Every founder hits a point where someone — an investor, an advisor, a co-founder — asks them to articulate their product vision and their product strategy. The two terms get used interchangeably so often that the distinction can feel academic. It isn’t. Getting the relationship between product vision and product strategy wrong is one of … Read more
Every founder has a product vision. It’s clear in their head — the product they want to build, the market they want to serve, the problem they’re going to solve. The difficulty is rarely the product vision itself. It’s that the vision usually exists as two separate things: a technical picture of what could be built and a commercial picture of what the market will pay for. Those two pictures live in different people’s heads, get articulated in different ways, and point in subtly different directions.
What investors at the pre-product stage are actually evaluating has very little to do with the solution. It has everything to do with the market, the urgency, and whether you understand the opportunity well enough to be trusted with capital.
Stakeholder alignment failures rarely look like disagreement. They look like a product that gets built correctly but misses what the sales team needed to sell it. A co-founder who seemed on board until the first major decision. An investor who backed the idea but had a different product in their head than the one being built. A board conversation that surfaces fundamental misalignment at exactly the point when it’s most expensive to address.
How to write a product brief: You’ve thought through the product. The logic is clear in your head. You write it up, hand it to a developer or a design agency, and wait. What comes back is close — but not quite right. A flow that doesn’t match what you imagined. A feature that solves … Read more