EMPOWERED

CHAPTER 38Sharing the Product Vision

A compelling product vision is the gift that keeps on giving.

Communicating the Product Vision

It's worth investing some real time and effort into the best way to communicate the product vision. Remember that the vision's purpose is to inspire. PowerPoint presentations rarely inspire anyone.

The minimum is typically to create a visiontype, and we often produce a video of this visiontype. A visiontype is a conceptual prototype—a high‐fidelity user prototype (realistic looking, but completely smoke and mirrors—and because of that, it is very easy to create, and most important, not constrained by what we know how to build).

The difference between a high‐fidelity user prototype used as a visiontype, and a high‐fidelity user prototype used in product discovery, is the scope of what's covered by the prototype.

The visiontype describes the world once the vision is a reality—that may be 3 years or 10 years in the future.

The product discovery prototype describes the new feature or experience for something we will likely build in the coming weeks.

Once you have this visiontype, you can show it (demo it) to anyone you like. But many companies today are taking a little extra time and effort and producing a scripted video designed to show off the visiontype in the best light possible.

This may mean showing how different types of users would experience the product, and leveraging the emotional power of music and a thoughtful script to help increase ...