It's so easy to confuse vision, mission, and strategy.
Vision, mission, strategy, goal, charter, roadmap. These words get used so often that we rarely ask, "what do they mean?" Do we all have the same definition?
Recently, John Culter wrote several articles discussion strategy. His more recent piece, “Why Don’t We Have a Strategy?”, I’m summarized into two takeaways:
Assumption: There is no product strategy because the people responsible are incompetent (i.e., don’t know how to craft strategy).
Reality: The system people work in don’t value strategy (i.e., don’t give people time to to think), but value execution (i.e., how much can we get done to see what sticks on the walls).
Assumption: There is a product strategy and we need to stop talking about it and start doing real work.
Reality: Not everyone understands the product strategy that’s communicated or believes what’s communicated is product strategy. There are different “levels” of strategy and not everyone understands strategy at the level that’s relevant to them. [Note: I wrote briefly about this issue previously when discussing why metrics are confusing because it’s a similar issue.]
But when I step back and think about the discussions around vision, mission, and strategy, I think it’s not as simple as John’s takeaways. The reality is that there are people who:
don’t know the difference between vision, mission, and strategy
enjoy action and execution more than hypothetical thinking and reflection, which vision and strategy requires
have difficulty separating vision and strategy for team, product, technology, and business when they aren’t necessarily all the same
don’t know how to craft and evaluate different vision and strategies
can’t communicate the vision or strategy
can’t help people apply the strategy so its relevant to them
In short, for Product Managers, the more people involved, the more confusing vision, strategy, and mission becomes because each of the issues above might exist with a person, then compounded. But I do think we can help others if we first understand the definition of vision, mission, and strategy.
What is the product vision?
This reads like a simple question and I desperately want to argue my favorite answer. Unfortuantely, the reality is that there is no single “correct” answer. Scrum.org writes:
Context is everything when using terms like vision, mission, and strategy. Each organization or person will have their own context when those words are used.
A great article by Jens-Fabian Goetzmann summaries that the product vision can be defined using one of the criteria:
equivalent to company vision or,
describes the envision end-state of the product without specifying the how or,
describes the end-state but specifying the how
To add confusion, others argue that product vision
How Shaw define’s product vision
Recognizing there are differences, I think product vision statements should be:
describes what you want to be true in the future
agnostic of the time period
equivalent to a goal
can specify a little bit of the how
not the same as company vision unless you work at a startup with one product [This point is especially true for PMs managing internal products. Your product vision definitely can’t be the company vision.]
My rules are meant to make the product vision statement easy to understand. You notice I don’t list aspirational as a rule. This is because I’ve learned, what’s aspirational for one person isn’t for another. Furthermore, because many people will treat product vision statements as goals, writing impossible to achieve aspirational vision statements will simply make certain people incredible anxious. These individuals, who index more into “what’s possible/the now/constraints” will then force the product vision statement to include more of the “how”, as a way to reduce their anxiety.
Now, a brief commentary on #4. You should try to avoid product vision statements that specify the how. But the reality is, you’re likely to add or be forced to add such qualfiers. For example, if the product vision is: enable people to communicate with each other, you might easily add qualifiers such as:
using low earth satellite (strategy and technology)
instantly (strategy and some technology, at least not sending pigeons)
for free (strategy)
across different languages (strategy)
in virtual worlds (technology and constraints)
It’s not wrong to add these additional statements. They come naturally to us. It’s at least better than adding filler buzzwords such as innovatively, creatively, or using AI. But you need to recognize you’re blurring into strategy. As someone wrote:
Whether the latter belongs in the vision or should be pushed down to the level of strategy is up to debate [without a obvious right or wrong approach].
If I understandstand product vision, what about strategy?
Strategy is the how. That’s easy to understand. Yet there are two problems:
we don’t really know how → we have a hypothesis of how, but people hate the uncertainty that comes with a hypothesis
different people want different levels of details on the how → we can only go so far in detail
Again, going back to my example vision statement: enable people to communicate with each other. Let’s argue that my strategy is “by providing free and instanous SMS”.
You might foresee questions such as:
How will it be free? How can we afford to be free?
How will SMS work? How will we implement this technology?
How do we know it will help us reach our vision?
How do we know people will use it?
If you can communicate your rationale, including the assumptions you’ve made and beliefs you hold that led you to this strategy, that’s good. If you can also show other strategies considered by discarded, that’s even better. But it’s important here to recognize some people don’t understand the strategy because they don’t feel comfortable with uncertainty (in hypothesis or detail).
Mission is for people
Finally, let’s talk about mission.
In many ways, mission, vision, and goal sound alike and are frequently used interchangably. Google’s is famous for this by stating as a company, it’s mission
Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Now, their vision is a world where information is organized and universiablly accessible and useful. But for the people working at Google, their mission is to reach this vision.
Mission’s for people. Vision’s for future. You can have a vision, but no mission if there’s no people involved. More importantly, you can have two different missions, but the same vision. For example, there might be a team responsible for Google’s infrastructure. Maybe it’s mission is to “keep the servers that maintains all of Google’s information always accessible”. Another team might have the mission of “apply machine learning to index Google’s internal know so it’s accessible”.
In short, mission statements are for teams. If have only one team, your mission statement is the same as achieving your product vision. But if there are multiple teams, this is where mission statements no longer match product vision statements word for word.
Takeaways
Recognize different people have different challenges for understanding vision, strategy, and mission
Understand there are conflicting point of view for what is a good product vision statement
Strategy is the how, but we aren’t 100% certain about the how
Mission are statements for a group of people.
Disagree or have a question? Let me know what you think.
Additional Reading:
The Difference Between Goals, Strategies, Metrics, OKRs, KPIs, and KRIs (I could nitpick a few parts I might slightly disagree, but a good quick reference if you’re ever confused).