Can you give an example of a bad product vision statement? What would you do to improve it?

Vision statements are critical for products, product portfolios and companies. Firms with clear vision statements are able to adapt, evolve and focus on solving problems that their customers face, better than competitors and in a manner that brings forward all their strengths. Firms without clear vision statements and products without one become stale, one-hit wonders or worse, seasonal crazes like beanie babies

Here are vision statements from two financial services firms 

1) “aspire to be the best, execute superbly, build a great team & winning culture” 

2) “serve as a trusted partner to our clients by responsibly providing financial services that enable growth & economic progress”. 

The first statement does a good job of conveying the firm’s values and its culture but does not offer any color on the business, the problem it is solving or the value to its customers. The second firm does a better job of touching upon the business and the type of impact it wants to create but it is still too vague to be a vision statement

Here is a good vision statement - ‘Make financial progress possible for everyone’. Credit Karma does this  by offering information & tools to each of its customers to understand where they are in the credit & financial products journey.

A bad vision statement is one that is either too narrow or too broad. It is hard to get a vision statement right, but you need it to be ambitious, but believable. It needs to address what you are trying to achieve.

Few reasons why it can be a bad vision statement include:

1. Too long. You want the vision statement to be memorable, not an essay. Pick what is relevant.

2. Trying to solve all problems and not providing a direction.

3. Trying to sound good instead of talking about what your product should try to do.

As a reminder, Geoffrey Moore's product vision template is:

• For [final client],

• whose [problem that needs to be solved],

• the [name of the product]

• is a [product category]

• that [key-benefits, reason to buy it].

• Different from [competition alternative],

• our product [key-difference].

I think it would be rude to call out a specific example of a bad product vision. A few signs of bad product vision statements include those that:

• Change often. I don't think product vision statements should change that often, but I understand why they do. As companies evolve or expand into new business models and markets, so do visions. However, if the core premise of the company doesn't change, the vision shouldn't constantly be changing.

• Focus on features rather than benefits. What conveys more value, that your car has power steering and seatbelts or that your car provides a superior driving experience without compromising safety? See the difference?

• Targeted customers or customer problems aren't specific enough. You cannot please everyone, therefore you cannot build a product that serves every need for every person. Being specific and targeted helps solve real problems. When first launching a product, sometimes being super niche is a huge strength. Expanding beyond that initial target segment becomes easier when you have NAILED delivering a solution to a real problem.

• Too broad, not enough differentiation. Maybe your product is really excellent, but don't use terminology or adjectives that do not evoke a specific (sensing a theme?) emotion or understanding. Don't use words like "great," "nice" or "extraordinary." Use words like "thrilling", "serene", "white-glove" - so I understand what you really mean.

• No goals called out. Do you want to be the #1 in the world? In your country or region? Within a category? Help me understand what you're the best at otherwise I'll just settle for the cheapest option.

If you made it this far in the answer, you deserve a real example of a bad product vision. I found multiple versions of WeWork's corporate vision, which evolved from a longer internal product vision at one point, but this one was particularly bad:

"Empowering tomorrow's world at work." - I don't know what this means. Way too broad, no specific differentiation.

"We are reinventing the way people work through designed space, flexibility, technology, and community." I understand this one, but it's both focusing on features rather than benefits, and also providing features that are too broad and not inherently differentiated - because they are not specific enough.

Hope this helps!

With product vision, we need to carefully tread the line between making it too generic/vague or too technical. Other things to consider are - it should clarify what impact it creates, what unique value it offers and what is the long term goal while also making it inspiring. If target audience or problem area is niche, then it should also specify the target audience or the specific problem.

An example for an unclear product vision is “ We want to make customer service better for companies”. Utilizing the above considerations, a better version of vision statement would be “We help small businesses deliver faster, more efficient and personalized customer support through an intuitive AI-powered platform “.