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Company vision vs Product vision

Last post 05:39 pm April 3, 2018 by Thiago Cunha
4 replies
07:50 pm March 25, 2018

Hi, the context is that my company is a single-product company, but we have both company vision and product vision, being "primary place where employees find and share professional content" and "product with least features which are used the most" respectively.

My questions are that

  1. In a single-product company, should the company vision and product vision the same? If not, why? If is, then how can we distinguish CEO and PO, because traditional CEO is the person behind the formation of company vision, while PO is behind the formation of product vision (together with other accountability such as product backlog management)
  2. Is "product with least features which are used the most" a good product vision? I mean it totally make sense, because all our product decision are always based on this "ideology" and data; we see the data said some ideas or features not utilized enough, we kill them, but is this statement a "vision" though? This statement can be applied anywhere, is it closer to "principle" rather than "vision"? In this case, is the company's vision also the product's?

06:13 am March 27, 2018

If someone is selling me a product saying that "it has the least features which are used the most", my response would be "that's great but what does it actually do?"


05:07 am March 30, 2018

Thanks Julian, that's my thought as well. IMO, that "vision" or "principle" is great for the development team, but can't be used to "sell" to potential clients.


07:06 am April 3, 2018

It's a good principle to follow, but I don't think it's a vision of any sort. Not only will you be unable to sell it to clients, but you will also be unable to "sell" it to developers, Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Managers and everybody else.

A vision, in my understanding, should be a unified source of inspiration for everyone involved in the product. It's what makes people say: "Yes, this is absolutely worth investing my valuable time into developing this". It's also something to fall back upon, when you're faced with a decision between two alternatives: Which one do you think will bring your product closer to the product vision?

So a vision is not only important in order to sell a product. It's incredibly important to have one during development as well.


05:39 pm April 3, 2018

Great question! 

I don't think the product vision is made to sell to the final client, but to support the estrategy in decision-making and developing. The selling stuff is marketing team problem. Product vision is all about purpouse on the development.

1. The organization vision shouldn't be the same as the product. I said that because the organization, normally, it's bigger, it envolves the human resources, hiring, financial, and not only the devolopment of the product. But this estrategics decisions are subjective, I guess it's not wrong, but I wouldn't recommend. 

2. I guess its not bad.If supports you in decision making, and you instantly knows what to do based on their estrategy... It's not definitely not  motivational, but like I said before there are no rights and wrong on strategies, it's really subjective... 

After saying that the best thing for you to do is to follow an espirism path with experiment and learning. Fail fast, learn faster! 


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