Define Product Vision

Instructions

1. Extract the core problem from your conversation data

   • Listen for repeated customer pain points or frustrations mentioned by multiple speakers
   • Identify the emotional tone: What makes customers angry, excited, or resigned?
   • Separate the symptom from the root cause—Harmony will flag where speakers discuss outcomes vs. underlying drivers
   • Document verbatim quotes that reveal what customers really care about

2. Define the emotional shift

   • What emotion do customers feel today? (Frustrated, resigned, overwhelmed, disconnected)
   • What emotion should they feel after your vision is realized? (Empowered, confident, connected, autonomous)
   • Move from functional language ("faster") to emotional language ("trusted", "in control")
   • Test the shift with this sentence: "We believe customers should feel _____ when _____"

3. Describe the user's world, not your product

   • Write from the customer's perspective: What does their day/week/month look like?
   • Avoid naming your product or category
   • Include concrete behaviors: What do they do that they can't do today?
   • Example: "Engineers ship features confident their code won't break production" (not "our monitoring tool saves debugging time")

4. Validate against four criteria

   • Lofty: Does it genuinely excite and stretch the organization for 5-10 years?
   • Realistic: Could a well-resourced team realistically achieve this? (Not "cure cancer", but "transform cancer diagnostics")
   • Tech-agnostic: Does it survive changes in technology or business model? Would it be true if your current tech stack vanished?
   • Problem-grounded: Can you trace it back to specific, validated customer pain?

5. Create visual artifacts

   • Sketch a prototype or wireframe of the future state
   • Write a future press release describing what changed in the customer's world
   • Create a "day in the life" narrative showing the customer experience
   • Build a mood board that captures the emotional essence of the vision
   • Use metaphors: "We're building the _____ for _____" to make it memorable

6. Test against common mistakes

   • Is it a vague tagline? (Bad: "Democratizing X"; Good: "Engineers in SMBs ship with the reliability of Big Tech companies")
   • Does it mention your product or category? If yes, rewrite to focus on the customer's world
   • Is it a feature list or roadmap? If yes, zoom out—these are milestones toward the vision, not the vision itself
   • Does it describe what users DO, not what they HAVE? (Check for behavior change)

7. Align vision with decentralized decision-making

   • Test the vision against real decisions your team faces: Would this vision change how we prioritize?
   • If vision doesn't cut at least 20% of potential projects, it's not specific enough
   • Create a "vision check" rubric: When in doubt, we choose X over Y because of this vision
   • Share the vision and ask: "Does this actually guide your daily work?" Listen for hesitation

8. Document the narrative

   • Write the 1-paragraph vision statement (4-6 sentences)
   • Add a 1-page expansion explaining the problem, emotional shift, and user's world
   • Create a 2-3 minute "vision talk" that leadership can repeat
   • Archive the reasoning—why this vision, why now, what constraints we rejected

Output Format

# [Company Name] Product Vision

## The Vision (1 paragraph)

[1-sentence emotional outcome] [Specific user behavior change] [The world they inhabit] [Why it matters]

In 5-10 years, we believe [user role] will [concrete behavior] because [root problem solved]. They'll feel [emotional shift] rather than [current emotional state]. This matters because [impact/scale/urgency].

## Problem & Opportunity

**The pain today:**
- [Specific customer friction, grounded in verbatim quote or observation]
- [Frequency and impact of this problem across your customer base]
- [Why customers accept this friction (switching costs, resignation, etc.)]

**Root causes:**
- [Using 5 Whys or similar, what's the underlying driver?]
- [What would have to be true to solve this?]

## User's World in [Year/Timeframe]

**What they'll do differently:**
- [Specific behavior 1, with concrete example]
- [Specific behavior 2, with concrete example]
- [Specific behavior 3, with concrete example]

**What becomes possible:**
- [Downstream opportunity or capability unlocked]
- [New market or use case opened]
- [Competitive advantage that emerges]

## Visual Anchors

**Future press release headline:** [Describe the change from outside perspective]

**Day in the life:** [5-7 sentences showing a future customer's workflow and emotions]

**Mood/tone:** [Key words: "collaborative", "trustworthy", "frictionless", etc.]

## Strategy Implications

**What we're optimizing for:**
- [Long-term differentiation vs. short-term revenue]
- [We are *not* optimizing for: [what we're deliberately de-prioritizing]]

**One-way door decisions this vision guides:**
- [Decision 1: Because of vision, we choose X over Y]
- [Decision 2: This vision rules out Z entirely]
- [Decision 3: This vision requires investment in infrastructure/capability]

## Success Metrics (5-10 Year Outcome)

- [Behavioral metric: % of users doing X daily/weekly]
- [Emotional metric: NPS, customer quotes reflecting the vision]
- [Market metric: Market share, TAM expansion, or similar]

---

## Notes & Iteration

**When this vision was written:** [Date]
**Team alignment level:** [Red/Yellow/Green]
**Key assumptions to validate:** [List 2-3]
**Next refinement trigger:** [What would cause us to revisit this?]

Example

# Lattice Product Vision (HR Tech for Remote Teams)

## The Vision

In 5-10 years, managers leading remote and distributed teams will conduct meaningful performance conversations and career development continuously, not once a year in a frantic review cycle. They'll feel confident in their team's growth and psychological safety, because they have visibility into daily contributions and open feedback channels. What was once a compliance exercise will become a genuine partnership between manager and IC.

## Problem & Opportunity

**The pain today:**
- "Our annual review process is theater. No one changes behavior based on feedback that arrives 6 months after the work happened." (VP Ops, SaaS company)
- Remote managers lose visibility into their team members' work quality and growth trajectory
- Feedback only happens when problems escalate or when HR-mandated reviews force it
- Managers spend 2-3 weeks every year in review-writing hell instead of focusing on team growth
- Performance conversations feel adversarial (rating-driven) rather than collaborative (growth-driven)

**Root causes:**
- Annual reviews were designed for co-located offices with visible productivity signals
- Remote work erased watercooler feedback loops and manager observability
- Review systems are built around rating/ranking mechanics, not continuous improvement
- Managers lack a repeatable, low-friction way to document and discuss growth moments

## User's World in 2034

**What they'll do differently:**
- Manager spends 10 minutes weekly on a single report, capturing wins and growth moments (not 3-week sprint at end of year)
- Team members initiate conversations about skills they want to develop, with manager guidance
- Feedback flows in real-time: "You crushed that client call, here's what I noticed"
- Career conversations happen over a drink, not in a formal meeting—the system just keeps notes
- When promotion time comes, data exists; no scramble to remember what happened 6 months ago

**What becomes possible:**
- High-performing people stay because growth is visible and continuous
- Managers can spot flight risk (disengagement, skill gaps) in real-time, not after attrition
- HR has the data they need without the theater of annual calibration
- Teams self-organize around strengths because everyone sees everyone's growth trajectory

## Visual Anchors

**Future press release headline:** "Remote teams report 40% better retention; continuous feedback replaces annual reviews"

**Day in the life:** It's Tuesday. Sarah opens Lattice and sees her team of 8 developers. She notices Marcus just shipped a complex refactor and wrote a great code review comment on someone else's PR. She adds a note: "Your architectural thinking is leveling up—this is the kind of senior mindset we need here." Marcus gets the comment async while working from Singapore. Two weeks later, they talk about what skills this points to. By September, when promotion cycles start, Sarah has months of evidence that Marcus has earned a senior role.

**Mood/tone:** Continuous, collaborative, growth-focused, human, light-touch

## Strategy Implications

**What we're optimizing for:**
- We're building for psychological safety and growth, not compliance and control
- We are *not* optimizing for: Gaming metrics, surveillance, always-on productivity tracking

**One-way door decisions this vision guides:**
- We will never build rating/ranking systems, because they conflict with continuous feedback culture
- We will invest heavily in mobile-first interfaces, because feedback should happen in the flow of work
- We will build integrations with communication tools (Slack, email), not replace them

## Success Metrics (5-10 Year Outcome)

- 70% of managers report conducting meaningful conversations at least monthly (vs. <10% today)
- Customer NPS points to "growth culture" and "psychological safety" as top reasons for retention
- Lattice customers report 15% better retention vs. peers without our system
- 80% of users check the system weekly, not just before review cycles

---

## Notes & Iteration

**When this vision was written:** Q3 2026
**Team alignment level:** Green (95% of leadership agree on core direction)
**Key assumptions to validate:** Remote teams actually want continuous feedback, not just less frequent bad feedback
**Next refinement trigger:** If we find that adoption is highest in specific industries (e.g., tech vs. finance), we may need to narrow vision or create product variants

Edge Cases

• Vision is true but unmotivating: Your vision is realistic and grounded, but no one gets excited. Root cause: You're describing a feature, not a behavior change or emotional shift. Rewrite to center the user's world and emotional transformation.

• Vision conflicts with near-term revenue: You're solving a 5-year vision that cannibalizes your core product. Options: (1) Confirm this is truly your vision and plan the transition, (2) Realize you have two different visions and need to choose, (3) Find a path where near-term product builds the foundation for long-term vision.

• Vision sounds like 10 companies have it: Too generic. Push harder on specificity. Not "empowering teams" but "empowering managers in distributed companies to coach in real-time."

• Leadership agrees on vision, but actions don't match: Vision isn't guiding decisions. It's either too vague, not communicated clearly, or it's not the real vision (the real one is hidden). Revisit with this question: "If we actually believed this vision, what would we stop doing?"

• Vision requires a technology that doesn't exist yet: That's fine (and often necessary for lofty visions). But separate the vision (user's world) from the strategy (how we might get there). Don't let uncertainty about tech derail the vision clarity.

• You want a new vision but people are attached to the old one: Acknowledge the old vision's impact. Show that the new vision builds on what you learned, not contradicts it. Move carefully and involve the people who built under the old vision in defining the new one.