The product vision describes the future we are trying to create, typically somewhere between two and five years out. For hardware or device‐centric companies, it’s usually five to 10 years out.
Its primary purpose is to communicate this vision and inspire the teams to want to help make this vision a reality.
The product strategy is the sequence of products or releases we plan to deliver on the path to realizing the product vision. For consumer‐focused companies, we often structure each product/market fit around a different customer or user persona. Sometimes, the product strategy is based on geography, where we tackle different regions of the world in an intentional sequence.
There’s no single approach to product strategy that is ideal for everyone, and you can never know how things might have gone if you sequenced your product work differently. I tell teams that the most important benefit is just that you decided to focus your product work on a single target market at a time. So, all teams know we’re tackling the manufacturing market now, and that’s the type of customers we are obsessing over. Our goal is to come up with the smallest actual deliverable product that makes these manufacturing customers successful. Ideas that come up that pertain to other types of customers or markets are saved for future consideration.
The idea is not that every product team has its own product vision. That would miss the point. The idea is that our organization has a product vision, and all the product teams in that organization are helping to contribute to making that vision a reality.