In a previous article, I laid out the full stack of my Product Operating System (OS); nine layers that connect vision to measures, intent to reality, story to operating truth.

I also promised that Layer A (Product Vision) was coming first, because it’s the anchor everything else depends on.

Originally I said, it would be ‘next week’ and honestly I wanted it to be, but in all transparency, I’ve actually been applying this in real life to customers that really need this support now and couldn’t wait. So I had to prioritise. That said, here it is, albeit a bit later than proposed.

And I want to start with another honest confession before we get into the craft of it:

Most product visions are useless.

Not because the people who wrote them were incompetent. But because nobody told them what a product vision should actually be for, in my view.

A vision isn’t just a slogan. It isn’t a mission statement. It isn’t just the first slide in your board deck or the line under your logo.

I believe a product vision is a practical instrument. Done right, it guides day-to-day decisions, anchors strategy under pressure, and gives teams the clarity to act without needing to check in with you first.

Done wrong, it’s just fancy wallpaper.

My hope for this article is to hopefully show you the difference and give you the tools to make your own product vision, not just more exciting but more practical.

The Test Most Visions Fail

Here’s the fastest way to know whether your product vision is actually working with 2 questions:

1. Ask someone in your team, anyone, just not a senior leader, not someone who helped write it, to tell you two options they’re weighing up for a piece of work. Then ask them: “Which one does the vision support?”

If they can answer without hesitating, you have a vision that works. If they look confused, or say they’d need to ask someone, or worse ‘“what vision?” you don’t.

A vision that can’t guide decisions in the field isn’t a vision. It’s a slogan with good layout and kerning.

2. The second test is equally brutal: “Can you say what your vision is not?”

The best visions carry implicit boundaries. They rule things out as clearly as they invite things in. If yours includes everything, it governs nothing.

Why Most Visions Go Wrong

Before we get to what good looks like, it’s worth naming the failure modes because they’re predictable, and I’ve seen every single one of them. You probably have too.

• Too generic. “Empower users to achieve more.” More what? More of which users? Achieving what, exactly? Is empower the most overused word in product marketing? Generic visions feel safe because nobody can disagree with them. But they don’t guide anything precisely because nobody can disagree with them.

• Too technical. “Build the world’s most advanced AI-native platform.” Nobody who isn’t already living in the product could tell you what they’d actually experience differently. AI-native, LLM-powered, ML architecture etc. Great - but they have no place in a vision. I’m of the firm belief that visions shouldn’t describe architecture — they should describe change.

• Too modest. “Helping teams track market data more easily.” Fine. But it won’t energise anyone, it won’t attract the right talent, and it won’t survive the first time the roadmap comes under budget pressure.

• Too inflated. “Revolutionise the global supply chain.” Sounds great. Means nothing. Creates cynicism faster than almost anything else in my view. It can initially feel really grandiose and exciting, but then what? This could be part of your overall mission but it should not be the defining product vision.

• Not connected to the business. This is perhaps the most common one. I sit in rooms regularly where the product vision and the commercial strategy are two completely different stories. Both exist in slides. Neither talks to the other. This is a slow-motion catastrophe, and it always shows up in decisions being made, particularly around the roadmap.

A good vision avoids all of these. Not by splitting the difference between them, but by aiming at something specific: the future state of the world you’re building toward, expressed in a way that makes action obvious.

What One Actually Looks Like

To make this concrete, I want to share a real vision statement — one I’ve been involved in developing — for a real company that was going through a key inflection point after receiving significant funding.

(The company is anonymous, but the example is real, and the process behind it is exactly what I’ll describe as we continue)

The core vision we landed on:

The decision layer that enables industrial companies to turn external world dynamics into confident action*.*

Let me show you why this works against the criteria.

“Decision layer” stakes out a future category that doesn’t cleanly exist today — it’s not incremental improvement on forecasting, it’s the claim of a new structural role in how industrial decisions get made. Definitive. Future-focused.

“Industrial Companies” is the current understanding and most refined articulation of the current Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) to provide clarity on who we are building for.

“External world dynamics” — commodity markets, energy prices, weather, geopolitics, logistics, macro signals — are first-class inputs, not background noise. This anchors the commercial direction immediately and makes the ICP obvious without naming it.

“Confident action” is the ultimate benefit. Not better models. Not more data. Not higher accuracy. Confidence at the point where a decision must be made. That’s where the value is felt.

And “decision layer” implies infrastructure within a broader system. Not a standalone tool competing for everything, but something that strengthens what already exists. It goes beyond the product into how organisations will work differently.

Most critically: it reframes the company’s core question. Not “how good is our forecasting?” but “who owns the moment where volatility turns into action?”

That’s a category question. And a compelling vision always points at a category, not just a feature set.

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⭐ PAYWALL BREAK ⭐ — Not really…this isn’t just thought leadership for the sake of it, I want to offer this information for real product operators by real product operators for free as long as I can and hope you get some actual value out of using it.

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Mike’s Personal Criteria for a World-Class Product Vision™

Over the years, I’ve developed a set of criteria I use to stress-test product visions. Both the ones I write and the ones I inherit. I’ll share the full set with you here, because I think it’s genuinely more useful than a formula. You’ll no doubt adapt and evolve these as you start applying them, as I have myself. Great, it means you’re being intentional about what matters to you and the products you are part of.

There are (currently) eleven traits. A strong vision should satisfy all of them. Most visions satisfy three or four.

1. Definitive and future-focused. It names a future state that doesn’t cleanly exist today. Not where you are…where you’re going, and what will be different when you get there.

2. Tied to the business vision. Not a parallel story. The product vision should be an expression of the commercial direction, not a creative exercise that lives in product and gets confused with the business strategy.

3. Guides strategy and prioritisation. Any meaningful product decision should be testable against it. If a team can’t use the vision to choose between two good options, it isn’t working hard enough.

4. Speaks to the ultimate benefit. Not the feature, not the mechanism, not the architecture — the outcome someone feels. The value should be experienced at the point of decision, not the point of analysis.

5. Goes beyond the product itself. A great vision implies a structural change in how something works, not just a new capability in a piece of software. It describes what the world looks like through a different lens.

6. Aspirational but believable. Bold enough to energise people. Grounded enough that it doesn’t generate eye-rolls. The sweet spot is ambitious without being detached from reality.

7. Helps articulate change and impact. It should make clear what shifts — in behaviour, in process, in how decisions get made — when the vision is realised. The impact should be evident without needing a three-slide explanation.

8. Creates excitement for the right people. Not for everyone. The best visions deliberately target a specific audience and resonate deeply with them. Trying to excite everyone is a fast route to exciting no one.

9. Helps people act without asking. Teams should be able to assess their own work against it independently. If a feature doesn’t move towards this vision, it’s incomplete or misdirected. This is the autonomy multiplier a good vision provides.

10. Less is more. Concise, dense with meaning, free from technical clutter. If you need three paragraphs to explain the vision, it isn’t the vision yet — it’s a draft.

11. Supports multi-level extension. A strong core vision should naturally expand into ecosystem strategy, ICP definition, messaging, moat narrative and strategic guideposts — without needing to be rewritten at each level.

Three Real Visions

To make the criteria tangible, it’s worth applying them to visions you already know. Not to score companies, but to see the patterns clearly. Three well-known examples tell three very different stories. Note: I found these online, so some potential that they have been updated or slightly different now.

LinkedIn

“To create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce”

This passes the inspiration test immediately. It’s future-focused, tied to genuine structural change, and describes a benefit that matters at a human level. The “so what?” is obvious. But run it through criterion 3 — does it guide decisions in the field? — and the cracks show. A team could use this to justify almost anything. “Every member” is inclusive enough to be energising, but too broad to function as a decision filter. A product manager couldn’t use this to choose between two competing roadmap directions without significant interpretation layered on top. Strong on aspiration. Weaker on the operational clarity that criterion 9 demands.

Instagram

“To capture and share the world’s moments”

Probably the most practically useful of the three for its time. Dense with meaning, immediately testable. You can hold almost any feature decision against it: “does this make capturing or sharing a moment better?” If yes, proceed. If not, reconsider. That’s criterion 3 working. It also implies structural change the way memory, connection and presence work; without overreaching into grandiosity. The limitation is one worth noting: this vision described a camera app. It no longer describes what Instagram is. A vision that doesn’t evolve with the product eventually becomes a constraint rather than a compass. That’s not a failure of the original vision. It’s a reminder that the vision should be a live instrument.

Netflix

“To become the world’s leading streaming entertainment service”

This one feels like it should work. It’s clear, confident, memorable. But look carefully. It describes a competitive position, not a future state of the world. It says nothing about who specifically you’re building for. It gives a team no material guidance when two good options are on the table e.g. “be the market leader” resolves nothing at the point of a real decision. And there’s no implied structural change in how entertainment is experienced, just a claim about market rank. It’s a business ambition written in the language of a product vision. That’s a common failure mode, and it shows up in criterion 2 (tied to the business strategy, not an expression of it), criterion 5 (goes beyond the product), and critically criterion 9 (autonomy: teams can’t act from it independently). Worth noting: Netflix’s actual product thinking around the machine learning infrastructure, the content bet, the anti-appointment-viewing model was almost certainly guided by a sharper internal view than this statement suggests. Which is itself a useful observation. The vision online and the vision the team operates from aren’t always the same thing.

The pattern across all three: aspiration is the easy part. The harder job and the one most visions don’t do, is building enough specificity that a company can act from the product vision without asking someone more senior to interpret it for them. That’s the bar I think is worth aiming for.

How to Actually Build One

Knowing the criteria is step one. The harder part is the process of how you get from wherever you are now to something that actually satisfies them. This is where most teams get stuck, because vision-writing looks deceptively simple and turns out to be anything but.

What follows is the process I use. It’s not a single workshop. It’s a sequence and the sequence can help.

Step 1: Start with the problem you’re solving at scale, not the product you’re building.

Most vision-writing processes start with the product team in a room with a whiteboard. This is backwards. Before anyone writes a word, you need to be deeply fluent in the problem at the level of the person experiencing it, not the person building the solution. This is obviously just a core product management principle but extremely important for what follows.

The question to anchor on is: “What is the most consequential decision our customer makes and why does it go wrong?” Not “what do they need?” Not “what’s missing from the market?” The most consequential decision, and the reason it consistently goes wrong.

In the example above, the answer was that procurement and operations leaders make irreversible commitments on supply, on cost, on contracts in the face of an increasingly volatile world they can’t reliably interpret in time liek they maybe could years past. The consequence of getting that wrong is measured in signifcant hits to margin, not inconvenience. Material impacts to the business. That’s the foundation everything sits on.

If you don’t have that kind of clarity before you write, you’ll end up describing your product rather than the change it creates.

Step 2: Stress-test against the “so what?” and “why us?” questions before you write anything.

Two questions that kill weak visions early and save a lot of wasted effort.

“So what?” Read the draft vision as if you’re the sceptic in the room. If the honest answer is “well, someone probably needs that,” you don’t have a vision yet. The so-what has to be obvious, immediate and significant.

“Why us?” Not as a defensibility exercise, but as a reality check. Does the vision imply a set of capabilities that you can credibly build toward? Or does it describe a future state so generic that thirty other companies could claim the same vision with equal legitimacy?

Both questions hurt when you first ask them. That’s the point.

Step 3: Write the core statement first. Everything else is extension.

The core vision statement should be one sentence. Maybe two if the second genuinely adds something the first can’t carry. Everything else like expanded vision, aspiration, strategic guideposts will be an extension of the core, not part of it.

A useful structure: [who is the actor] + [what structural change are you creating] + [what is the outcome for them]. That doesn’t mean it has to follow that template mechanically — but when a vision is missing one of those three things, you can usually feel the absence even if you can’t name it. Visions that drop “the outcome” become technical. Visions that drop “the structural change” become generic. Visions that drop “who” become rootless and unclear in their category.

Step 4: Run it through the eleven criteria. Honestly.

Print the criteria. Score the vision against each one. Not “does this pass?” but “how well does it pass, and where does it fall short?”

The most common gaps I see: criterion 9 (autonomy — can teams act on it independently?) and criterion 11 (extension — does it naturally expand into strategy and messaging?). These two tend to reveal whether you have a working vision or a well-worded sentence.

If you’re scoring fewer than eight out of eleven confidently, keep going. It’s not done yet.

Step 5: Test it in the field before you commit to it.

Share the draft with three groups: someone on the product team who wasn’t in the room, a sales or commercial leader, and a current customer. Not for validation, for calibration.

Ask each of them:

• “If this is what we’re building toward, what would you stop doing that you’re doing now?”

• “What would you start doing that you’re not?”

The answers tell you whether the vision is landing as a practical instrument or just sounding good. If the product person says “not much would change,” the vision isn’t doing its job internally. If the commercial leader says “I’m not sure how I’d use this in a conversation,” the vision isn’t doing its job externally. If the customer says ‘“It sounds just like competitor x’s offering”, it’s too generic. All matter.

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The Expanded Vision and Why It Matters

Here’s something I’ve noticed consistently: companies skip all three of the layers I’m about to describe. Not because they disagree with them. Because they don’t know they need to exist.

They write the core statement, or something approximating it, and treat that as the job done. Product Vision: complete. Move on.

The cost of that shows up later, and it looks like this:

• Cross-functional arguments about what to prioritise that go in circles and never fully resolve.

• Product managers are being asked by leadership to just go and ask the business what it wants, stack rank the answers, and build that.

• Sales teams are quietly crafting their own materials because what they’ve been given doesn’t land in the market.

• Staff at every level are waiting to be told what to do by someone more senior rather than deciding and getting on with the work.

• A general, persistent sense that pace is slow,but nobody can point to exactly why.

None of that is just a process problem. It’s a vision architecture problem. The core statement exists, but it hasn’t been extended into anything the organisation can actually operate from. The roof is built. There are no walls.

The extension happens in three layers in my view, and each one does a job the others can’t.

The expanded vision: Gives the core statement its context. Where is the world today, why does the gap the company is closing exist, and what changes when the vision is realised?

This isn’t an explanation of the core, if the core needs explaining, it isn’t good enough yet. It’s the narrative that surrounds it. Written well, it’s two or three paragraphs that an investor reads and immediately understands the market logic, or that a new hire reads on day one and understands what they’ve joined and why it matters. It carries the journey, not just the destination.

The aspirational outcome: Is different in kind, not just in length. It’s not just narrative. It’s a rich picture. Ambitious but concrete, almost journalistic description of what a day looks like for your customer when the vision is fully realised. What meeting are they no longer having? What decision do they now make in an hour that used to take a week? What do they take for granted that currently keeps them up at night? The test for a strong aspirational outcome is simple: could your best customer read it and say “yes, that’s exactly what I want”?

If it reads like a feature list or a strategy summary, it’s the wrong register entirely. It should feel like a description of a future that’s worth building toward which is precisely why it’s the north star that keeps product and strategy anchored when the quarterly pressure to compromise starts building.

Strategic guideposts: This is where the real operational leverage is, and where almost everyone falls short.

A guidepost is not a value. It’s not a principle. It’s a decision filter and the test for whether one is working is brutal: can it be violated? Can you imagine a reasonable person, in a real meeting, arguing the opposite? If not, it’s a platitude, not a guidepost. “Put the customer first” fails this test. Nobody argues against it, which means it resolves nothing when two good options are on the table.

The reason executives sense the problem but can’t name it is that the symptom looks like a people or process issue. Decisions are slow. Teams keep escalating. The roadmap debates the same territory every quarter. The reflex is to add process: better sprint rituals/ceremonies (note: I hate these terms that people use, it’s not a religion; they are ‘events’), a clearer RACI, a more rigorous roadmap review. But the root cause is almost always that nobody has translated the vision into a set of decision rules the team can apply independently. And the longer that goes unaddressed, the more the organisation learns to route around it. Which is how you end up with product teams taking orders from internal stakeholders and sales decks written by people who’ve given up waiting for the right materials.

The most common version of this I see is a leadership team that’s deeply experienced in the domain, where most people have done the actual job the product supports. The instinct is to trust that expertise. “We know what the customer wants” and they’re not wrong that they know the domain. But domain knowledge is not a substitute for current market signal. The customer they knew and the customer they have now are not the same person. Without a guidepost that makes this explicit, the organisation will default to internal conviction every time, and the product will gradually drift away from the market it’s supposed to serve.

Here’s what four well-formed guideposts could look like, anchored to the tensions I see most often to show some tangible examples:

• Internal expertise is a starting point, not a substitute for market signal. We build from what customers do and what the market is telling us now, not from what we know they used to need. Domain knowledge informs our questions it doesn’t answer them.

• We go deep on fewer things, not shallow on many. Every addition that doesn’t compound the core use case is a tax on the customers who need us most. When in doubt, we do less better.

• Our job is to change behaviour, not to inform it. Insight that doesn’t lead to a decision or an action isn’t product value, it’s overhead. We measure success by what customers do differently, not what they now know.

• We treat velocity as a lagging indicator, not a goal. Moving fast through the wrong problem is expensive. We optimise for the quality of decisions made, not the volume of work shipped.

Each one is testable. Each one tells a team what to say no to. And critically, each one cuts against something a reasonable person in the room would argue for, which is exactly the point. A guidepost that nobody would ever violate isn’t governing anything.

What makes the difference between guideposts that work and ones that don’t is almost always operationalisation, not content. The ones that change team behaviour are the ones that end up in working agreements, that appear in the language of retrospectives, that get referenced naturally when a difficult call is being made. They become part of how the team thinks, not a document nobody opens. Written once and filed, they’re wallpaper. Embedded deliberately into how decisions actually get made, they’re the closest thing to scalable product leadership that exists.

The Hardest Part Nobody Talks About

Here’s what I’ve learned after doing this many times across very different companies:

The vision isn’t the hard part. The conversation is.

Writing a strong vision statement requires skill and rigour, but it’s ultimately a creative and analytical challenge. The harder work is creating the conditions in which the vision becomes a shared operating truth. Not just a slide that gets nodded at in an all-hands and quietly ignored for the next six months.

That requires a founding team or leadership group that genuinely agrees on the problem worth solving - not just the solution. Enough psychological safety for people to say “I don’t think this vision would have stopped us building the wrong thing last quarter.” A collaborative enough process in its creation so at a minimum the key individuals are bought in as early as possible. And a willingness to revisit and sharpen the vision as the company learns, without treating every revision as a failure or a rebrand.

The companies that struggle with product vision usually have at least some of these cultural aspects missing. The ones that get it right treat the product vision as a live instrument, not a launched artefact.

In Summary: What You Can Do This Week

Run the eleven criteria against your current vision. Not to judge it, but to see it clearly for what it is. Then ask yourself which three criteria it fails most badly, and why. That’s a starting point. Share your views with your team, a manager. Even better, a trusted customer on their own take on the product vision if they know it.

If you don’t have a vision at all which is more common than most product leaders will admit, start with the consequential decision question: what’s the most important decision our customer makes, and why does it consistently go wrong? Build from that truth, not from what you’re building.

Next in the series:

Product OS: Part 3 - Company Objectives and why product without commercial accountability isn’t product management at all.

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If this was useful, share it with someone who’s about to start a vision exercise or someone who’s wondering why their existing one isn’t working.

And if you want to talk through how the Product OS applies to your company specifically, you know where to find me.

www.productleaders.co.uk