---
name: product-strategy-vision
description: Craft a product vision, strategic narrative, or north star in a focused session. Use when leadership needs a strategy document or when the team needs direction.
---

# Product Strategy & Vision

Create a product vision, strategic narrative, and strategy-on-a-page in a focused 2-4 hour session — not a multi-week offsite. Claude drafts the artifacts; you provide the insight about users, market, and company context that makes strategy real.

## When to Use

- Leadership asks for a product vision or strategy document
- The team is executing without a clear "why" and you need to set direction
- You're entering a new fiscal year or planning cycle and need to frame priorities
- After a major discovery effort, you need to translate findings into strategy
- The current strategy no longer fits the market and needs to evolve

## When NOT to Use

- You need to prioritize a backlog — use Prioritization frameworks in FRAMEWORKS.md
- You need stakeholder buy-in on a specific decision — use Stakeholder Alignment
- You need to validate whether a problem is real — use Discovery Process first

## The AI-Native Approach

**Traditional strategy:** 2-4 week process of workshops, executive interviews, market analysis, and multiple draft reviews.

**AI-native strategy:** A focused 2-4 hour session where Claude handles the structural work and you provide the strategic judgment. The quality comes from your insight, not from the length of the process.

| Step | Time | Claude Does | You Do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Assess current state | 30 min | Structure market position, competitive context, user data | Validate and add what the data doesn't show |
| Define the vision | 45 min | Generate vision statement variants, stress-test each | Choose the one that captures your conviction |
| Set the north star | 30 min | Propose metric candidates with rationale | Select the metric your team will rally around |
| Build the narrative | 45 min | Draft strategic narrative connecting vision to execution | Add the "why now" that only you know |
| Create strategy-on-a-page | 30 min | Format the output as a one-page reference | Review for clarity and conviction |

## Process

### Step 1: Assess Current State (30 minutes)

```
Here's our current context:
- Product: [what it does, who it serves]
- Market position: [how we're positioned vs. competitors]
- Key metrics: [MRR/ARR, growth rate, retention, market share]
- Recent learnings: [what we've discovered from users, data, or the market]
- Company context: [strategic priorities, constraints, investment appetite]

Summarize our current state in three sections:
1. Where we are (honest assessment — strengths and weaknesses)
2. What's changing (market shifts, user needs evolution, competitive moves)
3. What's at stake (opportunity cost of inaction, window of opportunity)
```

### Step 2: Define the Vision (45 minutes)

```
Based on our current state, draft 3 product vision statements.

A good vision statement:
- Describes a future state for our users, not a feature list
- Is ambitious but achievable in 2-3 years
- Differentiates us from alternatives
- Inspires the team without being vague

For each variant:
- The vision statement (2-3 sentences)
- Who it prioritizes (and who it de-prioritizes)
- What trade-off it makes (you can't serve everyone equally)
- What it means for the next 12 months of roadmap
```

Choose the variant that matches your conviction about where the market is going and what your team can uniquely deliver. If none are right, tell Claude what's missing and iterate.

### Step 3: Set the North Star Metric (30 minutes)

```
Given our vision, propose 3-5 candidates for a north star metric.

A north star metric:
- Directly measures the value users get from the product
- Leads revenue (not lags it)
- Is movable by the product team's work
- Can be decomposed into actionable sub-metrics
- Is understandable by everyone on the team

For each candidate:
- The metric and how it's measured
- Current value and realistic 12-month target
- How it decomposes (what levers move it)
- Risk: what behavior does optimizing this metric incentivize, and is that healthy?
```

### Step 4: Build the Strategic Narrative (45 minutes)

The strategic narrative connects your vision to your execution plan. It answers "why this, why now, why us."

```
Draft a strategic narrative that connects:
1. The user problem we're solving (grounded in evidence)
2. Why the market is ready for this now (timing)
3. Why we're uniquely positioned to win (differentiation)
4. What we're betting on (the core hypothesis)
5. How we'll know it's working (north star + milestones)
6. What we're explicitly NOT doing (strategic trade-offs)

Write it as a narrative, not a bullet list — this needs to be compelling
enough for leadership to fund and for the team to rally around.
Keep it under 2 pages.
```

### Step 5: Strategy-on-a-Page (30 minutes)

```
Condense our strategic narrative into a one-page strategy reference:

- Vision: [2-3 sentences]
- North star metric: [metric + 12-month target]
- Strategic bets: [3-5 key initiatives with rationale]
- What we're NOT doing: [explicit trade-offs]
- Key milestones: [quarterly checkpoints]
- Success criteria: [how we'll evaluate in 12 months]

Format as a clean, skimmable single page I can share with the team.
```

## Output

- Current state assessment
- Product vision statement (chosen from variants)
- North star metric with decomposition
- Strategic narrative (2 pages max)
- Strategy-on-a-page (one-page reference)

## Common Pitfalls

1. **Vision without trade-offs.** "We'll be the best platform for everyone" isn't a strategy. Strategy is choosing what NOT to do. If your vision doesn't exclude anyone, it doesn't guide anyone.
2. **North star that doesn't decompose.** If the team can't identify what levers move the metric, it's aspirational, not actionable.
3. **Strategy disconnected from evidence.** Vision should be informed by what you've learned from users and the market, not invented in a conference room.
4. **Perfection over progress.** A good-enough strategy today beats a perfect strategy next quarter. This is a living document — revisit it quarterly.
5. **Strategy as a document, not a decision.** If the strategy doesn't change what you're building this quarter, it's a poster, not a strategy.

## Related Skills

- [Discovery Process](../discovery-process/SKILL.md) — when you need evidence to inform the strategy
- [Stakeholder Alignment](../stakeholder-alignment/SKILL.md) — when the strategy needs executive buy-in
- [Go-to-Market Planning](../go-to-market-planning/SKILL.md) — when strategy needs to translate to market execution
- Reference: [FRAMEWORKS.md](../../FRAMEWORKS.md) — Positioning Statement format