In this post, I’ll cover why you need a compelling product vision, a journey map framework for getting your high-level vision together, and an approach for telling the vision story in more detail, from your customer’s point of view.

Why you need a compelling product vision

As a product manager, it’s not uncommon to find yourself in a situation where you have to move a new idea through an organization. This can feel anywhere between intimidating and impossible. First you have to get through product discovery with customers and internal stakeholders to align on what you want to build; then get through those smart, logical engineers with lots of good questions; and finally, you have to get through the go-to-market/operational launch gauntlet. Throughout these phases, you’ll encounter skeptics, competing priorities, and descoping based on what’s actually feasible. Sometimes it feels like a strange video game, with surprises and potholes all along the way, but having a compelling product vision can help you navigate these obstacles more smoothly. Sure, things like market data, customer insights, and product analytics matter in order to formulate your plan, but people really love stories. And a good product vision is essentially a good story.

Here’s why your product vision matters:

1) It helps people understand what you actually want to build. If the vision is just words on a page or in a PowerPoint, it can be hard for people consuming that vision to know what it actually means for them. But if you tell a compelling story about what you want your customer to experience, it helps people in the organization understand more clearly what you are asking them to do, and they can collaborate with you better. It’s more specific.

2) It’s inspiring! Stories get people excited about a problem in a way that data just doesn’t, and that excitement can often result in your team delivering something better than what you asked for.

3) It’s your guiding light. As you go further in the product development process, things get de-scoped. Competing priorities make your brain fuzzy. Sometimes you just get plain lost in the thick of it. And in those moments, you can always refer back to the original vision to ensure you are still delivering on your original promise. If you aren’t still delivering on that promise (or something close to it), it’s a good idea to reconsider your plan.

Okay, if you’re convinced you need a compelling vision, now I’ll tell you how to make one.

Start with the Discover/Trial > Onboard > Use > Support > Buy/Upgrade Framework

When it comes to crafting your product vision, I’ve found this framework to be helpful in thinking through the end-to-end customer journey. This framework can vary a bit depending on whether your product has a trial, direct buy, or people-assisted buy path, but you can adjust or rearrange the sections accordingly. The key is that you think through how someone would discover, sign up for, buy, onboard into, use, get support, and upgrade or buy more of your products. This framework can be helpful for thinking through technical dependencies and people-assisted handoff points to ensure they are seamless to your customer.

As an example, I filled this framework out for Peter Gibbons of Initech in his search for a new TPS Reporting solution. For the sake of this article, I kept it relatively simple, but you could add more detail and/or structure it with different swim lanes for the customer, internal users, and any key technical handoff points. The key is that you think it through end-to-end! This can help you spot gaps in your operational process, technical hurdles you need to think about, handoff points between engineering teams, and it gives all the internal teams a better idea of what they’ll need to do to support this new product.

Next, tell the story from your customer’s point of view, in as much detail as possible

Once you’ve defined the high-level customer journey, it can be helpful to write a detailed story about how your target user will experience your product. Questions to think about:

• How do they feel before they discover your product? What pain-points brought them to you?
• How do you want them to feel after they’ve used it? You probably want them to feel confident, and you also probably want them to feel a certain way about your company, based on the company brand statement and your product value prop. With this information, you can build delight into your product to reenforce those points.
• What parts of the customer journey are key to get right? Depending on the product you are building, some touch-points are more critical than others, and if you misstep at those points, you will deeply frustrate your customers. Think about these ahead of time, and flag them as risks!

Below, I wrote up an example customer vision story for Peter Gibbons, in search of his new TPS reporting solution:

Meet Peter Gibbons, a middle-aged software engineer at Initech who is very apathetic about his job. Every week, he has to print 8 TPS reports and put them on the desks of each of his 8 bosses. Recently, he forgot to give the TPS report to a few of his bosses, and he got an earful from all of them. Frustrated and defeated, he thought "there must be a better way!" so he searched for an automated status reporting solution. After evaluating a few options, he signed up for a free trial of his favorite pick, JumpToConclusions. He liked this one because it was cheap and integrated with the business systems he used most. He was guided through a smooth introductory experience that asked him why he signed up and what he was looking for. He wrote that he needed a weekly status report with as many words pre-populated as possible (He's not lazy. He just doesn't care.)

He uploaded a PDF of the existing report, and the form automatically generated for him! The product also gave him the option to write an AI prompt about what his TPS report usually includes (it never changes all that much) so AI could pre-populate the report for him each week. He felt a pang of... what is that feeling? Excitement? He thought about how he'd share this with his coworkers later. "It's not just about me and my dream of doing nothing. It's about all of us."

Next, he specified who it needs to go to and how often it gets sent. He usually delivers these reports on Fridays at 4:59PM, so that's what he selected here. Then he entered the 8 email addresses of his bosses. He previewed his report, and everything looked good, so he clicked "Publish." He felt confident the whole way through the setup experience, so he didn't end up needing help, but it was reassuring to see a little chat window at the bottom of the page throughout.

The next Friday at 10AM, he got an email to fill out his weekly TPS report. In just 2 clicks, he quickly reviewed the AI generated text and submitted his report. "Wow, this is amazing." Later that day, he heard the email ping sound on all 8 of his bosses computers. It worked!

A few weeks later, Peter got an email that his free trial was over. He clicked on the link and chose the cheapest plan on the page. Next, it gave him the option to invite one of his 8 bosses to enter the credit card information and complete the transaction. "Now that's cool!"

Fast forward a few months. Peter now wears Hawaiian shirts to work and unscrewed the walls of his cubicle. He's feeling so good and relaxed about his job, and his bosses even gave him a promotion (with less work to do). He's really thankful for JumpToConclusions, as it saves him a lot of time and headache.

Finally, put it into a compelling format!

Once you’ve crafted your product vision story, you can turn that into a video artifact that conveys the story in a more visual way. I’m not going to do that right now because this article is already getting pretty long, but I’m hoping you can see how you could take this story and visualize it with sketches, images, and a voiceover. All you really need is a sketching tool, images from a few Google searches, and a screen recorder such as QuickTime. I’m sure there are AI tools out there that could help you generate this sort of thing, but (gasp!) I think there is a lot of value in doing it manually. It allows you to tap into the feeling of that customer for a longer time and think through the problem in more detail. From here, you can share your vision with stakeholders and start refining your more detailed user story map, customer journey, and requirements! Off to the races!