How to create a product vision that sells the future
Breaking down the tactical tools and frameworks you need to create an impactful product vision
What is your vision?
I remember the first time someone asked me that question. I was working on a medium-sized initiative, redesigning an online gift registry — but I saw a tremendous opportunity to transform the whole end-to-end experience.
I could see what was possible to improve the experience for people shopping a gift registry in a store, or for store associates to be able to serve gift shoppers and registrants better, and how using your mobile phone could eliminate the need for paper forms or using an inventory “gun” to scan items for your gift registry, and more.
At the time, I wove a vision for the future with words and an on-the-fly whiteboarding session. It worked, and our scope and funding increased dramatically, but this was way back in 2011 when talking with a few stakeholders could be enough to get things green-lit. Today that is rare.
Why do visions matter?
An inspirational horizon line can be an exceptionally motivating force to attract investors, convince shareholders, and drive product development teams. I use the words “horizon line” very intentionally.
A horizon line is a demarcation point in the future. You can sail towards it, but the intention is not necessarily to reach it. It is simply to ambitiously declare, “let’s go there.”
Because of this, we can be bolder with our claims. We can push things further, knowing that we will hit the shore of another continent — or island — before ever reaching our receding horizon line. We know getting to a new coast takes us further than what would have happened if we didn’t imagine what lies beyond in the first place.
Creating a vision
What kind of vision do I need to create and when should I create it?
The above sounds fine and dandy, but it doesn’t tell you when a product or project needs a vision. Or how bold should a vision be to be effective? Like, flying cars level bold? Or is a robust end-state for a brand new feature what’s needed?
These are great questions — and ones I would often get from product designers who would confess to me they had never created a vision before and were unsure how to do it.
Vision crafting isn’t usually taught in UX boot camps or design schools. If your first few jobs in the field are on in-house execution-oriented teams — like, three designers supporting a whole product and sprinting against a tidal wave of projects — it is no wonder you haven’t had practice with this skill. You have barely had time to look up, let alone imagine the future.
A few years ago, with support from talented product designer Christopher Smeder, I developed a playbook to address this need for training. The goal was to create a step-by-step guide to help designers (and their cross-functional partners) get answers to their key questions about how to craft a vision for their product areas and the tools to do it.
The ideas below are the genesis behind that playbook and what I encourage designers to consider when facing the question, “what is your vision?” — so they too can be bold, point to a horizon line, and invite everyone to sail there.
When to create a vision
Timing is important; leading with a vision can help people understand where the team wants to go, and supports later proposals for the initial scope of work.
Visions can be done at any time but are most appropriate at earlier project stages — late in Discovery or early Define phases if you follow a double diamond process.
This is especially true if no vision exists for this product area, the scope of project work is substantial — like building a brand new feature — or the surfaces you are looking at have a high ROI for the company.
Not every big project needs a vision —a data migration could be a considerable engineering initiative and critical to the company —but a design-led vision isn’t a valuable tool here if there are scant UX needs.
Start where you are
Before you can imagine an amazing future, you need to understand the situation today — what are the user pains or customer needs driving this initiative or project?
Start by knowing where you are, to get you to where you want to go.
Unless you are starting from scratch, a product experience already exists. As part of your Discovery process, get the lay of the land by conducting an audit, creating a blueprint of the primary use cases, gathering data from analytics, talking to customer care agents, testing with customers virtually or in the wild, and so on.
Once you understand where things stand, you can imagine a future that is grounded in real needs and will solve actual problems.
Imagine the future
This is the fun stuff — thinking about what could be — in ideation sessions, brainstorms, or even an entire design sprint, with your fellow stakeholders.
While ideation sessions can be extensive, you will eventually need to curate your ideas for your vision. I recommend aligning on a shared perspective on where you are plotting the ‘horizon line’ for the vision you’re creating.
If you do this before your ideation sessions, you can focus on generating ideas resonant with that horizon line. If you do it afterward, you may need to park more ideas since they are too ambitious for your timeline or, oppositely, not ambitious enough for a vision farther out. Either way works, but it needs to happen.
Plotting the horizon line:
How distant is this future and what is the focus?
Understanding the timeline for your vision — do you and your program team want to achieve this in six months or three years — and the altitude — is this for one feature or a whole end-to-end experience across multiple channels — is a critical step.
A vision that looks at the end state for a single feature in six months is very different than a vision for a whole product in three years.
Work with your team to define the timeline and altitude for your vision, so there are shared expectations on what it is you are creating. You can even plot it on a simple 2-by-2:
Altitude: What is the “zoom” level — are we looking at one feature or a whole end-to-end experience across multiple channels?
Timeline: When would we want to achieve this state — in six months or three years?
Later, when constructing the narrative for your vision, you should be able to articulate these two variables clearly.
Creating assets
How thought out are the concepts and how visually refined should they be?
After your ideation sessions, you should have generated a large volume of ideas to be refined and honed.
The question then becomes, for the vision you are creating, how thorough does the thinking need to be for these concepts? And what level of visual resolution is needed for your ideas to be impactful on an audience?
Thinking
The nearer the timeline and the lower the altitude, the higher the fidelity of thinking for the concepts presented.
If you are crafting a feature vision for the next quarter, the concepts should be thought through — not a wild notion. The team should be confident they can achieve this end-state — or something close to it.
The ideas you share for a long-term vision for a whole product, which will take years to build, can be much more speculative. They should still ring true and be grounded in customer needs — even if they are ambitious and inspiring — but these concepts can be a target instead of a considered proposal.
Ideas proposed for multi-year and high-altitude visions say, “we‘re inspired to create something like this,” not “this is exactly what we will create.”
Visuals
The visual resolution (or fidelity) for your concepts depends on the audience for your vision work and the goals for presenting the vision.
Are you presenting to executive stakeholders to get funding for your project or posting it online to drum up investors and entice customers? In these cases, you will want higher resolution concepts — or create a whole production.
Suppose you are simply creating something for your immediate team to help them understand your ideas for a feature you’re collectively working on. In that case, you can get away with lower-resolution wireframes or sketches.
You can create a very impactful vision with lightweight visuals. However, the audience for that type of vision is closer to the work and not an executive or external audience.
Generally speaking, the further away people are from your team’s work, the higher the resolution needs to be so they can understand the ideas presented, and be excited by the prospects proposed.
Again, while the fidelity of thinking does not always need to be complete in higher-resolution concepts — they can be inspirational concepts, not final mocks — higher-resolution visuals sell better to an audience who doesn’t know the product or features as you do.
Creating the story
Spinning an impactful narrative deck that sells your vision
If you search for narrative arcs, you will find the following classic bell-curve-shaped framework:
Vision stories don’t need to be any different. Below I’ll walk you through a classic narrative arc you can use for a vision story that takes the audience from the current state to the future state.
Frame it up
Your initial exposition should introduce your audience to The Challenges — essentially, the data and insights you’ve collected to understand why this project is something to spend money on to solve. If you are working on an in-house team, this is where you fuse the needs of the business and the needs of your users into your story.
The key here is to make the breadth of the challenges digestible and memorable.
You could have hundreds of data points you’ve unearthed, but that is far too much information for an audience to consume. Find a way to make The Challenges understandable — distill it into a few key themes or areas, or create a single resonant conclusion — use a simple framework to help make the information easy to understand and remember.
The big beats
When considering how to paint a picture of where things are — the “rising action” where you illustrate the current challenges — and where you want something to go — the inspirational “falling action” that resolves these challenges — you can feel overwhelmed with what to highlight.
I like to start with an outline of what I call the big beats: what are the significant challenges and the boldest and most inspiring solutions to those challenges that I want to showcase?
What would the sizzle reel be for this vision?
You can determine your big beats in various ways. My go-to is to base it on a few primary use cases, looking at the most impactful moments for one or more users over a journey that spans a critical time. For example, the first thirty days for a new user onboarding into a product.
The red thread
Once you have your big beats, the rest of the story is the red thread — or throughline — that strings those beats together cohesively.
If imaginative storytelling isn’t in your wheelhouse, go back to your data and insights and read real stories about real customers who had the challenges you are showcasing.
You can often cherry-pick real customer stories for each part of your user journey and weave a single narrative with it.
Wrap it up
Every presentation needs a conclusion, and vision decks are no different. The kind of conclusion will depend on the purpose of creating the vision in the first place.
If you are creating a vision purely to inspire, the story concludes — “challenges solved; everyone loves it!”— but usually, you want to make sure your audience is clear on what is happening next. How are you going to achieve this end-state? When do we set sail to this bold new horizon?
If the project has funds and is on a roadmap, and this vision is to fire up executive leadership, conclusions should focus on where the team thinks it will start and the speculative timeline to get there — the work back and initial scope. If you pitch a vision to get support or funding, you may dovetail into an open discussion on steps to get this on a roadmap, and so on.
Go forth and set sail
In short, creating an inspiring vision is within your grasp with a few fundamental research and design tools and critical frameworks to guide your vision’s focus and storyline. While this article is not exhaustive, I hope it helps make vision crafting understandable and empowers you to take on this skill and boldly declare, “let’s go there.”
Additional Resources
- How to Scale a Magical Experience: 4 Lessons from Airbnb’s Brian Chesky
- IDEO: 5 Tips for Running a Successful Design Sprint
- 4 Experts Reveal How to Create a Strong Product Vision
- How to Create a Meaningful Product Vision
Workshop
Looking for immersive training? I recently discovered a workshop led by the Design Department called “Demystifying Visions.”
