What's a product vision?

This post begins a series of mini articles on agile chartering inspired by Diana Larsen and Ainsley Nies' book Liftoff: Start and Sustain Successful Agile Teams and my work as a coach helping teams in creating effective agile charters. These articles will summarize the 9 elements of an agile charter.

In a nutshell, your product vision is the one thing that everyone in your product ecosystem should be able to agree on. Like the North Star, the product vision establishes a reference point. Regardless of where someone is in the product ecosystem, they can take a bearing on the product vision and use it to inform both decisioning and action.

The product vision identifies your customer — the one who actually benefits from your product — and what that customer will be able to do. The best product visions are clear and concise, often stated in a single sentence.

Consider a can maker

Who is the can maker’s customer? You might start with the bottling company that will fill the cans with soda. In a way the bottling company is a customer for the can maker, but they are not the ultimate customer. To discover who the real customer is we need to look downstream. Where do those filled cans of soda go? Along their journey the cans of soda might be stored in warehouses; travel on various forms of transport; sit on display in a retail store; be purchased by a grocery shopper and taken home; cooled in a refrigerator; and finally taken out, top popped, poured into a glass and consumed by a thirsty individual.

That thirsty individual is the real customer. Everyone in the product ecosystem — from the can maker to the bottler, to the warehouser, to the retail store, to the trucker, to the beet farmer (who grew the beets that became the sugar that sweetens the soda), and all the others in all of the value streams that converge to that one individual — everyone can agree that the person consuming the soda is the real customer in this product ecosystem.

The product vision

So what is the product vision in this scenario? Simply this: "Our customer enjoys a convenient, refreshing beverage."

The product vision can not be realized without all parts of the product ecosystem working in harmony consistent with the vision. This recognition of the cohesive whole and the knowledge of who and what it is all for is the power of the product vision.

Now that you know what a product vision is, what's yours?