I recently sat down with a former coworker of mine to catch up and talk shop. He’s an engineering leader with a keen interest in product, and we were discussing how to create a product vision that communicates direction yet doesn’t prescribe exactly what to build.

This is a topic I know in my bones, but have historically had trouble finding the words to articulate how to achieve this. Sometimes you learn things that, after awhile, seem obvious… and yet aren’t even remotely obvious to someone who hasn’t done it before.

This is the long way of telling you I had a breakthrough in that moment, sipping coffee together in the window. Product vision is the Benjamin Button of the business world.

Go ahead, laugh. But… it’s just so crazy it might work.

time and detail are inversely correlated

I don’t even want to admit to you how long it took me to figure out how I wanted to draw this. But hey—we got there!

The further in the future your vision depicts, the more detailed, specific, and high quality it can be. As you move closer to that time horizon, the vision becomes fuzzier, less clear, and depicts more of the problems to be solved. At the shortest distance, it may become words instead of images.

Long-term vision

In order to effectively communicate your 5 or even 10-year vision for the product, you’re going to need something a little bit more inspiring than words. You need to literally create images so that your people can see where you’re heading. The beauty of the time horizon being so far out, is that this vision should not impact the product by the time we reach that horizon. You’re not prescribing anything, because no one on your team is staffed to work on this area yet anyway. All you’re doing is demonstrating what could be.

Mid-term vision

You still need some visuals to help communicate a vision that’s 1 or 2 years out, but you’ll want to lower the “quality” of those visuals. In other words, the images will spend more real estate depicting the problems to be solved, and less to what specifically will be implemented. This is where I find it very useful to say “NONE OF WHAT I’M SHOWING YOU WILL BE BUILT! But it’s representative of the types of things we might build to solve these issues.” Also maybe never show this to a sales person…

Short-term vision

You’re a couple months out from starting work on an area, which means your visuals should be of such low quality that they’re actually just... words. At this point you’re not sharing any nods to solutions or interfaces—you’re simply articulating the problems and areas to be prioritized in the coming months.

a vision is never done

The fun thing about product is that it’s a living, evolving, changing thing. What you think it will be in 5-10 years is almost certainly not what it’s going to be, whereas what think it will be in 2 months is going to be a lot closer to the truth. And, as we move forward through time, our 5 year vision becomes our 3 year vision becomes our 1 year vision becomes our next project.

This means your vision is never done.

Think about that for a moment. Your product is constantly changing (hopefully…), your knowledge of your customers and market indicators is constantly changing. That means to some extent your vision is also constantly changing in subtle ways. You may find yourself re-making your long-term product vision every few years, but the mid-term vision is likely shifting once a year. It’s removing things that have already happened, it’s adding things previously nodded to in the long-term vision, and it’s removing specificity.

you are in both the present and the future

And it’s not because you’re either Doctors Strange or Who. As a product manager you will have to learn to flex through time. One minute you may be writing minute stories for a feature you’re implementing in a week, and the next you’ll be mocking up visions for 2 years from now. While to the untrained eye they might seem like completely opposite activities, you should see the trails and traces of threads that connect the two.

You are implementing this feature, because it was a solution to a problem that was presented in the short-term vision. Solving that problem moves the product closer to the “what if” that was painted for the mid-term, which in turn leads to the “someday utopia” presented for the long-term.

case seurat: let’s van gogh with another metaphor

Still not making sense? That’s ok—I’ve got one more metaphor to throw at you. Imagine you’re Cameron Frye, standing in the Art Institute of Chicago, wondering why the worst friend ever, Ferris, is actively destroying your life. You’re staring at a painting. It depicts a scene. Your eyes zoom in. You see a woman’s face. Your eyes keep going. You see nothing but dots.

I’m describing pointillism, an artistic technique in which the artist creates an image from dots of color. It almost certainly describes the saying, “the sum is greater than the whole of its parts.” (Dot matrix printers also come to mind, although that rather dates me.) In addition to all of that, pointillism also the perfectly demonstrates product visions.

At a distance, you can recognize the image. It’s clear, it’s beautiful.

Get a little closer, and you can still make out some detail, but the scope is much smaller.

Even closer? You can’t see the image at all, only the underlying problems.

I also cannot believe how hard I just punned

But hopefully it was worth it for you, if not me. Does this track with how you’ve worked on product visions? Are there any other metaphors I should cover in the future? Let me know in the comments!