How does the importance of a product vision change from 0-1 products to a growing product to a very mature product?

Product vision is one of those amorphous concepts that everyone asks for, but never seems defined well enough for the team at large. In a high growth company, especially one that's forging new ground, the vision will always feel squishy and not pinned down. That's the nature of innovation - you're at the forefront of change and you're building something that's never been done before. By nature, it will be hard to define exactly. Product vision at these stages is critical because that's all you h ...Read More

I’ve worked in very different product environments—from early-stage startups, to scaled giants like Walmart, to a mature but growing company like Barracuda—and I’ve seen how the role of product vision evolves at each stage. 0→1 (Startup phase) At this stage, product vision is the product. It’s your north star when there’s no data, no users, and very little structure. When I worked at a startup, our product vision was the story we told to early customers, to ourselves when things were uncertain, ...Read More

When creating a product vision for a 0-1 product, the focus is primarily on finding the right product-market fit. This phase involves investing significant time in user research, deeply understanding the problem your users face, and identifying their pain points. The goal is to come up with an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) that is good enough to launch while also being flexible enough to evolve. Recruiting design partners and consistently iterating on the vision is key in this stage. It’s importa ...Read More

In 0-1, the vision is a deal breaker. If you cannot sell this, you cannot move forward with getting the funding to really establish product market fit (PMF). Here vision is required not critical. It's the single most important thing you need to get right. In mature products, you have to be more careful. The original vision established (PMF) and now you need to keep true to those jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) while also building toward adjacent JTBD where you and win in the future. Here the doc will hel ...Read More

The importance of product vision doesn’t go away as a product matures, but how you apply it changes and so do the kinds of people and problems you need to solve. In the early days (0–1), it’s all about innovation. You don’t really know what will work yet, so the vision is more directional than precise. You’re deeply immersed with customers, forming hypotheses, and running experiments to find product–market fit. This phase tends to favor “innovation people”, those who are comfortable with ambigui ...Read More