From Vision to Product Mission

In a bit more detail:

• The product mission explains how the product will serve the company vision, so summarize what kind of product offering we plan toward our purpose. As such, the product vision describes an intended future state, typically 3-5 years into the future — sometimes shorter, sometimes longer.

• As explained, Purpose & Vision shall focus on the outside world. Now, at the product mission level, we will start to talk about the company and its services.

• While Purpose & Vision usually remain very stable even in the long term, the product mission might change mid-term when a company achieves certain major milestones or extends its portfolio to support its purpose with more products.

The product mission highlights some key aspects of the product, describes how it stands out from the competition, and explains why customers will see a high value in it.

• Optionally, the product mission can include a specific customer segment, target group, industry vertical, or region — if that is what makes the product unique.

• The product mission shall be aspirational and inspiring. It shall provide high-level guard rails but no features or detailed actions.

The difference between vision and mission can nicely be illustrated by this example describing IKEA:

The vision, already shared in the chapter on Purpose & Vision, is clearly broad, ambitious, and maybe even a bit too vague to immediately identify the IKEA brand. In contrast, the mission depicts a specific business activity that immediately points to IKEA.

The same can be observed very well for Tesla:

The product mission is not the product strategy; it is not a plan for execution but rather focuses entirely on the goal while leaving the path toward that goal open.

Most notably, this implies that:

• We do not cover services or consulting companies here — which might not even build a product at all and, hence, do not need a product vision.

• We accept that other business functions are also important for the company’s success, such as HR (for winning talent), Marketing, Customer Success, Sales, and Consulting.

In other words, while the company aims for long-term business outcomes, the product vision should address related product outcomes. For example:

• A simple business objective to grow in revenue will not be sufficient to derive product outcomes because it doesn’t state whether the growth should come from more customers, bigger deal sizes, better retention, entries in new markets, completely new products etc.

• From a business objective to expand into new markets or geographies, several product-related objectives can typically be derived, such as on internationalization — but it’s also clear that other teams need to contribute, say Marketing or Consulting.

• If the business objective is to enter new verticals, the product will most likely have to provide additional functionality relevant to these verticals.

Ideally, both business outcomes and product outcomes inspire each other and are aligned by way of an open discussion among executive management — for which the product leader is responsible.

The following tips might help in creating a product mission:

1. Keep it crisp — just a few sentences, not pages.

2. Explicitly name the rationale for the product’s existence.

3. Clarify the target users and the key value they receive from the product.

4. Mention company-specific aspects but focus on the customer.

5. Describe what makes the product unique without listing features.

6. Make the mission memorable and repeat, repeat, repeat.

7. Get feedback from the team, revise, and tighten.

The product vision board is a tool developed (and provided for download) by Roman Pichler that

While there is also an extended version, the basic board looks like this:

As displayed, the key idea is to collect the most important aspects of a new product idea and structure them shortly and concisely along the different dimensions. Compared to, for example, a value proposition canvas (see this highly recommended book), the board contains fewer details about the actual user personas, about jobs to be done, and about the pains and gains related to the whole user journey. To learn more, check out the following video on YouTube to learn about how to use the product vision board:

Sometimes product vision statements are more like marketing-style tag lines: easy-to-remember one-liners which, however, often aren’t sufficient to really align a team towards a common north star. Radhika Dutt, in her book Radical Product Thinking, suggests a so-called mad-lib format to provide a bit more detail:

Obviously, a product vision in this format is no longer immediately memorable. Instead, the focus is on providing enough clarity so that all members of the team are aligned — even if they express it in their own words rather than literally. The radical product vision statement includes

• a specific target group

• how their world looks like today and what they are struggling with

• a reason why this is unacceptable

• a statement as to when the vision will be achieved — when referring to a future success state here, not a specific point in time

• an answer on the fundamental approach, or technology, that will enable this change.