Product Vision, Strategy, and Roadmap: The Differences and How They Connect

Each of the four words covers a different scope

Vision

The vision is a destination over a span of several years — "how this product will change the world." It is not something to change frequently, nor is it meant to give direct answers to day-to-day decisions. Because it is highly abstract, on its own it does not serve as material for judging what should be built.

Strategy

Strategy is the decision of "where to focus and what to abandon" in order to reach the vision. In his book Good Strategy Bad Strategy, Richard Rumelt writes that a good strategy consists of three elements: a diagnosis (what is the core challenge of the current situation), a guiding policy (how to respond to it), and coherent action (what to do concretely). When a strategy has become a scattershot policy of "do this and this and this too," the cause is in most cases a weak diagnosis.

Roadmap

The roadmap is the time-bound plan for executing the strategy. This is where concreteness — "when" and "what" — first enters. How to put together a roadmap and the techniques for prioritisation are covered in How to build a roadmap and the practice of prioritisation.

OKRs

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are a goal-setting mechanism for measuring the degree of execution of the strategy over a period shorter than the roadmap, roughly a quarter. In his book Measure What Matters, John Doerr positions OKRs not as the strategy itself but as a tool for translating strategy into execution and making progress visible.

Connecting vision to strategy, and strategy to roadmap

These four function when the higher level acts as a "constraint" on the lower level. The vision narrows down the strategy's options, and the strategy becomes the criterion for adopting or rejecting the initiatives placed on the roadmap. Put the other way round, if you cannot explain which part of the strategy a given feature on the roadmap contributes to, that feature should not, by rights, be on the roadmap. The relationship in which the choice of positioning becomes an input to strategy is covered in The strategy of positioning and differentiation.

Where OKRs sit

OKRs are not a substitute for the roadmap. Whereas the roadmap is the plan for "what to build," OKRs are the definition of the outcome — "what should change as a result." It is not unusual for organisations to put a feature release itself as an OKR Key Result, but this is a textbook case of confusing output (the thing built) with outcome (the result that changed). That said, at stages such as the early launch of a product, where outcome metrics cannot yet be measured stably, there are cases where you have no choice but to place, provisionally, a metric closer to output. In that case, a realistic practice is to make clear to the team that it is provisional and to switch to an outcome-type metric as soon as the metric becomes measurable.

What happens when you jump directly from vision to a feature list

In organisations that skip the strategy and roadmap levels and build a "list of features to build" directly from the vision, the individual features do not contradict the vision, but there is no basis on which to prioritise them against one another. The requests of the loudest stakeholder, or a competitor's latest new feature, tend to become the adoption criterion as they are. As a result, the roadmap only grows longer, while falling into a state where no account can be given of which feature to drop. It is precisely because the strategy is responsible for "focus and selection" that the roadmap can be kept short; omit the strategy and the roadmap expands without limit.

Common pitfalls

A commonly seen case is being satisfied after making a strategy document once, then leaving it untouched for half a year or a year without updating it. When the market and competitive landscape have changed but the strategy stays old, the roadmap's criteria for judgment also become old, and the people on the ground keep acting on initiatives while carrying a nagging sense that "the strategy and reality do not match." That said, changing the strategy significantly every quarter creates a different problem. Because frequent shifts in policy sap the team's capacity to execute, it becomes easier to operate if you keep in mind the difference in update frequency: review the strategy on a half-year to one-year cadence, the roadmap on a quarterly cadence, and OKRs on a quarterly or shorter cadence.

Read next

For the concrete steps of translating strategy into a roadmap, see How to build a roadmap and the practice of prioritisation; for the thinking on positioning that becomes an input to strategy, see The strategy of positioning and differentiation.