting for new problems to solve for them. We were too busy copying.

That route was an expensive one to travel. It cost us double. We spent real money building things our customers never asked for, and those customers could tell they were getting a knockoff of somebody else's roadmap instead of answers to their problems. They became disillusioned with what we were building, and the product lost market share.

And underneath all of it was the gap this whole section is about. That product never had a vision of its own. There was nothing to hold the requests against, so nothing ever got a no.

The math makes it worse. Pendo ran the numbers on feature usage across 615 software products and found that 80% of features are rarely or never used. They put the wasted R&D at $29.5 billion. And those are the odds when teams build features they chose for their own customers. A parity feature wasn't even chosen for yours. It was chosen for somebody else's.

A vision pointed at a real customer problem pulls you out of that. You stop looking sideways at the competitor and start solving unmet needs, which is where the open water is. Focus isn't a personality trait. It's what a clear destination makes possible.

One more thing before you go build one. When the strategies do show up, make them real strategy, the kind Richard Rumelt writes about, not a slide of slogans or goals masquerading as strategies. Leadership owns setting the vision and sharing it until it sticks. The teams own the routes.

So start where the workshop started. Ask your team where you're going. One answer back means you have a vision worth keeping. Ten answers means the next few pages are for you.