How to create a powerful product vision (+ statement examples)
Airtable's Product Team
5 min read
Written by
Airtable's Product Team
Filed Under
Product
topics
- What is a product vision?
- What is a product vision statement?
- Why is a product vision important for product teams?
- What makes a good product vision statement?
- Who is responsible for defining the product vision?
- What should a product vision include?
- How do you write a product vision statement? (5 steps)
- Product vision examples from leading companies
- Achieve your product vision with the right product management solution...
topics
- What is a product vision?
- What is a product vision statement?
- Why is a product vision important for product teams?
- What makes a good product vision statement?
- Who is responsible for defining the product vision?
- What should a product vision include?
- How do you write a product vision statement? (5 steps)
- Product vision examples from leading companies
- Achieve your product vision with the right product management solution...
Too many product teams move fast without direction. Backlogs pile up, roadmaps shift constantly, and the loudest stakeholder sets priorities. Without a clear product vision, execution becomes reactive firefighting instead of strategic progress.
The data backs this up: Forrester found that 59% of B2B operations professionals say their functional plans don't align with corporate objectives—proof of how easily vision and execution drift apart.
This guide shows you how to define, write, and refine a compelling product vision with practical steps, real examples, and proven techniques.
What is a product vision?
A product vision defines the future you're building toward and why it matters. It guides decisions about what to build, who to build for, and how your product should evolve to meet customer and market needs.
Unlike a product roadmap (the "how") or a product strategy (the "what"), a product vision explains the "why"—the aspirational future that keeps teams aligned and moving forward.
What’s the difference between product vision, roadmap, and product strategy?
To understand vision, it is helpful to distinguish it from strategy and roadmap.
Product vision
Product strategy
Product roadmap
Purpose
Why your product exists and the future you're building toward
What you'll do to achieve your vision
How and when you'll deliver specific features
Function
Inspires and guides decision-making
Prioritizes initiatives and allocates resources
Provides timelines and milestones
Timeline
Remains stable over years
Adapts over quarters
Changes sprint to sprint
Align product vision to strategy
What is a product vision statement?
A product vision statement is a brief and memorable description of your product’s intentions and long-term objectives. It communicates the product’s purpose, target customer, and key benefit in one or two sentences.
Why is a product vision important for product teams?
When a product vision is defined and clear, it motivates teams with purpose, builds executive confidence and buy-in, and keeps every decision aligned with both today’s priorities and future business goals. Without it, product managers risk chasing feature requests, wasting effort, and losing sight of customer needs and long-term goals. This north star guidance inevitably helps product teams align strategy, development, and execution around long-term impact.
What makes a good product vision statement?
What separates a weak vision from one that truly inspires and aligns? The best product visions share these qualities:
Inspiring: Rallies your team and stakeholders around a shared future worth pursuing
Customer-focused: Centers on real user needs, pain points, and the problems you're solving
Future-oriented: Articulates where you're headed in years, not months
Distinctive: Clarifies what makes your product uniquely valuable
Actionable: Connects directly to priorities, initiatives, and business goals
Who is responsible for defining the product vision?
Product vision typically originates with senior product leadership—CPOs, VPs of Product, or the executive team—but it's never created in isolation. Effective vision requires customer insights, competitive analysis, and market intelligence from across the organization. Product managers, researchers, and customer-facing teams all contribute by gathering feedback, analyzing user needs, and tracking industry trends.
How do product owners contribute to the product vision?
Product owners don't typically create the vision, but they're essential to executing it. They translate vision into action by prioritizing backlogs and guiding sprint-level decisions that keep development teams focused on what matters most.
What should a product vision include?
A strong product vision statement should cover:
Target customer: Who you're serving
Problem: What pain points and needs you're addressing
Future state: The transformation or better experience you'll deliver
Differentiation: What makes your solution uniquely valuable
Impact: The key benefit for customers and their business
Product vision template
Fill-in-the-blank example
Our product, [product name], helps [target customer/persona] achieve [future state] by solving [pain point/user need], so they can [key benefit].
How do you write a product vision statement? (5 steps)
A compelling product vision requires collaboration, market knowledge, customer insight, and a clear process. Use these five stages as checkpoints to ensure your vision stays customer-focused, differentiated, and connected to meaningful outcomes.
1. Define the problem you're solving
Start by conducting in-depth customer interviews to uncover their biggest challenges and unmet needs. Look beyond surface-level complaints—dig into the underlying frustrations, workarounds, and gaps that competitors haven't addressed.
Analyze support tickets, user feedback, and behavioral data to validate what you're hearing. Document patterns across multiple customers to identify problems worth solving at scale.
Ask yourself: Is this problem painful enough and pervasive enough to justify years of product development? Would customers pay to have it solved?
2. Identify your customers and their needs
Create detailed personas that represent your target users, not just job titles. Go beyond demographics to understand their daily workflows, motivations, success metrics, and the barriers preventing them from achieving their goals. Interview customers in different roles, industries, and company sizes to understand how needs vary. Map out their current journey and identify where your product fits into their work.
Ask yourself: Can you clearly describe who you're building for, what drives their decisions, and where to reach them? Would your team recognize these customers if they walked into the room?
Use our user persona template to document and share your target customer profiles across teams.
3. Imagine the future state
Paint a vivid picture of what the customer's world looks like when their problem is solved. Be specific about the transformation—how their workflow changes, what becomes possible that wasn't before, and how success is measured. Describe both the emotional shift (reduced stress, increased confidence) and the practical outcomes (time saved, revenue gained). Make it concrete enough that your team can visualize building toward it.
Ask yourself: Does this vision describe a meaningful transformation, not just incremental improvement? Can stakeholders clearly see the before and after?
4. Show differentiation and unique value
Identify what your product can deliver that competitors cannot—whether it's proprietary technology, a unique approach, specialized expertise, or a defensible market position. Conduct competitive analysis to understand where others fall short and where you have distinct advantages. Be honest about what makes you different and why it matters to customers, not just what makes you better at the same things.
Ask yourself: Does the vision articulate a unique position in the market? If a competitor read this, would they recognize they couldn't easily replicate it?
5. Align with business goals
Connect your product vision directly to measurable business outcomes—revenue growth, market expansion, customer retention, or strategic company objectives. Work with finance and leadership to understand what metrics matter most and how your product contributes to them. Quantify the potential impact where possible, and show how product success ties to company success.
Ask yourself: Can executives trace a clear line from this vision to quarterly goals and company strategy? Does it support the broader direction the company is heading?
Product vision examples from leading companies
“We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.” Those are Jeff Bezos’s words. And they capture the challenge that every product owner and business leader faces—holding firm to the product vision while remaining agile with strategies, roadmaps, and functionality as conditions change. Below are real-world examples of how top companies have defined and delivered on their product vision.
Dropbox’s product vision is to simplify the way people work together. They’ve delivered on this by streamlining file sharing and collaboration, and expanding into products like Dropbox Sign, which give clients greater control over business documents.
Red Bull’s vision is to give wings to people and ideas through energy, media, and sports. They bring this to life by producing global events, original media, and cultural experiences that inspire their audience and strengthen brand connection beyond the energy drink itself.
Vimeo’s product vision is to enable professional-quality video for all. They’ve advanced it by building features that combine hosting, analytics, and integrations, helping customers get more from video in their everyday workflows.
Cisco’s product vision is to power an inclusive future by creating a secure, open, and collaborative digital infrastructure. As EVP and GM of Security & Collaboration, Jeetu Patel explains: “When you buy a product from Cisco, it should add value to the products you already own from Cisco. That’s compounding magic.”
What are the best product vision tools and software?
The right tools help you collaborate on your vision, keep it visible to stakeholders, and connect it to your day-to-day product work. Here are the most effective options:
Product management platforms: Tools like Airtable ProductCentral let you document your vision alongside roadmaps, customer feedback, and priorities. They create a single source of truth that connects high-level vision to specific features and initiatives, making it easy to show how daily decisions support long-term direction.
Collaboration and documentation tools: Confluence and Google Docs work well for writing, iterating, and sharing vision statements with cross-functional teams. They're particularly useful during the drafting process when you need input from multiple stakeholders and want to track changes over time.
Visual strategy tools: Miro and FigJam help teams brainstorm and visualize their product vision collaboratively. Use them for workshop sessions where you're mapping customer journeys, identifying differentiation, or aligning on the future state with remote or distributed teams.
Presentation tools: Canva, PowerPoint, and Keynote are essential for communicating your vision to executives, investors, or company-wide audiences. A well-designed vision presentation makes abstract concepts tangible and helps non-product stakeholders understand and rally behind your direction.
Customer feedback platforms: Zendesk and Gong capture valuable customer insights that shape your vision. Integrate them with AI-powered product management software like ProductCentral to analyze feedback at scale and surface actionable patterns. This ensures your vision addresses real user needs, not assumptions.
The best approach: Most product teams use a combination—research tools to gather insights, collaboration tools to develop the vision, product management platforms to connect it to execution, and presentation tools to communicate it widely. Choose tools that integrate well and fit your team's existing workflows.
Achieve your product vision with the right product management solution
A product vision only matters if teams can actually use it to guide their work. Too often, visions sit in slide decks while teams move too fast to reference them, gradually drifting away from both the vision and customer needs. The right system keeps teams aligned without slowing them down.
ProductCentral is the AI-powered platform built specifically for product leaders. It connects your vision directly to strategy, roadmaps, and execution—ensuring every initiative supports your business goals. Capture customer feedback, use AI to identify patterns, and link insights straight to roadmap priorities. The result: a vision that drives real outcomes, keeps teams aligned, and turns long-term direction into features that ship faster and deliver greater impact.
See how it works by booking a demo.
Product vision FAQs
Teams often start with a product vision board or product vision template, but the most effective tool is one that connects vision to execution, such as Airtable ProductCentral.
Revisit it. A new product or shifting market needs may require revising the vision. A good product vision is stable yet dynamic.
Product management templates, analyst reports, case studies, and LinkedIn thought leaders are strong starting points. Look for product vision frameworks, customer research, and existing examples for practical guidance and support.
In Agile product development, the vision guides the development process, from feature or function focus to prioritization and decision-making, ensuring that every sprint advances the long-term product goals.
A company mission defines overall purpose, while a product vision focuses specifically on what the product will become and why it matters.
For example, a company mission might be: "Make sustainable transportation accessible to everyone." The corresponding product vision could be: "Design electric vehicles that deliver the best user experience in the industry and redefine urban mobility."
Align product vision to strategy
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