It starts with a vision!

The mission and vision describe the purpose behind the products and services the organization delivers. For all products and services, it is useful to describe how they contribute to the purpose, who they are intended for, and why they are valuable. This is not only helpful for selling the products and services to customers but also highly motivating for the crew, the teams involved in the realization and/or delivery of a product or service.

If you are unsure about what the organization’s products are, the best way to find out is to ask your customers what the product is. To find out which customers to ask, it is important to know who your target audience is. A structured way to document this is a product vision canvas by Roman Pichler, a German product management expert.

With this canvas, a product owner can clearly outline the added value of a product on a single A4 sheet. It describes what the product is, who it is intended for (target audience), how it meets the needs of that target audience (what benefits it offers and what problems it solves), what the key features of the product are, and what the value is for the organization.

A valuable exercise is to create a product vision canvas for one of the products together with a team, the product owner, and the stakeholders.