3 Strategies for Communicating Your Product Vision

The following is adapted from Build What Matters.

Have you ever experienced a vivid dream? Perhaps it made sense right after you woke up, but later in the day, when you tried to explain it to someone, the gaps in the story you hadn’t noticed before became obvious. 

This is often what happens with product visions. A product team thinks they have a well-defined vision, but then, when they take the time to put it down on paper, they’re surprised by how much still needs to be figured out.

A product vision—the overarching goal or essence of your product—is the north star of your product, guiding all product strategies and initiatives. But a vision is only as good as the degree to which it’s understood by those who will execute it, so your product vision can’t exist only in your head. You must explain the dream.

Too often, though, when seeking to explain the vision, product teams default to a short mission statement or a bulleted list of product features. That’s not what a product vision is. A product vision must be customer-centric. It is what the future should look like when your product is meeting the customer’s need—from the customer’s perspective. 

The following three strategies—comic strips, vision mock-ups, and customer diary entries—can help you define and communicate your vision in a clear, engaging, customer-centric way, so that everyone on the product team understands and can execute on it.

Strategy #1: Comic Strips

Comic strips are a great way to tell the story of your customer as they move through the stages of the journey with your product. The comic strip format creates a character-oriented narrative that is highly readable, accessible, clear, and visually appealing. Plus, it can be really fun to piece together!

The format constrains storytelling to individual frames, which naturally emphasizes the most important points in the customer journey. There’s insufficient space to get into the weeds of the end-solution, which prevents nitpicky judgments and the potential for distraction from the bigger picture concept.

Keep in mind that the comic strip needs to be holistic, explaining the entire customer journey, not just onboarding and engagement. Use thought bubbles and speech bubbles to show the essential realizations and decisions your customers make along the way. 

It should also be short, so stakeholders can read it in just a couple of minutes and still get a clear picture. 

Finally, it should come across as human, explaining how the customer feels as they discover, try, and use your product. These feelings are hugely important in explaining why someone will adopt your product, the internal motivations pushing them, and the obstacles they must overcome.

Here’s an outline of what a customer journey comic strip might look like for our imaginary product Chuckwagon:

Strategy #2: Vision Mock-Ups

We also recommend creating a set of vision mock-ups, which offer a visual representation of what your product could look like. In a sense, vision mock-ups take individual panels in the comic strip and flesh them out. For example, a mock-up might answer the question, “Once a customer has downloaded our app, what will be included in the onboarding experience?”

Bear in mind, the purpose of these visuals is to communicate a high-level concept, so you’re not locking your team into a specific implementation. These are not deliverables that you will hand to engineering. They are concept wireframes that will drive research and point you in the right direction. 

Think of vision mock-ups like a concept car that appears on stage at a car show. They present an idea of what you’re building toward in a way that people can see, walk around, touch, and talk about, which is healthy, as long as everyone understands their purpose. When BMW reveals a concept car at an industry event, they are not locking their design team into those design specifications. No one says, “Our future car must look exactly like this!”

Here’s a sample vision mock-up for our imaginary app Chuckwagon:

Strategy #3: Customer Diary Entries

Another option for describing the customer journey vision is to author an imaginary customer journal where you describe the customer’s thoughts and actions throughout the journey in their own words. Approach this as if you were writing an actual diary from the customer’s point of view, describing all of their interactions with the product.

Here is an extract from a four-page-long customer diary that Ben used to explain the customer journey vision at GoCanvas in early 2019:

You are presenting the same narrative as in the comic strip, but this time it’s in a prose form that communicates the customer’s thoughts and feelings throughout their journey in greater detail. This can be a useful exercise for putting yourself in the customer’s mindset, trying to see your product through their eyes, so you’re not tempted to make the mistake of communicating the vision in terms of business outcomes.

Make it Fun!

Another thing you may have noticed about dreams is that it’s often very boring to hear about other people’s dreams. Likewise, product visions are too often boring. They’re presented as multipage prose documents or slide decks, and nobody has the time or motivation to read such lengthy documents.

Don’t underestimate the importance of fun in communicating your product vision. If you want people to rally behind your vision, you need to make it engaging.

With these three strategies, you can communicate your product vision in a clear, fun manner, making it easier for your team members to understand and align to it. 

This article is an excerpt from Build What Matters, which I co-authored with Rajesh Nerlikar. We co-founded the product advisory and coaching firm Prodify. Reach out anytime to talk about how to become more product-driven at your company.