An Agile Product Vision Statement describes why a product is made, who it’s for, and what makes it different. The Product Owner creates it with their development team.
The Vision Statement is the overarching reason for the team to develop the product and ties all their efforts together.$^1$ A product vision describes the future state—of a product—that a company or team desires to achieve.$^2$ In short, it represents the essence of your product.
The Product Vision Statement answers the following questions:
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To create a compelling vision statement, we (< it is a team effort) might want to consider the following during the creation process.
Your vision motivates the team. It will clearly state why they need to build the product and who will benefit from it. Your vision compels your teams to do their best to make the product a reality. It should also inspire your stakeholders and executives so you can solicit buy-in. A product vision should be something everyone in your organization can rally behind.
The vision statement serves as your team’s North Star. When it’s clear to them why the product should be made and what it’s supposed to achieve, decision-making becomes more manageable. The vision becomes shared and keeps everyone rowing in the right direction.
After writing your vision statement, step back and think, is this achievable? You and your team need to know if it’s possible to attain the end goal. If it’s not, the team will find it hard to rally behind you.
Your vision statement should be anchored on the needs of your target customers (which may be you). If your primary market’s needs are not explicitly mentioned in your statement, it’s not enough.
The vision statement must be easily understandable and can be communicated in a short amount of time. An effective idea can be expressed in three sentences or less. You don’t need charts, graphs, or any extravagant presentation to get the message across.
I recommend following the following format when working a through a draft statement:
For (target customer) who (statement of need or opportunity), the (product name) is a (product category) that (key benefit, reason to buy).
Unlike (primary competitive alternative), our product (statement of primary differentiation).$^3$
Using the above, let’s make it specific to the BAS community in general:
For a maintenance manager who oversees several buildings or campuses, the Services Dashboard is a sensor top-layer that is easy to read and take action with.
Unlike single product dashboards, our product is vendor and service agnostic.
Another style of creating vision statements comes from Christian Strunk.$^2$ Here are three he provides: