The Product Vision blog

The Components of Product Vision

Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 | vision book

Earlier, we defined the vision of a product as “a mental image of what a future product will be like.”  What exactly is it that we are imagining?  What are the components that make up the vision?  It’s important to know so we can know when our visions are complete.

A complete product vision has two components corresponding with its two primary beneficiaries.  They are: the product concept — the idea and the story of how it will benefit customers — and the business model — how the product will benefit its sponsors.

Product vision is made up of a product concept and a business model

As the diagram suggests, the product concept is the heart of the vision.  The rest of the business’s activities are in support of the product and its imperative to satisfy important unmet needs.

The product concept

The product concept is the story of how the product will meet unmet customer needs.  The plot is always the same and goes something like this:

Once upon a time there were a set of people (your potential customers, the damsels in distress).  They were in an unhappy situation, out of which sprang a need.  Others (your villainous competitors) try to help, but they failed to get it just right.  Suddenly you came along (our hero, the sponsor), with just the right solution.  Your customers were relieved of their unhappy predicament, and they rewarded you for it.

Here is an how it looks filled in with the familiar example of a portable player like the iPod or the Sony Walkman:

Once upon a time there were mobile people with a lot of time on their hands while out and about (customers).  They ride the train, wait in line, or work out for hours a week (situation), and it gets redundant and boring (need).  There are other things to help while the time away (competitors), like books, magazines, videogames, but these are either not durable enough, not appropriate to use with one hand while standing, walking or running.  Our product, a small, durable, high capacity audio player (the solution) provides countless hours of diverse audio to entertain, stimulate and inform people while out, about and bored.

The product concept has these elements:

• who the customers are
• the pertinent situations they are in
• what needs stem from the situation
• who your competitors are, and how they are failing to fully satisfy the need
• how your solution satisfies the need

(These elements should be familiar if you’ve learned about SSNiF method as a way of capturing scenarios, modeling customer needs.)

The story of every successful product, past or future, can be told with this storyline. All the pieces are required in order to have a product concept that is qualified to be judged, something we’ll get to later.  But now we at least know what the story should look like.

This story gives guidance for the team to create it.  It’s rooted in tangible scenarios of use.  The development team can re-invoke the scenarios at any time to put themselves in the customer’s shoes and bring forward what it is they are trying to achieve.  The story (a big SSNiF) can be broken down into smaller, more specific scenarios (little SSNiFs), which in turn serve as the vision for each feature.

What is not part of the product concept?

Notice that the product concept emphasizes the problem rather than the solution.  It does not lock in presumptions about the feature set, design, or technology to use.  While it is good to have a rough initial idea of how the product will be realized, we know that these ideas only get better as we immerse ourselves in the problem.  If other approaches to the solution emerge that solve the need better, we should be willing to discard the original thinking.  Defining the vision in terms of the problem (usage scenarios and customer needs) establishes a test of goodness that is independent of implementation.

The business model

The product concept is only half of the product vision.  A product might make customers ecstatic, but if we can’t find a way of extracting money from the endeavor, it won’t be addressing anyone’s needs for much longer.  This is where the other half, the business model, comes in.

The business model is the story of how it will benefit us, its sponsor.  It must answer the following questions:

• How it will be economically built and supported? (development, manufacturing, support)
• How it will be profitable: how it can be built economically, generate revenue, and optimally priced?
• How will it generate income and turn a profit (revenue and profit model)
• How users will find out about it and obtain it?  (sales, marketing and distribution)

Both components are needed

Both components are necessary for a complete product vision, but sometimes organizations try and get away with just one or the other, with predictable results.  The big idea without a business model was the pattern for failure during the dot-com era.  And a business model in support of a product that fails to address important needs makes for a hollow vision.  The product will sell only to the extent that customers can be fooled into thinking otherwise.

Emphasizing the product concept over the business model

My focus in this blog is much more on the product concept than the business model, so much so that I will sometimes take the shortcut of equating the product concept with the product vision. There are several reasons for this.

First, business models are pretty well-understood.  You can find plenty of books on them and even go to school and get a degree in it.  On the other hand, systematically conceiving excellent product concepts is not yet well understood.  It’s a black art which I hope to shed some light on.

Secondly, it’s not usually necessary to innovate on the business model.  Off-the-shelf models suffice in most cases.  Whether you are creating a gadget to sell through traditional retailers or giving away a razor in order to sell razor blades, your business model is not a wheel that needs reinvention.  (That said, it is worth sifting through possibilities to innovate on the business model.  Google’s way of selling advertising with AdWord/AdSense, and Apple’s way of selling music through iTunes are salient examples of product visions with innovative business models.)

The third reason for focusing on the product concept over the business model is that many organizations are already good at the traditional business essentials: engineering, manufacturing, sales, marketing and distribution.  It’s the product concept they have trouble with.  If only the machinery were directed towards the right product, their success would be far greater.

The final reason to emphasize the concept when working on a product vision is that the effects of a product vision are profound.   Getting it right can set the stage for colossal success, and getting it wrong predestines a product to failure, as we shall discuss next.

In the mean time, take a step back and look at your product.  How complete and well defined is the “mental image of what a future product will be like?” according to the elements listed here?

See also: Product Vision Defined

[Updated: 4/22/09 - edited]

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Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

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