What is your end-to-end process for creating a product vision statement?

Product teams and firms should think about the relatioship between the Product, features & goals, the products' & companies' roadmap and finally the company strategy & mission! All these are related and are critical to build disruptve firms at scale

• Company Mission is how the world sees your company and the change it wants to bring
• Company Strategy is the logical plan to bring your company’s mission into being
• Product Strategy is logical plan for how the product will drive its part of the company strategy
• Product Roadmap is the sequence of features that implement the Product Strategy
• Product Goals are the quarterly and day-to-day outcomes of the Product Roadmap that measure progress against the Product Strategy

Ravi Mehta has written a brilliant note that outlines this and how the Product-Strategh stack looks and all these steps matter as do their relationship with each other https://www.ravi-mehta.com/product-strategy-stack/

TLDR: I use Geoffrey Moore's product vision template to craft an internal statement, which can be used for a compelling public message or "mission statement."

A product vision is not typically used for external consumption.

You might be asking yourself, what? I thought Apple, Meta, Slack, and Unity had all these quirky and cool vision statements that told me about their mission and products. These are actually corporate vision statements that reflect the brand, rather than merely the product I'm building.

This is true not only for big companies that have many products:

Apple: Make the best products on earth, and to leave the world better than we found it.

Meta: Giving people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.

But also for companies known for one hero product, often named after the company itself:

Slack: Make work life simpler, more pleasant and more productive.

Unity: Democratize game development and enable everyone to create rich interactive content.

Geoffrey Moore defined the quintessential product vision template in Crossing the Chasm.

I've seen two different versions of the template; this one that helps distill the essential elements in a bulleted list or one that is already in a statement:

• For [final client],

• whose [problem that needs to be solved],

• the [name of the product]

• is a [product category]

• that [key-benefits, reason to buy it].

• Different from [competition alternative],

• our product [key-difference].

AND

For [our target customer], who [customer’s need], the [product] is a [product category or description] that [unique benefits and selling points].

Unlike [competitors or current methods], our product [main differentiators].

Refer to the answer to the question, "What do you research when crafting a product vision statement?" to fill out the statement itself.

If you are looking for a public statement you can tie to your company's brand, use on websites, and tell to customers, there is one more step. Create a shortened version of the statement using the [unique benefits and selling points] or [key benefits, reason to buy it] section, which solves either a named or unnamed problem. If you take a look at the four punchy examples from Apple, Meta, Slack, and Unity above, they focus on their differentiation for their entire statement. They allude to the problem they're solving, but they leave it inferred. By leaving it up to the reader, and saying less, they hold your attention to perceive solving a variety of problems with their product.