I wrote this for our product team ahead of a meeting. It is something I think is critical in doing product work, and something I have said piecemeal but never clearly enough.

Product is about understanding user needs and problems deeply, then figuring out what would be an amazing way to serve those needs and solve those problems.

That work is informed by three things: understanding your users deeply, understanding the relevant technology deeply, and understanding the market, the regulations, and the competitive landscape.

But it is not created by any of them. It is created by synthesizing all three along with a fundamentally creative act. The right product does not appear from what users ask for, or what a technology does, or what a regulator requires. It emerges from deeply understanding these, adding in creativity and insight, and coming out with a solution.

That is what people usually mean by a product vision.

Offering-market fit

Once you have validated demand for the vision, you have offering-market fit. You can describe a solution to a problem and you feel pull from people who want to buy it, before the thing exists.

Offering-market fit is incredibly useful because it collapses the path to product-market fit down to “just” an execution problem: build the damn thing.

From the vision you drive toward the right next steps to validate and realize it, which usually means deciding what to start building. This is where you start layering in constraints. They could be resource constraints, organizational constraints, technology constraints, or customer constraints.

Once you have layered them in you have a plan you can execute against that is consistent with your vision and advances you toward it. The question becomes “what can two people do in the next two weeks that maximally advances our vision, either by de-risking key assumptions and ambiguities, or by delivering maximum value?”

Critically, you cannot invert these steps. You cannot start with constraints and then choose visions that are consistent with them.

“What is the best product we can build with two people and two days?” is the wrong question. So is “given our team owns X and another team owns Y, what product should we build?”

The job of product work is to creatively execute such that you blow through constraints, cut across boundaries, and invert what people thought they or the technology were capable of. The question that gets you there sounds more like “given we want to build Z, let’s convince the other team to second two people onto our team to get it done faster and cut across the dependencies.”

Great product thinkers continually pinball between the vision and the reality without losing touch with either. They do not let the realities kill the vision, and they do not let the vision make them blind to the realities.

Why this is hard

Doing this is extremely hard. Because it is hard, it is worth a team adopting some extreme hygiene in how it thinks and talks about the work:

• Always start from the user and the vision.

• Continually validate that you have offering-market fit and product-market fit.

• Layer in constraints, do not start from them.

• Over-communicate that you are operating with this hygiene, as a way to maximize the chance that you actually are and that everyone else is too.

Those that work with me see this show up as a few habits that can be annoying. I insist we start from a clear goal or vision even when it cuts across teams or quarters. I push back on plans that are formed downstream of organizational boundaries instead of creatively cutting across them, and I push back on execution that undermines our feedback signals or our ability to know whether we are building the right thing. Our team would rather have that discussion every time than end up with a roadmap that is our org chart with dates on it.