Your company's product vision reads: 'To be the leading platform for collaborative work.' It hangs on the office wall and appears on the first slide of every all-hands. Nobody references it when making product decisions. Nobody could explain what it means in concrete terms. It inspires nothing. This is not a vision. It is a vague aspiration that any company in your market could adopt verbatim.
A real product vision describes the world you are trying to create, not the product you are building. It is long-term, outcome-focused, and specific enough to guide decisions while being broad enough to last several years. Getting it right is one of the most important things a product leader can do because the vision is what connects daily work to a larger purpose.
The Core Idea
A good product vision answers three questions. What world are we creating? Why does it matter? And where are we going? It does not describe the product. It describes the outcome the product enables. Tesla's vision is about accelerating the world's transition to sustainable energy, not about building electric cars. Airbnb's vision is about creating a world where anyone can belong anywhere, not about listing apartments for rent. The product is the vehicle. The vision is the destination.