Crafting a compelling product vision

Ebi Atawodi, a product leader with experience at Uber, Netflix, and Google (and currently YouTube), shares a practical approach to crafting a compelling product vision. The conversation covers the difference between vision and mission, concrete ways to write and visualize a vision, a repeatable process for empathizing with users, creating a strategy, and evangelizing it across teams, plus reflections on how company culture shapes product building.

01Key learnings

• A vision should describe a picture of the future state, be lofty yet attainable, be free of today's technical limits, and be grounded in a clear user problem.
• Distinguish vision from mission: the vision is what the destination looks like, while the mission is the purpose and guiding principles for getting there.
• Write the vision as a 'once upon a time' story (current problem, a turning point, and the resulting changed world), or write the TechCrunch-style headline and subtitle you'd hope to see at launch.
• Mock up the vision with low-fidelity sketches or app-store screenshots without waiting for design resources; sketches can then be polished by a designer.
• Maintain a living 'top 10 things you should know' doc of user and internal problems, updated quarterly, and consider using it to gather stakeholder input before strategy sessions.
• Use a narrative of insights, strategy, and big rocks, keeping big rocks to three to five items, and treat it as an evergreen document rather than a yearly rewrite.
• Evangelize in concentric circles: first the core team, then stakeholders and adjacent teams, then leadership, welcoming friction and feedback as part of polishing the vision.
• Build clarity (crisp problems and narrative) and conviction (committing to a specific battle) rather than peanut-buttering resources across too many options.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.