The Product Vision

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” Alice asks the Cheshire Cat in Lewis Carroll’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. “I don’t much care where –,” said Alice. “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat (Carroll 1998, 56).

Being able to envision what a new product or the next product version should look like and do is essential for getting there. Envisioning the product results in the product vision—a sketch of the future product.^[1] The vision acts the overarching goal, galvanizing and guiding people, and is the product’s reason for being. As in the Polycom example, the vision selectively describes the product at a coarse-grained level, capturing the product’s essence—the information considered critical to develop and launch a winning product. Demoing product increments to customers and users in the sprint review meetings and releasing software early and frequently validates and refines the vision. An effective vision should answer the following questions:

^[1] Even though the product vision is not part of the Scrum framework, it is mentioned by Schwaber and Beedle (2002, 34). Ken Schwaber also writes about the vision in Agile Project Management with Scrum: “The vision describes why the project is being undertaken and what the desired end state is” (2004, 68).