8 Highly Effective Ways to Communicate Your Product Vision

Lea Hickman, from Silicon Valley Product Group, was responsible for the product vision and strategy of Adobe’s Creative Cloud. About that, she once said, “A product manager has to be obsessive about getting their story out and repeating it.”

As a Product professional, it’s your job to convey the product vision to everyone involved, from internal teams to all stakeholders. It sounds hard, right? Well, it is.

It’s especially hard if you consider you need to address different audiences, with their own set of perspectives, knowledge levels, and desired outcomes. That’s why you need to make use of different mediums and combine them to consistently and thoroughly communicate your vision.

Choosing the right tools, outputs, and level of detail for your audience is vital to ensure your message makes a successful impact.

Here are some options to share your vision, when to utilize them, and with whom:

• Sketches: A rough hand drawing of what you’re trying to accomplish is often all you need to spark meaningful conversations and clarify confusing aspects. Start here when designing new screens or flows.

• Wireframes: This is the next step after sketches. A wireframe provides more detail, but it’s still not a full-fledged view of what you’re planning to build. Use wireframes to support discussions within the team and to get high-level effort estimations from developers. You can also use them to receive feedback from potential users to ensure you’re headed in the right direction.

• Screenshots: These come after the initial validation with wireframes and provide a pixel-perfect representation of your thoughts. They allow for more accurate estimations and detailed conversations with developers and customers.

• Prototypes: Plenty of design tools allow you to create prototypes easily, but I recommend Figma and Invision. By building a prototype, you arrive at a tangible mock version of your site or application. Get the prototypes into your team members’ hands and see the magic happen: confusing aspects of your design will surface and questions about functionality will arise. This will help you think of edge cases and see your product from diverse perspectives.

• Visiontypes / Storyboards: This is a special type of prototype which centers more on the users of your product. It centers on the value they receive and experience they have as opposed to specific screens. The idea is that you sketch out (or make it more high fidelity if you have that option like Leah did at Adobe) the future better state of the world where your users will interact with your product. Think of this as a visual version of Jobs to Be Done (both functional and emotional) which helps you communicate the impact of the product you envision.

• Product Briefs: Besides visual support, detail your vision in a written format for depth of thought. You can do this by creating a Product Brief — I went ahead and created a template for you, check it out here. In this document, group the features and describe the overall value they deliver. Then share it with internal stakeholders, not forgetting the Marketing and Sales teams. They typically love this because it helps anticipate what they will be able to promote in the future. Customer Support teams also appreciate it being accompanied by prototypes so that they can get familiar with upcoming features.

• Epics + User Stories: These are less about communicating your vision as a concept and more about materializing that vision in concrete tasks. Write the goals of the feature and list acceptance criteria, so the design and development teams have a clear understanding. Attach a screenshot or prototype to add color to the written description; this also shows why you should have created those visuals in the first place. Review the set of epics and user stories as you go through your scheduled sprint/iteration planning.

• Roadmaps: They show your product’s long-term strategy, making them excellent to share with investors, executive teams, and other internal stakeholders. Your teams can use them to understand how their current work builds toward the future. (Stay tuned to learn more about a course I’m working on with Product Alliance around Mastering Roadmaps which will be available soon!)

As with everything else in Product, the exact answer to when and how to use these is: it depends. Each organization will utilize these in slightly different fashions, and sometimes even skip whole steps. That’s ok, as long as it works for you and your team.

But if you feel the process breaking down, or need more alignment within your team and with stakeholders, return here. Go through the steps above and identify what you’re missing. Then, get to action! You’ll be one step closer to aligning everyone around your product vision.