Crafting a Clear Product Vision When You’re Building in the Unknown
How to align teams, accelerate execution, and build confidently when everything is still fuzzy — especially in AI, startups, and high-stakes environments.
Front row seat to product chaos: startups sprinting blind, scaleups losing focus, enterprises tangled in their systems. I’ve advised, observed, and built my product in the middle of it all. No theory here. Just hard-won clarity from the trenches.
— Dominika
I’m currently in a fascinating moment in my product career — bridging multiple realities. I know and work with people across the entire spectrum: from early-stage, tech-savvy startups still validating their bets, to fast-growing scaleups figuring out how to stay focused, to mid-sized companies and global enterprises wrestling with product-market complexity.
On top of that, I’m actively building my product right now, which means I’m not just advising from the sidelines — I’m deep in the arena, testing and refining all of this in real-time.
Startups thrive on messy inputs: urgency, vision whiplash, and everyone wearing five hats. But if there’s one thing that consistently separates those who scale from those who stall, it’s this: clarity of purpose. Not a tagline. Not a funding story. A vision that says, "Here’s the better world we’re building, and why it matters."
Especially in environments with high volatility — generative AI experiments, multi-threaded R&D bets, enterprise pivots — clarity becomes your ultimate accelerant. Without it, teams don’t just build the wrong thing. They build everything.
This isn’t a theoretical essay. It’s for PMs, designers, and anyone elbow-deep in ambiguity, trying to keep the plane in the air while redesigning the cockpit. If you’re navigating unknowns and trying to align your team without sounding like a motivational poster, this is for you.
What is a Great Product Vision?
For a deeper dive into the difference between vision, mission, strategy, and roadmap, check out Lenny Rachitsky’s breakdown. And if you’re struggling to articulate your product vision, listen to his excellent conversation with Ebi Atawodi — ex-Uber, Netflix, YouTube — where she breaks down how vision gets translated inside high-growth teams.
A product vision isn’t just branding fluff or a VC pitch line. It’s your team's north star when the roadmap gets messy — and it will. Great visions condense complexity into clarity. They create alignment without requiring a hundred Slack threads.
"We exist to [outcome] for [audience] by [approach]." — If your team can't fill that in, you don’t have a product vision. You have a backlog.
A solid vision excels in several key areas:
It’s memorable. One sentence, no jargon.
It sets the standard. If it doesn’t fit, it’s a no.
It scales. From V1 to V100, it still makes sense.
It welcomes. New hires get it without a 50-slide onboarding deck.
Here’s how it looks in the wild:
Mission: Airbnb wants a world where anyone can belong anywhere.
Vision: Every day, people offer unique stays and experiences.
Strategy: Build trust, keep UX simple, scale globally.
The difference? Vision is the part your team can build into every decision.
Building Vision in a Startup Environment
Startups don’t get the luxury of clarity upfront. You're sprinting toward PMF, juggling investor asks, and building through ambiguity. Vision isn't a polished deck you write before launch — it's the alignment engine you need while launching.
Here’s the play:
Start with your raw belief:
What pain point are you irrationally obsessed with?
Why is now the moment to solve it?
What do you see that the market doesn’t (yet)?
And get your team involved — early and loud. Forget overthinking Miro boards. Try:
Drafting a “future press release” for the product launch.
Mapping your users before/after.
Writing a 5-line story of a user’s day, transformed by your product.
Red Flags to Kill Early:
Feature wishlists disguised as vision.
Decks made to please VCs, not align teams.
Borrowed strategy language from unicorns 4 funding rounds ahead of you.
Vision in the early stage is messy. That’s fine. Just don’t confuse motion with alignment.
Vision in AI/ML Products — Navigating Uncertainty
AI/ML products are built in the fog. You're solving for a problem that’s still forming using tech that’s evolving weekly. What worked in your prototype demo might break next quarter. That’s the reality.
So, stop tying your product vision to the hottest model or the latest release notes. Tie it to a user outcome that doesn’t move.
Don’t say: "We’ll use LLMs to summarize customer feedback."
Say: "We help PMs discover insights in minutes, not days."
How to lead vision when R&D is a moving target:
Work in hypotheses, not feature specs.
Anchor the team on the problem, not the implementation.
Create fast feedback loops: Test → Fail → Learn → Refocus.
Replit nailed this:
Vision: Bring the next billion software creators online.
They went from a multiplayer IDE (Integrated Development Environment) to AI pair programming. Same North Star, new path.
What helps when things are fuzzy:
Ask: What would we build if AI didn’t exist?
Find: What’s the smallest, testable user win?
Measure: How do we know this outcome matters?
AI’s changing fast. Your vision shouldn’t have to.
In Enterprise Contexts: Vision Without the Visionary
Enterprises are where vision goes to get murky. PMs inherit quarterly OKRs, bloated backlogs, and PowerPoints from execs who haven’t talked to a user in years. It’s easy to default to execution. Don’t.
Here’s what sharp PMs do instead:
Deconstruct strategy docs. Translate them into real user problems.
Talk to actual customers. Don’t hide behind dashboards.
Run mini vision sessions with your team. Ask: “What would we not build if we believed in this vision?”
Case in point: Slack
Then: Slack apps were a ‘cool add-on.’
Now: Slack = your team’s automation backbone.
What changed? A reframed vision. Teams got reinspired. New Software Development Kit. Clear GTM.
You don’t need to be the founder. But if you're in the room, you're in charge of clarity.
Keeping the Vision Alive
Vision dies in silence. If you only bring it up once per quarter, it becomes wallpaper. If it’s not in the room during decision-making, it’s irrelevant.
Make it loud. Make it routine:
Start every roadmap review by re-reading the vision out loud.
Run "kill list" sessions monthly. What’s on the roadmap that doesn’t earn its place?
Automate Friday #vision-reminder posts — a quote, a user story, a mini-win. Keep it emotional.
When to reboot the vision:
Strategy changes and no one’s sure why.
You just survived a reorg.
Teams are busy but disconnected.
You don’t own the vision. You steward it. Your job is to keep it sharp, relevant, and top of mind — or watch it rot behind a Notion tab no one reads.
Real Stories of Vision that Changed the Game
You want proof that vision matters? Look at the pivots that didn’t just survive — they dominated because the vision held steady while the tactics changed.
Notion: Started as a team wiki. Realized their vision was bigger — a thinking canvas for the world. Product flexed. Vision didn’t.
Shopify: Started by selling snowboards. Vision? Empower entrepreneurs. They scrapped the shop and built the rails instead.
Hugging Face: A chatbot that flopped. But the deeper mission — democratize AI — turned it into the GitHub of machine learning.
Strong vision = optionality. Weak vision = confusion when the market shifts.
When in Doubt, Return to the Why
Vision doesn’t remove risk. It removes noise. You’ll still be wrong sometimes, but at least you’ll be wrong for the right reasons.
Whether you're tuning a model or scaling a feature, the vision is your BS filter. If it doesn’t serve the why, it doesn’t ship.
Don’t wait for permission. Don’t over-polish. Write it. Use it. Repeat it until your team rolls their eyes — that’s when it’s working.
Was this useful? Drop a comment, share it with your PM chat, or hit the like if your team’s vision could use a tune-up. Let’s make the fog a little less foggy — together.
If your team is lost, it’s not more process they need — it’s a reason to believe.
Don’t say: "We’ll use LLMs to summarize customer feedback."
Say: "We help PMs discover insights in minutes, not days."
I'm going to make almost this exact change to something on my roadmap first thing tomorrow 😂