product-vision

# Product Vision Writes the 3-5 year picture: the world your product is trying to create, who is better off in it, and the beliefs it rests on. Distinct from `product-strategy` — the vision is the destination, the strategy is the honest diagnosis of what's in the way and the route you've chosen through it. **Grounded in:** *Inspired* — Marty Cagan: the vision is an inspiring, customer-centric picture of the future 3-5 years out, and its job is recruiting and alignment, not planning. It is deliberately *not* measurable — the moment you make a vision a metric you have written an OKR and lost the thing that made people care. **The load-bearing idea:** a vision earns its keep by settling arguments you haven't had yet. If it can't tell you which of two reasonable roadmap items is more on-path, it's a mission statement wearing a vision's clothes. ## When to use this - Every prioritization argument bottoms out in opinion because there's no shared destination above the quarter. - Hiring senior people who ask "where is this going?" and deserve a real answer. - After a pivot, an acquisition, or a strategy reset, when the old picture no longer describes the company. - Before writing a multi-year roadmap or a fundraise narrative. - When the team can recite the feature list but not the point of it. - A new PM inherits a product with a strategy doc and no destination. ## Before you start (gather these) - **Who you serve** — the specific person, in enough detail that a stranger could p...