The Elevator-Pitch Product Vision Template
Fill six slots — customer, need, name, category, reason to buy, differentiation — and you have a vision statement.
- Difficulty
- Starter
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 85%
A fill-in-the-blanks template for producing a product vision statement, which Bastow uses because it forces answers to exactly the questions a vision needs to answer. It is the same structure as a positioning exercise, which makes positioning work reusable as vision work.
Origin
Bastow explicitly credits Geoffrey Moore's 'Crossing the Chasm' — this is Moore's elevator pitch / positioning statement template. She adopted it for product vision and ships it as part of ProdPad's product canvas.
Core principles
- 01A vision statement is not the same as 'the vision for your product' — it is a compressed articulation of where it is going.
- 02The questions a good elevator pitch answers are the same questions a product vision must answer.
- 03Positioning work and vision work are the same artefact viewed from different angles.
How to run it
- 1
For your target customer
Name the specific customer the product exists for.
- 2
Who has this statement of need or opportunity
State the need or opportunity that customer has — the problem, not the feature.
- 3
The [product name] is a [product category]
Place the product in a category the reader already understands. The category choice is a strategic decision in itself.
- 4
That [reason to buy]
State the compelling reason to buy — the core benefit delivered.
- 5
Unlike [alternative], our product [differentiation]
Name the alternative the customer would otherwise use, and the statement of differentiation against it.
Pro tip If the differentiation slot is hard to fill honestly, that is the finding — not a wording problem.
In the wild
Lenny observes mid-conversation that this is the same framework as a positioning exercise. Bastow confirms it — meaning a team that has already done positioning work can convert it directly into a vision statement rather than starting from a blank page.
→ ProdPad ships the template on its site and inside its product canvas, so teams answer the six slots as part of normal product work.
Common mistakes
Confusing the vision statement with the vision
Bastow is explicit: it is a vision statement, not necessarily the vision for your product. It is how you articulate where it is going, not a substitute for actually having a direction.
Skipping the 'unlike' clause
Without a named alternative and a stated differentiation, the statement collapses into a generic benefit claim that any competitor could also make.
Is it for you?
Best for
Product managers and founders who are stuck on how to phrase or visualise a product vision and need a structured starting point rather than a blank page.
Not ideal for
Companies that need the underlying strategic choice made first — the template articulates a vision, it does not generate one.
From the transcript
“you might actually recognize it from the Jeffrey Morse Crossing the chasm book it's the elevator pitch template but I like it because it answers…”
From the episode
Building better product roadmaps
Janna Bastow (Mind the Product, ProdPad)