In what tangible ways should your product vision dictate the day to day decisions your product development team makes?

• Product Vision is similar to a compass for explorers! Product Vision sets the North Star for the product teams and ensures that the Product Principles, Values & Strategy aligns with the Vision on a daily basis
• Its easy for Product teams to devolve into a mess of features or play catch-up to competitors, etc without a singular vision thats bigger than the team's daily activities. Sony Ericcson, Nokia & Blackberry (smartphones), Bolt (electic cars) or Yahoo (Consumer & AdTech) are examples of firms that lost sight of their vision

Great product visions rally a team around a set of clear and concise goals. That vision represents the team's focus and can be a helpful tool when the team needs to make a decision or is starting to be misaligned. 

In college, I had a marketing professor who was known by a simple tagline: "Lose your focus. Lose your shirt." No matter how much experience you have building products, it's so easy to get distracted and start to solving problems without proper validation. As Product Managers, it's our job to make sure our teams stay focused on the problems we are trying to solve. I've found that referencing our produt vision is a helpful tool when I've needed to refocus my team when we get off track or need to make a tough decision. 

I recently led a project where we tried to help users feel confident that their work was automatically saved in Confluence. We had found that creators often used "publish" to save their work, so we set out to give users a dynamic, visual confirmation that work was being saved automatically. As a team, we had to make some tough tradeoffs between user experience and performance. I often reminded our team that our goal was to increase confidence while users created content in Confluence, and all of our decisions needed to help push that vision forward. It helped create a common language for the team as we weighed different options. 

As a reminder, the Geoffrey Moore product vision template requires the following elements:

• 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].

The product vision should dictate the scope and requirements prioritization of what your development team builds. It is a reminder to the product manager to focus on a particular customer segment, specific needs of those customers, and to remember differentiating aspects of the product when implementing a new feature to the solution. On a daily basis, I am referencing the following aspects of my product vision:

1. Target customers

2. A particular customer problem I'm working on solving

3. Category I work in (like Observability or Security)

4. Reasons why customers will want to use my product over competitors

5. Competitors and how they differ from my product

So - I'd say it should drive a fair amount of daily decisions, even though it may not *feel* like it does.