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The Vision Stack — Part 2 — Impact of Each Layer

Each layer is the Vision Stack is meaningful and contributes to the goal of alignment and focus. Skipping one is like skipping breakfast. You won’t starve, but you’re making life harder for yourself.

17 min readMay 22, 2025

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Contents

  • Introduction
  • Do we really need all this?
  • What if you don’t do it all?
    — 1. What if we don’t have a clear product vision?
    — 2. What if we don’t have clear objectives
    — 3. What if we don’t have a defined strategy
    — 4. The most common pattern I see
  • Getting out of this mess
  • A little feedback please
  • My other articles and podcasts

Introduction

In Part 1, I formally introduced the Vision Stack, described the various layers in it and provided links to specific articles about the layers.

In this post I will dig further into the stack and and explain why all the layers are important, and why it’s not a good idea to pick and choose which ones you want to use.

NOTE: In response to some reader questions after writing Part 1, I wrote Strategy and the Vision Stack. This post explains the placement of Vision and Strategy in the framework. Have a look and let me know your thoughts.

For your reference — The Vision Stack

Do we really need all this?

One of the questions I get when talking about the stack is “Do we really need to do all of this?”, or “This looks like a lot of work, do we have to define all of this?”

I’ll be honest. I have to chuckle when I get these types of questions. It speaks volumes about the culture in the tech industry where Product organizations don’t do the basics of their job. And then we wonder why so many products fail or why there is such frustration amongst Product Managers in their jobs.

Can you imagine how successful a Sales team would be if they didn’t do the basics? i.e. understanding their ICPs, focusing on the needs of their potential customers, doing qualification and proper funnel management, aligning with whatever Sales methodology and processes their company has?

The same is true for Marketing teams. If they ran marketing campaigns without clear messaging, positioning, understanding of their target audience, and without clear goals to measure against, they’d probably not be very successful would they?

And the same holds for Engineering teams. Imagine if they just wrote their code, and didn’t think through design, architecture, scalability, maintainability etc. They certainly could produce working software...for a while. But in time, it would become evident they’d created problems for themselves and the company, because releases would slow down or support cases would rise due to software instability etc.

For each of Sales, Marketing and Engineering, there are critical actions they take to work effectively in an ongoing manner. They all define metrics of some kind to show how well they are doing at their core jobs, and there is either measurable business impact or well defined outputs that show the value of their work.

What if you don’t do it all?

So, to answer that question from above — Do we have to do it all of this? — the answer is “No. You don’t have to do it all.”

You don’t have to do any of it, to be honest. You can do whatever you want, however you want, but you’d have to live with the results. And if by some chance you achieve consistently good results that’s great. Congratulations!!

The same could be said for other teams like Engineering or Sales. If they have no repeatable processes for their work, and they (somehow) consistently achieve their goals, then great. But, honestly, how likely will they be in delivering repeated success?

Having seen Sales, Marketing and Engineering teams across many companies, what I can say is that most leaders, particularly in Engineering and quite often in Sales and Marketing, work to create defined and efficient systems of operation for their organizations. They realize how critical their work is to the success of the company and strive to improve their ability to deliver results.

The reality for Product orgs is that in MOST companies, they don’t do all of this important work, even though doing it would be a significant benefit to them. They might have some parts of each layer, or they might be missing some aspects entirely.

But, when you see the results, or lack of them, as they struggle in the market, get outpaced by more focused competition, are less innovative etc., you realize there is a LOT of value in Product Management doing the work that needs to be done.

Let’s look at a few common scenarios.

1. What if we don’t have a clear product vision?

As mentioned in Part 1, a Product Vision defines the long term benefit or impact you want to achieve with the product. It explains the WHY for the product. Remember a Vision has 4 parts:

  • Current (Market) Situation
  • A Problem that Exists (in the market)
  • Relevant Trends (that will help you solve the problem)
  • The Opportunity at Hand (where you will focus the product)

The Vision is anchoring you, your team and your company on an understanding of the market, a problem that exists in the market and a clear market opportunity that you see and will focus on. This is the first level of alignment and focus.

Let’s assume you don’t have a Product Vision.

Vision Stack diagram, but there is no Product Vision. The top layer is Business Vision, Objectives, Strategy, and then Product Objectives, Product Strategy, Product Roadmap and Releases at the bottom.
Vision Stack, but with no Product Vision

If you’re a single product company, you could probably function like this. You will have some idea of the market — it’s not going be absolutely ZERO vision, but your understanding of the market problem/opportunity will be hazy and weak. It will be easy to meander and lose focus on your longer term goals.

Without a clear vision, objectives become your guiding focus — let’s assume you have them and they are clearly defined, because not all companies do. Those objectives will likely be tied to business goals, often things like revenue or customer acquisition or growth. What does that mean for your company and your products?

For the company, it means exactly what those goals are: closing deals, acquiring customers, growing your user base etc. But what makes a good deal, a good customer, a good set of users? Is that even part of the discussion, because not all customers or deals are equal.

The challenge here, especially in B2B companies, is that new customers usually come with new use cases or new feature requests, and addressing those becomes necessary to grow, regardless of what those use cases or features are.

NOTE: I wrote a detailed article on how to handle these requests, but one of the criteria is that you have a clear vision. You can read more about it here.

This is a common pattern in B2B companies, particularly smaller ones. The challenge for these companies is that as they grow, there is pressure to address these new customer “requirements” to close the deals, generate revenue, pay the bills etc.

And when implementing the requests tied to these deals, the product gets more complex, the code base gets more bloated and enhancements take more time and effort. Marketing and Selling also become more expensive as the product becomes less focussed and more open to attack by competitors.

Innovation becomes slower and more costly. It opens the door to more focused competition who can respond more quickly and who take new customers and marketshare.

It’s death by a 1000 customizations.

An example of lack of vision

I’ve seen many examples of companies focusing on deals and individual feature requests, but the most extreme case I’ve seen of this was a company in the finance market, that had ~50 medium to large customers and had the same number of forks in their code base. i.e. they didn’t have a single product, but ~50 different applications, each customized for each customer.

I knew the CTO there. He told me they had hired a Product Manager, who quit after 3 days. “Smart person” I thought. They should have hired a Project Manager instead, because that’s the kind of business they were.

They were focused on a market, but had no vision, and their objectives were customer acquisition and revenue. Their engineering team was effectively a large services organization that worked primarily on customer requests.

But their sales people were happy — every deal was a big deal because of the customizations. It eventually caught up with them. The CTO left less than a year after I spoke to him and the company followed with a round of layoffs. I’m pretty sure their investors realized the trouble the company leadership had created for themselves.

Benefits of a clear vision

Having a clear vision is important, but actively using it to guide decisions is even more important. A vision that is created and then forgotten or ignored is of no value, and as seen in the example above, a lack of vision and focus solely on deals and individual customer needs is incredibly costly in the long run.

2. What if we don’t have clear Objectives?

I’ll be honest, I’ve not come across a company with a clear vision and no clear objectives. Usually it is either a fuzzy vision and fuzzy objectives, or objectives tied to revenue or something similar. But there is usually a lot of room for improvement on this front.

Vision Stack diagram, but there are no Product Objectives. The top layer is Business Vision, Objectives, Strategy, and then Product Vision, Product Strategy, Product Roadmap and Releases at the bottom.
Vision Stack, but with No Clear Product Objectives

As I wrote in this article on objectives:

“Often people think of objectives in very functional, or dare I say boring, ways. e.g. Financial targets or customer acquisition targets or product usage targets etc.

But it’s important to think of objectives in bigger, more aspirational ways. Objective setting is a tool to help you imagine a future that you want to see and then work towards achieving it. This may sound like Vision talk, but when thinking this way about Objectives, it’s a way to help drive towards that Vision or other states that shape the market in your favour.

I’m referring to a method of thinking about a future where:

— your company or product is winning in the market, or

— your customers (current or future) are achieving MUCH better outcomes through the use of your company’s products or services.”

When I think of good objectives, I think of what is described in the latter part of this quote above. i.e. winning in the market, or delivering superior customer outcomes (which will then help you win in the market).

These are the kind of objectives that teams get up for in the morning and get excited about. Sure, revenue targets are good, but unless that’s what you’re compensated on and can directly impact, it’s of little relevance. And revenue is usually short-term — this year — but how is simply striving for a revenue target this year, going to set you up for success NEXT YEAR? That’s how Product Management needs to be thinking — about the future beyond what Sales/Marketing are focused on.

Diagram asking — Where are Teams Focusing. Shows 3 columns. Now, Near Future, Future. Sales is focused in the Now column. Marketing is focused in the Now and into the Near Future. Product Is a little bit in the Now, but focused in the Near Future and Future.
Areas of Focus for various teams in a company

Product Management cannot only be focused on short term objectives (this quarter or next quarter), nor only on financial or other business targets (like revenue) that are the responsibility of other teams.

Product Management should absolutely be cognizant of those business objectives, and derive ways — via specific Product objectives or agreed upon product activities — that the leadership team agrees will significantly contribute to achieving those objectives. But Product Management needs to be looking at markets and trends, and identifying new opportunities in existing markets, adjacent markets or even new ones for the company to focus on.

Without clear objectives, there can be no strategy

Strategy consists of the aligned choices you make to achieve an objective. If you don’t have clear objectives, then against what are you going to apply strategy? But once you’ve defined objectives and strategy, you can define a (strategic) roadmap based on that strategy. I wrote about this process in detail in two articles on strategic roadmapping. Here’s Part 1. It has links to Part 2 in it.

Boring objectives, boring results

Objectives that inspire teams, that challenge them, that enable companies to defeat their competition are what is required. Revenue targets don’t inspire. They are absolutely necessary for GTM teams, but for Product teams, complement them with objectives that provoke thinking and exploration into new markets, new use cases and new ways of meeting market needs.

3. What if we don’t have a defined Strategy?

Every Product Manager wants to be “strategic”. But many product managers claim they are not responsible for strategy. And I’ve often heard Product Managers say, their teams or leaders have no strategy.

Strategy can be summarized as a set of aligned or coherent choices that best enable a company or (product) team to achieve their objectives.

Vision Stack diagram, but there is no Product Strategy. The top layer is Business Vision, Objectives, Strategy, and then Product Vision, Product Objectives, Product Roadmap and Releases at the bottom.
Vision Stack — but with No Product Strategy

Defining good strategy is an intentional activity, done by informed people with clear and common understanding of what they are trying to achieve. There is nothing in this definition that confines strategy to the C-suite, or that requires a multi-day offsite.

Strategy is defined by identifying the potential paths forward to achieve objectives, and selecting the specific path(s) you believe will best help you achieve those objectives.

Without strategy, there is usually little or no coherence to the actions. They may move you forward, but they don’t always support each other or compound in their benefit. The result is usually slow progress or missed opportunity.

Even if you don’t have an explicit, well-defined and communicated strategy, the company is still making choices and decisions about how to compete in the market and achieve whatever objectives have been set. Those consistent choices (if there are any), can be called the strategy. It may not be a good strategy though.

For example, if a company consistently tries to undercut its competitors on price, then it is following a low-cost provider strategy, even if it doesn’t realize this.

The problem here is that, a true low-cost provider strategy would accept lower revenue because they have lower costs (thus maintaining margins). But if the company doesn’t explicitly focus on lowering it’s costs, then winning deals at lower prices only makes it a less profitable company. Not a great strategy.

Thoughtful Strategy Increases Chances for Success

There are many different ways people define strategy, but I prefer to think about it as being intentional, thoughtful and consistent in the choices we make to acheive our objectives. Haphazard or inconsistent decisions are not the way to win in the market. Having an explicit, thoughtful strategy working to achieve meaningful objectives is how companies can increase their odds of success in the market.

4. The Most Common Pattern I See

What often happens, and I’ve seen it many times in companies I’ve worked with, is the following:

There is no clear or defined Product Vision. People have “an idea” or “some thoughts” or a “general sense” on what the product does — e.g. an analytics product or an HR product or something similar — and the benefits they want to provide, but the vision hasn’t been formally thought through as described earlier in this post.

Objectives exist, but they are typically lagging business objectives like revenue or growth etc. There is little or no formal strategy. i.e. given the objectives, the focus is on achieving those objectives with little or no explicit discussion of the best ways to achieve them. It’s all about “execution”.

The picture looks something like this:

Vision Stack diagram, but there is no Product Vision or Strategy. The top layer is Business Vision, Objectives, Strategy, and thenProduct Objectives, Product Roadmap and Releases at the bottom. But what becomes of the Product Roadmap if there is no strategy?
Vision Stack — No Product Vision, No Product Strategy

Now the question is, without a strategy, what happens to the roadmap? i.e. if a roadmap is the output of a strategy process, what becomes of it when there is no strategy?

The answer is that the roadmap and plans merge into one — a Planmap or Roadplan or whatever you want to call it— and the gap is filled by other things.

Welcome to the Feature Factory

Many companies operate as Feature Factories, where Customer Issues, Sales Requests, Engineering Needs and Executive “Initiatives” are what gets built. The problem here is that this is really just a random assortment of activities that are “prioritized” purely from self-interest. There isn’t an explicit focus on particular use cases or overall market needs, or focus on competitive advantage.

Where is Product Management in this? They’re taking orders and trying to appease “stakeholders” most likely. i.e. focusing on delivery management and NOT on actual product management. I’ve never seen a feature factory where the IC Product Managers were happy with the situation. And this is the reason, we see such high levels of frustration and burnout amongst software PMs.

It’s also the reason we see so many posts like this on Reddit in r/productmanagement.

I’ve shown the Feature Factory slide multiple times to clients and unfortunately most of them see a lot of themselves in this slide. And yet, they are functioning. They are releasing products or features. Marketing is marketing. Sales is selling. Support is supporting. etc.

But is the company maximizing their market potential? No.

Are they effectively fending off their competition? No.

Is this a sustainable way for the company to operate? No.

Getting out of this mess

When I encounter a feature factory (or other ineffective organizational state), I try to speak with the Product Leader (VP Product, CPO etc.) about the situation.

If there is a leader, it’s often someone who doesn’t have a strong product background. i.e. they haven’t worked as an individual contributor Product Manager and worked their way up. Thus, they don’t understand the value of many of these concepts, how and why they are interconnected and important, and most importantly, don’t understand how to create a system for their teams to define, implement and BENEFIT from them.

The job of product leaders

I can’t stress the following enough. It is a primary duty of an organizational leader (Sales, Marketing, Engineering, Product etc.) to define the organization’s working model and work with their teams to implement them, so that teams can be as effective as possible. This happens widely and openly in most other orgs, but is usually missing in Product.

As David Marquet, author of Turn the Ship Around said:

“…as leaders, our responsibility is to design the organization so that the individuals can be the best versions of themselves.”

It’s very hard to design that system when you’ve never operated inside a well run system yourself.

When there isn’t a strong product leader — e.g. it’s a CEO or founder dictating things from above — the problem is compounded. i.e. you have someone with significant authority but without the awareness of better ways of working, AND, whose context and focus is very different from what many Product leaders would have.

Focus on identifying the problems to solve

Regardless of the situation, I started with challenges they are having. i.e.

What challenges are they currently facing that are causing them real pain?

This is a good place to start as people will be more than happy to tell you their pains (assuming you are there to help them address those pains), and it starts with a focus on the potential problems to solve.

The challenges could be lack of sales, tough competitors, lack of adoption/usage, issues with product definition and delivery etc. This leads into discussions about current processes (or lack of them), previous attempts to address the challenges, current team skillsets, turnover and more. People need to understand that their situation today is the result of decisions and actions in the past. So addressing them means understanding how they got there.

I then focus on areas of alignment or misalignment — trying to understand both. I ask about vision and objectives.

  • Are they clearly defined, understood, referenced and used?
  • What is the quality of the objectives?
  • Are they mushy/loose, or are they specific, measurable and timebound?

Usually they are the former and not the latter. My favourite answer on vision came from someone who said :

“No. We have lots of vision. But it’s different with every person you ask.”

And finally, I look into strategy and roadmaps. As for strategy, the first question is whether there is any clear or defined strategy. There’s usually a lot of talk about “strategic objectives” or “strategic pillars” or “strategic plans”, but not a lot of actual strategy itself — i.e. “strategic choices”. And of course we get to roadmaps. A favourite topic for many.

  • Are the roadmaps simply wish lists?
  • How are they created?
  • How are they connected (if at all) to objectives and strategy.

Once this is done, I’ll do some quantitative analysis as well, getting consistent data from across the organization on various topics. It varies from company to company, but this data often covers areas such as:

  • Vision and Culture
  • Product Research and Planning
  • Product Delivery and Go-to-Market
  • Cross-team Coordination
  • Customer Inclusion and Interaction
  • Leadership and Management

All of this goes into a broader understanding — an assessment — of what is working well and what isn’t. This gives a baseline to work from and measure against once changes are made.

It’s important to provide both sides (i.e. the good and the bad). No company is completely dysfunctional, but often perceptions are that their dysfunctions overshadow any goodness they have. We then lay out a plan with the leadership team to address the problems and help them achieve their goals.

It’s important to understand that this is not simply “product work”. Yes, it’s the product management team that is the focus of the change in my work, but given the cross-functional nature of product management, buy-in and collaboration with Sales, Marketing and Engineering (at minimum) is critical. e.g. working with Marketing on Product Launch should start VERY early in the product development process, not a few weeks before something is released.

This work takes time to show results. Depending on the organization, it is a 6–12 month process (possibly longer depending on the appetite and opportunity for change in the company), and that assumes no major distractions (e.g. major economic issues, market shifts, internal reorgs etc.) that would pull focus away from the change.

Here’s a chart that a client sent me about the shift in focus of their product managers over a 12 month period. I was working closely with the Product Leader and PMs to improve their focus by leveraging the Vision Stack. I was not aware they were tracking work this way, but it was good to see the change over a year and the primary focus on Product Discovery (a huge and positive change) and the reduction in Engineering Support. i.e. compare the first (May) column with the last (April) column.

Improvement in PM focus over 12 month period by using the Vision Stack

Keep in mind, the change happened because the wider company and especially Engineering understood that Product Management time was better spent outside the office, gaining market and customer insights and bringing those into the company, and spending less time overseeing what Engineering was doing.

I always remind myself (and my clients) of the following:

Change is a process, not an event.

i.e. as much as we want to make “big changes” and fix problems, the reality is that everything requires time. Individuals need to change, teams need to change, organizations need to change, processes need to change, expectations need to change and mindsets need to change in order for results to change. But in the end, the results are substantial, both for the Product organization as well as the company overall.

A Little Feedback Please

If you’ve read this far, thank you. I’d like some feedback on the article to make it better. It’s just a few questions and should take just 1 minute, but will really be valuable to me. Thanks in advance.

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My other articles and podcasts

If you found this article helpful and want to read my other writing or listen to my podcasts/interviews on Product Management, you can find an indexed list of it here.

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Saeed Khan
Saeed Khan

Written by Saeed Khan

Product Consultant. Contact me for help in building great products, processes and people. http://www.transformationlabs.io

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