How to Create a Truly Inspiring Product Vision

“If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you,” Steve Jobs once said. Creating such forward momentum is a key benefit that a product vision should offer. Unfortunately, I’ve seen many visions that failed to move people. In this article, I explain how you can create a truly inspirational vision that engages and motivates people.

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Before You Start: Know What a Product Vision Is and Why You Need One

A product vision describes the ultimate reason for building the product and the positive change it should bring about. It’s best captured as a BHAG—a big, hairy, audacious goal. An example of a vision for an app that helps people reduce the risk of developing type-2 diabetes might be “help people eat healthily,” or even shorter, “healthy eating.” As the example shows, a vision is best expressed as a concise statement or slogan.[1]

I generally encourage teams to use a product vision. Why? An effective vision inspires people. It creates a meaningful purpose and shows how their work connects to the bigger picture—how it helps make a positive impact. This motivates the individuals and encourages them to move forward together. Additionally, a big, aspirational vision acts as the product’s North Star: It provides continued guidance for the product team, no matter how much the product’s market grows and its UX, features, and technologies change.

But using such a vision is not enough. You also need to determine the approach to realise it and achieve product success: In other words, you need a product strategy, as Figure 1 illustrates.

Figure 1 shows my product strategy framework, in which the vision plays a fundamental role. It guides the strategy, which, in turn, directs the product roadmap and backlog. Additionally, it shows the tool I have developed to capture the vision and strategy—the Product Vision Board. To learn more about the framework and the template, read the articles The Product Strategy Framework and The Product Vision Board.

Capture the Product’s True Purpose

In my coaching work and workshops, I often see visions that state what the product should look like and do or what business goals it should achieve. While there is, per se, nothing wrong with such a product vision, it is not particularly inspiring. If implementing features and chasing business benefits is all we do, it’s hard to care and stay motivated, especially when the going gets tough—for example, when development progress is unexpectedly slowed down, or the market response to the latest release is less positive than anticipated.

To craft a truly inspiring vision, you need to state the product’s ultimate purpose. To discover it, ask why the product exists. What positive change will it have achieved in five to ten years? What impact will the product have on the world and especially on the people who come in touch with it? How will it have changed their lives for the better?  “(…) the secret to high performance [is] our deep-seated desire to (…) to live a life of purpose,” as Daniel Pink writes in his book Drive.[2] Such a purpose-driven vision generates strong motivation for everyone working on the product. It gives their work meaning and helps them understand how they make a positive impact through their work.

Let’s make this more concrete and look at the following sample vision:

“Build an AI coding assistant with autonomous agent capabilities and automatic testing and debugging.”

This vision statement seems to be well thought out—it envisions the new product. But therein lies the problem: It’s a solution-focused vision, not a purpose-driven one. I would therefore rework it and use the following phrase instead:

“Empower people to create software at the speed of thought.”

This vision resonates much more with me. It gives me a purpose—to enable people to create—and motivates me. Additionally, it does not talk about the target group and features. This has two benefits: First, it makes the vision more stable. A product’s market, features, and business goals will change, but the vision should stay stable and provide continued guidance across its entire life cycle. Second, it makes the vision more concise and easier to remember. That’s a good thing, as you don’t want the vision to be forgotten but to be present in people’s minds.

Use Language that Triggers Positive Emotions

An inspiring vision moves people. It gives them confidence and creates enthusiasm to work on the product, which, in turn, builds forward momentum. To achieve this, the vision has to resonate with people. It must speak to them and evoke positive emotions, such as feeling happy, joyous, energised, and excited. Emotions drive actions. Logic alone does not move people.

The lack of emotional load is a major source of vision failure: Many product visions I have seen over the years were written in formal, at times technical, language. As a consequence, they did not create a positive emotional reaction and failed to move people. There is no motion without emotion.[3]

Therefore, choose your words to describe the vision deliberately. Use positive language that focuses on possibilities, has a caring tone, touches people, ignites their imagination, and makes them excited about working on the product.[4] Take the following vision, for example:

“Provide personalised education that adapts to every learner’s goals and pace.”

The vision nicely captures a purpose—providing personalised education. But I find it dry and boring. It fails to move me. To make it more exciting, we can reframe it as:

 “Make learning fun.”

The word fun triggers a strong positive emotional response in me. The whole phrase resonates with me, and I can imagine myself working on a product that makes knowledge acquisition enjoyable.[5]

If using emotional language feels hard at first, don’t worry. Experiment with different words, check if they move you, and try out alternative formulations, drawing inspiration from the list of “happy” feelings in orange in the Wheel of Emotions shown in Figure 2.

Take Your Time and Use a Collaborative Approach

Creating a truly inspiring vision usually isn’t a five-minute job. It takes time and patience. Don’t expect your initial attempt to be perfect. Instead, draft a first vision. Then edit and improve it. Revising text is something even the best writers routinely do—it’s part of the creative process. As the vision is fundamental to motivating and aligning people, as well as to discovering an effective product strategy, and as you want it to be stable and act as the product’s True North, it is worth taking the time to get it right.

To maximise the chances of creating a vision that resonates strongly with people, I recommend following a collaborative approach and co-creating the vision. My preferred way to do this is to invite the right people—dev team representatives like a designer, tech lead, and tester—and key stakeholders, for example, a marketer, sales rep, and customer support team member, to attend a collaborative workshop.[8] Using structured brainstorming is a great way to get started. Ask people to capture the positive change the product should create on cards. Once everyone is finished, invite them to read out their visions. Then build shared understanding and develop a vision that captures the product’s real purpose and speaks to people.

Aim to reach a unanimous agreement on the vision. Everyone involved in making the product a success—in building, marketing, selling, and supporting it—wholeheartedly supports it. The vision must sound and feel right for everyone. Consider asking a skilled facilitator, like a team coach or Scrum Master, to moderate the workshop and help the group come up with a vision everyone supports. This allows you, as the person in charge of the product, to focus on getting the vision right rather than making sure everyone’s ideas are heard and nobody dominates.

Notes

[1] To learn more about how to set an effective product vision, refer to my articles Six Qualities of a Great Product Vision, Choosing the Right Approach to Capture the Product Vision, and 5 Product Vision Mistakes You Should Avoid.

[2] Daniel H. Pink. 2010. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, p. 145. Kindle Edition.

[3] “Where there is no emotion, there is no motion,” is a quote attributed to British politician George Griffiths. Zag Ziglar allegedly said, “There is no motion without emotion. There is no energy in logic.” But I could not verify this quote.

[4] For an overview of research on the connection between language and emotion, see Pilar Ferré, Isabel Fraga, and José Antonio Hinojosa. 2025. “The interplay between language and emotion: introduction to the special issue,” Cognition and Emotion, Vol. 39, No. 7, 1405-1417.

[5] Note that I have made the vision intentionally very big. As mentioned earlier, a vision is best captured as a big, hairy, audacious goal. But how big you want to make your product vision is obviously your decision. A more focused vision might be “make tailored learning fun.”

[6] Psychologists have created different lists and visualisations of emotions. In 1980, Robert Plutchik constructed a wheel-like diagram of emotions with eight basic emotions and eight derivative ones. The former are joy, sadness, anger, fear, trust, disgust, surprise, and anticipation. The wheel I use is taken from https://feelingswheel.com. The website allows you to rotate the wheel and enlarge the text.

[7] This is, of course, not the fault of any LLM. Instead, it shows that there is confusion in the product management space about how a vision is best described.

[8] If you use extended product teams, something I generally recommend, then the team members should co-create the vision. See my article Building High-Performing Product Teams for more guidance.