EMPOWERED

PART IVProduct Vision and Principles

Most companies have some sort of mission statement that summarizes the purpose of the business (e.g., “organize the world's information”), but a mission statement typically says nothing about how we plan to deliver on this mission.

This is the critical role of the product vision.¹

An inspiring and compelling product vision serves so many critical purposes that it is hard to think of a more important or higher‐leverage product artifact:

• A good product vision keeps us focused on the customer.
• A good product vision serves as the North Star for the product organization so that we have a common understanding of what we are hoping to accomplish together.
• A good product vision inspires ordinary people to create extraordinary products.
• A good product vision provides us with meaningful work. A list of features on a roadmap is not meaningful. How you can positively impact the lives of users and customers is meaningful.
• A good product vision leverages relevant industry trends and technologies that we believe can help us solve problems for our customers in ways that are just now possible.
• A good product vision provides the engineering organization with enough clarity about what's coming in the next several years so they can ensure they have in place an architecture that can serve the need.
• The product vision is a primary driver of the team topology ...