Product visions often get dismissed as a luxury reserved for companies with too much time on their hands. When you're in the trenches — shipping features, fielding feedback, chasing OKRs — it can feel like there's no room (or need) for lofty declarations about the future.
But here's the thing: the best product companies recognise that visions aren't just performative: they're fundamental.
Without a shared sense of what the company is building toward, teams lack a common framework for making trade-offs. Conversations about priorities become either impractically narrow ("We should kill Product X in Market Y because of insight Z") or frustratingly broad ("We need to do less!").
A well-defined product vision gives your team a yardstick for decision-making. It sharpens focus. It sets boundaries. It helps you spot which ideas are distractions - and which ones move you meaningfully closer to the future you're trying to build.
It's not just a slogan. It's a pragmatic, operational tool for anchoring behaviour. That means it needs to be specific — bringing to life what you're building, for whom, and how your approach is meaningfully different. Are you building an insights platform for sales teams, or a data orchestration layer for workflow automation? Under the hood, it might be the same data moving around — but this kind of distinction influences everything: your roadmap, your hiring plan, even how you pitch your product.
With a solid product vision in place, the rest gets easier. Previously contentious decisions — about market segmentation, feature prioritisation, brand positioning, geographic expansion — suddenly become clearer. Teams no longer talk past each other, they make decisions anchored in a shared, specific goal. Product visions don't slow teams down. They clear the path.
In a world full of noise and opportunity, a compelling, shared product vision might just be the most practical tool you have.