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.

Day-to-day work is often busy and intense, and it’s easy to get distracted by shiny new features, security issues, customer requests, complaints, refactoring, and other improvements. The product vision, which should be well-documented, serves as a guiding compass to help rise above the daily noise and balance priorities. It sets the course for achieving long-term goals and ensures focus on what matters most.

When something doesn’t fit the vision, working on it can slow down progress. There may be times when it’s necessary to accommodate customer demands or secure a large deal, but it’s essential to be fully aware of the trade-offs. Every decision should have a clear "why" behind it, ensuring the team understands how their work aligns with the broader vision.

The product vision also helps align the entire company, including non-engineering teams like customer success and marketing, so that everyone is working towards the same goal. This alignment ensures that cross-functional teams are pulling in the same direction, reducing conflicts and improving efficiency.

For example, I recently worked with a short-staffed engineering team, and our focus was on shifting security left to developers. Our product’s vision centered on creating an excellent developer experience by meeting developers where they are and reducing friction when handling security findings. This meant integrating security directly into the developer’s workflow, such as in their IDE and pull requests.

With every new request or feature suggestion, whether from customers or leadership, the first question we asked was, “Does this help improve the developer experience?” If the answer was no, we added it to the backlog. If the answer was yes, we discussed and prioritized it. This alignment with our vision became our north star and guided us in making better day-to-day prioritization decisions.

Ultimately, the product vision helps teams stay focused and ensures their daily decisions align with the long-term goals of the product. By consistently referencing the vision, the team can avoid distractions and work on what truly matters, leading to better outcomes for both the product and the business.