In this video, I'll clearly differentiate product vision and product strategy and show how they relate to and benefit each other. Differentiating vision from strategy is not just about semantics. If you understand the difference between them, you can actually use product vision to help drive bold choices in product strategy.
Jeff Bezos' famous quote on being stubborn on vision but flexible on details is only useful if you have created and committed to a product vision that's worth reaching for. So what exactly is the difference? A product vision describes the future state for your users, which emerges from the value provided by your product.
It's a big aspirational goal. It should inspire others and, at the same time, be the foundation for your product strategy. In short, a product vision defines where you are going.
A product strategy outlines the most promising direction for reaching that future state. For example, which problems will you solve? Who will use your product?
Which business objectives will you aim for? In short, a product strategy defines how you will get there. As product teams, we often lump together terms like vision, mission, strategy, and values.
And this isn't always our fault. Maybe management, company peers, and stakeholders want us to get to work and produce results fast. But you can't forget the value of vision-driven strategy in favor of quick wins and boilerplate tools and processes.
Filling in the blanks and checking off boxes won't cut it. Unless you can focus on the key aspects and ingredients of strategy and vision, you'll end up with incremental changes instead of higher impact results. Let's review product vision and product strategy side by side.
Product vision describes an aspirational future. It synthesizes the experienced value for people or things that is drastically different from the status quo into an easy-to-communicate statement. Product strategy outlines a set of choices.
It methodically approaches the composition of the internal and external circumstances to derive promising choices to win. Product vision focuses on changes for users. What is the difference between behaviors, feelings, or looks in the future compared to today, and through what vehicle will your product create this difference?
Product strategy provides a holistic perspective. It isn't limited to the aspects from within but also acknowledges immutable aspects and market dynamics to identify gaps worth acting on. Product vision enables ambitious strategies.
It's not the sole deciding factor of how useful and effective product strategy is, but the lack thereof makes ambitions fall short. Product strategy relies on a forward-looking vision. Strategic choices about offerings, markets, and user segments depend on the appropriate ambition level to not get sucked into iterative baby steps.
Now that we understand the difference, you can use product vision to help drive bold choices in product strategy, but a question that often gets asked is, which comes first? As much as I want to give you a simple answer to this question, product management is a dynamic process. These relationships must flow in both directions.
Just as product strategy and vision must trickle down, insights and learnings from discovery and delivery must also trickle up. This chart shows how product vision and product strategy relate to other core domains of product management. Starting under ambitions, we see product vision, the aspirational future state caused by the value of your product and product strategy, which sets the most promising set of explicit choices for winning your market.
Product goals like OKRs quantify how winning looks like to measure progress and success. They act as the glue between ambitions and tactics to make sure that strategic directions are present and usable in the everyday work of product teams. And under tactics, we find product discovery, which is about understanding what problems and solutions are actually worth solving and needed to win.
And product delivery, which focuses on iterating solutions to move closer to success. Before you embark on any product strategy, your initial product vision probably relies on some kind of user insights. The key is envisioning a user-centered future and delivering value that leads users towards that future.
If your product vision isn't based on your users' experiences, your features and business goals will be disconnected. Start with a user-centered product vision and then inform your product strategy. Once your product vision is clearly defined, it can help generate product strategy.
Here is a chart that outlines some of the ways different product visions can generate different product strategies. In this instance, low-key refers to staying close to the status quo whilst ambitious means more disruptive visions that change the status quo. For example, if the low-key product vision is simply about helping our current users to send more emails through cleaner design.
This could generate low-key product strategies such as simply focusing on the problems with sending emails of the current users, differentiating through design aesthetics, and being stuck with the current team skills and capabilities. Whilst an ambitious product vision example would be that blue-collar professionals communicate without barriers to redistribute the wealth of the world. This would generate the following more ambitious product strategies: a gradual unlocking of these sub-segments of the market required due to size, multiple offerings required to compete against alternatives, covering various channels for acquisition, and rethinking team skills and moats to drive societal change in behavior.
Neither path is right or wrong. As always, your choices will depend on your product, company, skills, marketplace, and your tolerance for risk. And if you're feeling confident with strategy and vision and you're ready to talk about product discovery, check out my video on the 6 Key Elements of Product Discovery by clicking here.
