Case Study: How to Develop Your Product Vision Collaboratively (Part 3)

​Dear Reader,​

Go here to check out part 1 of this series, and find part 2 right here.

There is rarely a perfect moment to work on your product vision. But there are some clear triggers for initiating that work.

The clearest ones are structural:

A team reorganization, a strategic pivot, an acquisition, or new ownership of a product area. Any of these creates a natural break, where the old pillars no longer hold, and the team needs a new shared direction.

Victoria's trigger was exactly this. Her team had been reorganized around a backend service, with members arriving from across the company. Nobody had full ownership yet. Working on the vision wasn't a nice-to-have — it was the most direct path to the team actually becoming a team.

The subtler trigger is harder to name but just as important: when your team can no longer clearly articulate who they are building for, or why the work they're doing matters beyond the next sprint.

Two pitfalls are worth paying attention to. The first is waiting for conditions to be perfect. Vision work is important but rarely urgent, which means it will always lose to operational demands unless the PM treats it with deliberate momentum. Not because the deadline is real, but because without that energy, the effort will lose its drive.

Victoria captures this tension better than most:

The second pitfall is initiating this work because you found a compelling framework online. This is more of a distraction than a real trigger. The impulse to revisit your vision should come from your product context, not from someone else's process looking appealing.

Making Product Vision Stick as a Living Tool

A product vision that lives in a document and gets referenced once at an all-hands can’t serve the job you hired it for. The work of making it stick starts once the team has gotten behind that synthesized statement.

The first step is circulation and sharing it beyond the immediate team. The vision is most powerful when the people around your team understand it well enough to reinforce it, reference it, and hold you to it. Victoria describes this as building internal champions for the change you want to create. That means sharing it with adjacent teams, stakeholders, and anyone whose work intersects with yours.

The second step is integrating it into the rhythm of daily work. Your product vision should be present when your team reviews progress, discusses opportunities, or demos work in progress. Not as a replacement for more tactical tools like OKRs, but for moments of decision-making around fundamental directions. This is where the scenario testing pays off in the long run. A team that has already stress-tested its vision against real decisions has an idea of the trade-offs they are able and willing to make.

For platform teams especially, this presence matters. As Victoria puts it: 'the vision is most powerful when it's shared.' For platform teams especially, that means sharing it with people who will never see the architecture — but whose decisions your work ultimately shapes. Which is the aspect that a more backend-service-focused team can relate to to remind them there is a real person at the end of the chain, even when the architecture makes that person invisible.

Victoria frames it not as a destination but as a starting point:

As Victoria's experience shows, when a product vision is created collaboratively, grounded in real user insight, tested against real decisions, and shared beyond the team that made it, it creates something no template or prompt can replicate: It makes people feel something about the work they're doing. And that's what makes it worth reaching for.

Thank you for Practicing Product,

​Tim​

If you consume one thing this week, make it this...

What to measure when AI is running your product Read it here

Who is Tim Herbig?

As a Product Management Coach, I guide Product Teams to measure the real progress of their evidence-informed decisions.

I focus on better practices to connect the dots of Product Strategy, Product OKRs, and Product Discovery.