Vision Evolved: From Launchpad to Legacy
Why your product's North Star needs to move with the times.
Hey, welcome back! It feels like we’ve been on a bit of a journey together, doesn’t it?
First, in “Escape the Feature Factory: Crafting a Product Vision That Ignites Initial Innovation,” we talked about that crucial first step: finding your North Star. We explored how a compelling Product Vision can yank us out of the daily grind of just churning out features and, instead, point our teams toward building something truly innovative and meaningful, especially when we’re launching something new or aiming to revitalize a product.
Then, in “The ‘Good Enough’ Masterpiece: Knowing When to Shift Innovation from Your Star Product to the Next Big Thing,” we tackled the sophisticated, sometimes uncomfortable, challenge that comes after initial success. We discussed the strategic wisdom in recognizing when your star product has brilliantly fulfilled its core purpose, becoming a “good enough” masterpiece, and how that very success can be the signal to redirect your most potent innovative energies toward cultivating the next big breakthrough.
But here’s the thing about North Stars, even the brightest ones: from our perspective here on Earth, they appear fixed, but the universe is always in motion. And our products, our markets, our users? They’re in constant motion, too. This brings us to the final, and perhaps most nuanced, part of our vision trilogy: What happens beyond launch day and even beyond that first wave of stellar success? How does that powerful Product Vision, the one you so carefully crafted, need to breathe, adapt, and evolve right alongside your product as it journeys through its own lifecycle?
Today, we’re diving into why your Product Vision isn’t a “set it and forget it” monument but rather a living, breathing guide that must learn new dance steps as the market’s music changes.
Why Your “Set-in-Stone” Vision Might Actually Be a Tombstone
There’s a certain romantic appeal to the idea of an unwavering, immutable vision. It sounds resolute, doesn’t it? Like a captain steadfastly guiding their ship through any storm, eyes fixed on a single, unchanging point of light. And indeed, consistency of purpose is vital.
However, in the dynamic world of product development, a vision that’s too rigid, too resistant to adaptation in the face of new learning or profound market shifts can become less of a guiding light and more of a… well, a very elegantly carved tombstone for innovation.
Think about it:
Markets are Living Ecosystems: Customer needs evolve. New technologies emerge, creating new possibilities and new expectations. Competitors adapt and introduce novel threats or opportunities. A vision crafted in a vacuum, or one that never looks up to see how the landscape has changed, will quickly become obsolete.
Your Understanding Deepens: As your product is used in the wild and you gather more data through conversations with users, your own understanding of the problem space, unmet needs, and potential solutions will inevitably become richer and more nuanced. Why wouldn’t your vision benefit from this accumulated wisdom?
Unforeseen Opportunities (and Obstacles) Emerge: No vision, however brilliant, can anticipate every twist and turn. Sometimes, the most exciting opportunities are ones you stumble upon or ones that only become visible once you’ve reached a particular stage of maturity with your current product. A vision that’s too brittle can’t flex to embrace these.
I recall working on strategic planning for Renova Energia, a large energy company, as we navigated the then-nascent renewable energy market in Brazil. Our initial vision was bold: to be a leader in clean energy generation. But “clean energy” itself was a rapidly evolving concept. Wind technology was improving, solar costs were plummeting, and even small-hydro had its place. If our vision had been rigidly tied to, say, only wind farms of a particular scale, we would have missed massive opportunities to build a diversified, resilient portfolio that ultimately led to a significant increase in share value. Our overarching vision of “leadership in clean energy” had to be elastic enough to incorporate new technologies and adapt to shifting regulatory landscapes and market dynamics. The essence remained, but its expression evolved.
A static vision risks your product becoming a beautifully preserved relic of a time and a set of assumptions that no longer exist. The goal isn’t to abandon your core purpose at every whim but to ensure your vision remains a relevant and practical guide through the inevitable currents of change.
The Product Lifecycle Tango: How Your Vision Learns New Steps
The most common framework for understanding a product’s journey is the Product Lifecycle: Introduction, Growth, Maturity, and Decline. What is often overlooked is how the emphasis, scope, and even the articulation of your Product Vision should adapt gracefully to each of these distinct phases. It’s like a dance – the fundamental steps might be the same, but the rhythm, energy, and flourish change with each act.
Let’s break down how your vision might evolve:
Act 1: The Launchpad – Vision as Rocket Fuel (Introduction & Growth)
This is where your vision, as we discussed in Article 1, needs to be at its most expansive, ambitious, and inspiring.
Emphasis: Disruption, market creation, establishing a beachhead, evangelizing a new way of doing things.
Characteristics:
Bold & Unconventional: It challenges existing norms and paints a picture of a dramatically different and better future. Think of Airbnb’s early vision, which wasn’t just about renting rooms but about enabling people to “Belong Anywhere.” That was a vast, culture-shifting idea.
Customer Problem-Focused: It’s laser-focused on solving a significant, often unarticulated, pain point for a specific group of early adopters who are eager for a new solution.
Rallying Cry for the Team: It needs to be powerful enough to motivate a team through the uncertainties and intense effort of launching something new and finding product-market fit. It’s the fuel that gets the rocket off the ground.
Flexible on the “How”: While the “what” (the future state) is clear, the “how” (the specific features and path) is often highly experimental and iterative during this phase. The vision provides the direction for these experiments.
During the introduction and growth phases, your vision is your primary tool for attracting talent, securing investment (if applicable), and convincing early customers to take a chance on you. It’s about selling the dream, the potential, the transformative impact. Minor pivots in features or tactics are standard, but they should all be in service of that grand, guiding vision.
Act 2: The High Plateau – Vision as a Telescope & Shield (Maturity)
Your product has found its footing. You have a solid user base, predictable revenue, and established market share. The “rocket” is in a stable orbit. Now what? The nature of your vision needs to adapt. It’s less about explosive liftoff and more about sustained flight and navigating a more complex environment.
Emphasis: Optimization, market expansion (new segments or geographies), differentiation against established competitors, efficiency, and defending your position. This is also where the “good enough” masterpiece concept from Article 2 comes into play for your core offering.
Characteristics:
Refined & Focused on Deeper Value: The vision might narrow slightly to focus on delivering exceptional value and solving adjacent problems for your now well-understood core audience. How can you enhance their experience, make it more integrated, and make it more indispensable?
Strategic Expansion: It may expand to encompass new user segments or new applications of your core technology or solution. The vision now guides where to extend for maximum leverage. At ClickSitter, once we’d established our model in our initial cities, our vision for growth involved a replicable playbook – adapting our core offering for the unique nuances of each new urban market rather than radically reinventing the product each time. The core vision of “trusted, simple childcare” remained, but its application expanded geographically.
Competitive Differentiation: As competitors emerge or mature, your vision helps articulate your unique value proposition and why users should continue to choose you. It becomes a shield, protecting your market share.
Efficiency and Scalability: The vision may now incorporate elements of doing things more efficiently, sustainably (in a business sense), and at a greater scale without compromising the core magic.
Paving the Way for the “Next Thing”: Critically, as your core product matures and becomes that “good enough” masterpiece, your company’s vision may prompt the exploration of entirely new product lines or innovations (like Arc Browser and DIA). The vision for the mature product then includes being a stable, profitable engine that fundsand enables this next wave.
During maturity, your vision is less about raw inspiration and more about strategic clarity. It helps you make tough choices about where to invest for continued growth versus where to optimize and when to channel resources toward the next S-curve of innovation. It’s a telescope to spot future opportunities and a shield to protect your hard-won gains.
Act 3: The Graceful Sunset (or Strategic Hibernation) – Vision as a Legacy & Bridge (Decline/Maintenance)
All products eventually enter a phase of decline. This isn’t necessarily a failure; it’s a natural part of the lifecycle. Alternatively, as we discussed in Article 2, you may strategically transition a “good enough” masterpiece into active maintenance. Here, the vision plays yet another crucial, though different, role.
Emphasis: Maximizing value from remaining users, ensuring a smooth transition for users if the product is being retired, supporting the legacy, and clearly communicating the future (or lack thereof for this specific product).
Characteristics:
Clarity and Honesty: The vision for a declining or maintained product needs to be brutally honest. What is the commitment to existing users? How long will support continue? What are the alternatives?
Focus on Legacy & Learnings: Even in decline, a product has a legacy. The vision might focus on extracting maximum value or learnings that can inform future products. What did this product teach us? How did it contribute to our overall company mission?
User Transition & Support: If users need to be migrated to a newer product or an alternative solution, the vision guides how this is done with empathy and minimal disruption.
Resource Reallocation (The Final Act): The vision confirms the strategic decision to wind down investment in this area and fully reallocate those resources to growth areas, as discussed in Article 2.
A Bridge to the Future: For the team, the “vision” for a sunsetting product often revolves around how its legacy, technology, or customer relationships can serve as a bridge to the company’s next generation of offerings. It’s about closing one chapter gracefully to make space for the next.
I was once involved in advising a company that had a very successful but aging desktop software product. The market had irrevocably shifted to cloud-based solutions. The vision for that desktop product couldn’t no longer be about growth. It became about: 1) Providing stellar, unwavering support for the loyal, long-term users who still relied on it. 2) Creating a clear, attractive migration path to their new cloud offering. 3) Systematically sunsetting features that were costly to maintain and offered little value to the remaining user base. The “vision” was one of responsible stewardship and using the old product as a gentle ramp to the new rather than an abrupt cliff. It preserved customer goodwill and facilitated the company’s overall transition.
The key is that even in decline, a sense of purpose and clear direction – a form of vision – is essential for managing the process effectively and respectfully.
The Symphony Conductor: Leadership’s Role in Orchestrating Vision Evolution
Evolving a Product Vision isn’t an automatic process; it requires deliberate leadership. Just like a symphony conductor, leaders must interpret the core “score” (the company mission), listen to the different sections of the “orchestra” (market, users, team), and guide the performance, adapting the tempo and dynamics as needed.
Key Leadership Responsibilities:
Constant Sensing and Synthesizing: Leaders must remain attuned to market trends, technological advancements, competitive shifts, and user sentiment. They need to synthesize this information and understand its implications for the current vision. My numerology (double 11s – Life Path and Soul Urge) speaks to heightened intuition and perceptive abilities. As a leader, I’ve found this “sixth sense” for subtle shifts invaluable, but it must always be paired with data and team input.
Initiating the Conversation: It’s often up to leadership to recognize when it’s time to revisit the vision and to create the space for that strategic conversation. This takes courage, especially if the current vision has been successful.
Facilitating Co-Creation (When Appropriate): While the ultimate responsibility for vision often rests with leadership, the process of evolving it can be highly collaborative. Engaging the team in interpreting new realities and co-shaping the next iteration of the vision can lead to greater buy-in and richer insights.
Communicating the “Why” Behind the Shift: This is paramount. If the vision evolves, the team and other stakeholders need to understand why. How do new market realities or learnings necessitate this change? How does the evolved vision still connect to the core company mission? Clear, consistent, and empathetic communication is crucial to bring everyone along. This is where your Prosci change management skills become so vital, Taric.
Maintaining Core Identity and Values: Even as the vision evolves to accommodate different lifecycle stages, it should remain faithful to the company’s fundamental values and core identity. The expression of the vision changes, but its essence should endure.
Making Tough Calls: Evolving a vision often involves making difficult choices – such as sunsetting beloved features, reallocating resources away from comfortable areas, or entering uncertain new markets. Leaders must be prepared to make these calls, guided by the recalibrated vision.
A vision that evolves gracefully, guided by insightful leadership, is a sign of a healthy, adaptive, and resilient organization – one that’s built not just for today’s success but for enduring relevance.
When the North Star Moves: Triggers for a Vision Recalibration
So, how do you know it’s time to formally sit down and re-examine your Product Vision? It’s not something you do every sprint, but there are definite triggers:
Major Market Disruptions: A new technology emerges that fundamentally changes the game (think AI’s recent impact across industries). A new competitor redefines the category. A significant shift in user behavior or economic conditions occurs.
You’ve Largely Achieved Your Current Vision: If you can honestly say you’ve delivered on the core promise of your existing vision, it might be time to set your sights on a new, more ambitious horizon.
Persistent Mismatch Between Vision and Reality: If your team is constantly struggling to reconcile the vision with what they’re actually building, or if the vision no longer excites or guides them, it’s a sign it needs a refresh.
Significant Strategic Pivot at the Company Level: If the overall company mission or strategy undergoes a change, individual product visions will likely need to be realigned accordingly.
Consistently Diminishing Returns: As discussed in Article 2, if you’re seeing clear signs that further investment in the current product direction isn’t yielding proportional value, it may be that the vision for that product has run its course and a new one (perhaps for a new product) is needed.
A Regular Cadence: Even without major disruptions, it’s healthy to have a strategic review cadence (e.g., annually) where you explicitly reassess your Product Vision in light of the past year’s learnings and the outlook for the future. My experience leading annual strategic planning, aligning product vision with broader organizational goals, underscored the value of this regular recalibration.
Your Vision: A Living Blueprint for Enduring Impact
Ultimately, your Product Vision isn’t a static artifact to be framed and forgotten. It’s a dynamic, living blueprint that should evolve as your product, your market, and your understanding grow. It’s the story you’re telling about the future you’re trying to create. Like all good stories, it can have new chapters, surprising plot twists, and evolving character arcs.
Embracing the evolutionary nature of vision is what separates truly resilient and innovative companies from those that eventually fade into irrelevance. It’s about having the wisdom to know when to hold steadfast to your core principles and the courage to adapt your path when the landscape shifts.
Navigating Your Product’s Evolving Horizon
Understanding how to craft an initial vision, recognizing when it’s time to shift innovative focus from a mature “good enough” masterpiece, and guiding the evolution of that vision through the product lifecycle are all critical leadership competencies. These aren’t just theoretical exercises; they are the practical work of building products and companies that endure and make a genuine impact.
If you’re looking to build this adaptive, visionary capability within your leadership team or across your product organization, know that there are frameworks and facilitated processes that can help. From intensive workshops on visionary product development (for that initial spark and ongoing recalibration) to high-level strategic advisory on portfolio management and navigating these lifecycle transitions, the goal is to equip you to confidently chart and re-chart your course towards ever more impactful horizons.
Your product’s journey is long and ever-changing. Ensure its vision is a companion that evolves in tandem with it.