Product Management in Practice, 2nd Edition

Chapter 10. Vision, Mission, Objectives, Strategy, and Other Fancy Words

No fewer than three of the fancy words in this chapter’s title appear in nearly every product job listing, whether it is for an associate product manager or a chief product officer. And yet, these job listings are rarely quite so generous in stating plainly what exactly they mean.

The good news is, there is no shortage of well-written magazine articles, elegant cascading diagrams, and aggressively worded Medium posts offering the definitive take on what these terms mean and how they should all fit together into a neat little cascade of clarity and purpose.

The bad news is, none of these equally authoritative-seeming sources actually seem to agree with each other. Some insist that strategy and objectives are wholly distinct concepts, while others use the word “strategy” to encompass both. Some declare that a compelling mission is far and away the most important thing for a product team to have in place; others dismiss mission statements as meaningless fluff. What is a product manager to do?

This chorus of decisive-but-conflicting opinions created a lot of anxiety for me early in my product career. Whenever company leadership asked me to deliver a product strategy, I froze in terror. Did I even know what a good product strategy looked like? What if I turned in something embarrassingly off-base? For fear of revealing myself as a complete impostor, I would often rattle off a list of righteous and defensible-sounding ...