The Four Tests of a Compelling Product Vision
A vision must be lofty, realistic, free of today's constraints, and anchored to a potent problem.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 95%
Ebi Atawodi separates vision (the picture of the destination) from mission (the purpose and guiding principles) and gives four binary tests any vision statement must pass. The point of the test set is that most 'visions' fail on one axis: they are either safe, or fantastical, or shackled to today's tech, or floating free of any real customer pain. Passing all four is what makes a vision usable as an alignment tool rather than a slogan.
Origin
Developed by Ebi Atawodi across her product leadership roles at Uber, Netflix and YouTube; she credits much of her product craft to Uber's culture. The vision/mission distinction is illustrated with Uber's own mission ('reliable transport for everyone, everywhere') versus its vision (a world of continuous trips with no parking).
Core principles
- 01Vision is the picture of the destination; mission is the purpose and the guiding principles that get you there.
- 02Every PM at every level owes their team a vision — micro or macro. A pilot who says 'I don't know where we're going but I'm a good pilot' loses the passengers.
- 03A vision must be written in a vacuum from today's technical limitations, because the limitations of today may not be the limitations of tomorrow.
- 04Lofty and realistic are held in tension: it should scare you a little, but you must be able to see it.
- 05Without a clear, potent problem underneath it, a vision is decoration.
How to run it
- 1
Write the destination, not the purpose
Fast-forward into the future, freeze time, and describe the picture of the world once you have arrived. 'A computer on every desk and in every home' is a vision; 'spread ideas' is a mission. If your statement explains why you exist rather than what the world looks like, you have written a mission.
Pro tip Use the plane analogy as a smell test: if a passenger boarded your team, would they know where they are landing and what it feels like when they get there?
Watch out Do not conflate the two and then wonder why nobody feels anything. Missions do not paint pictures.
- 2
Test 1 — Is it lofty?
The vision should almost scare you in an exciting way — something that makes you want to get up in the morning. If achieving it would be unremarkable, it is a roadmap item, not a vision.
- 3
Test 2 — Is it realistic and attainable?
It must feel within reach for ordinary people, not pie in the sky. Exceptional founders can carry an apparently impossible vision on force of conviction alone, but most leaders cannot — so calibrate to what your audience can actually picture.
Pro tip The check is visual: can people literally see it? 'A computer on every desk' passes because you can picture the desk.
Watch out A vision so far out of reach that people quietly discount it is worse than no vision — it teaches the team to ignore you.
- 4
Test 3 — Is it devoid of today's technical limitations?
Strip out what is currently buildable. The whole purpose of time-travelling five years out is to come back and say what we need to fix or put in place now to get there. If today's constraints shaped the wording, you have written a plan, not a vision.
Watch out Expect naysayers ('engineering will never solve that'). Their objection is about today's limits — which is exactly what the vision is meant to exclude.
- 5
Test 4 — Is it grounded in a clear, potent problem?
Name the specific, painful problem the vision resolves. Uber's parking vision was grounded in the fact that roughly a quarter of the average city is parking space in a world with a housing crisis.
Pro tip A good vision also acts as a filter for people: they read it and decide whether they care about that problem enough to join the ride.
In the wild
Against the mission 'reliable transport, everywhere, for everyone', Uber's vision was a world of continuous trips where cars never stop — so cities no longer need parking. Around 25% of the average city is parking; freeing it up means homes, restaurants, gardens. The vision was lofty, visible (Amsterdam is already converting street parking into communal gardens), constraint-free (assumes autonomy), and grounded in a real urban-space problem.
→ The vision directly seeded product bets like Uber Pool — maximising the 1.5 people in the average car — and gave teams a shared destination years before the technology existed.
Uber's original tagline was 'transportation as reliable as running water'. Working in Nigeria, Atawodi found the analogy collapsed — water was not reliable there. The company moved to a more inclusive framing: reliable transport everywhere and for everyone.
→ A mission that survived global scale, showing the realism test applies to the words as much as to the ambition.
Common mistakes
Believing junior PMs are exempt from vision
PMs say 'I'm just an associate PM, vision is above my level.' Atawodi ran her first vision exercise as an L4 PM. There is always a micro or macro vision your surface owes its team.
Writing the vision inside today's constraints
Once you filter for what engineering says is possible this year, you produce a roadmap wearing a vision's clothes. It will not survive contact with a better technology and it will not inspire anyone.
Confusing a warm slogan with a picture
Statements that sound good but generate no mental image ('bring people together') fail the realism test — people cannot see them, so they cannot row toward them.
Is it for you?
Best for
Product managers and founders at any level who have been told 'you need to get better at vision' and need a concrete pass/fail test before they socialise a statement.
Not ideal for
Six-month feature planning or quarterly roadmaps — for anything landing next year, Atawodi says skip the vision exercise and just write the headline or do the mock.
From the transcript
“realistic it has to be devoid of the any Tech or limitations of today and it has to be grounded in a very clear and…”
“I fast forward into the future I hold time and I'm in that place and I'm describing the picture”
“that's your vision and then the mission is like the purpose and some set of guiding principles as to what will allow you achieve that…”
“the whole point of going to the Future and saying I'm time traveled five years out is to say okay I've come back to tell…”
From the episode
Crafting a compelling product vision
Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber)