Vision vs Strategy vs Roadmap: How Are They Different?

Following a global frenzy of digital products rolled out over the past few years, product development as a process has evolved into a science of its own. With nearly every niche you can think of saturating just months into the spotlight, product development is no longer an engineer-only field anymore.

The modern innovation process now involves newer roles, both technical & non-technical. Job titles like product managers, product marketing managers, software project managers, product owners, Scrum masters, and so forth are still new but carry a lot of responsibility and perks sometimes.

Besides these new roles, there has been a rise of several new terms and jargon important for any product innovation process. If you’re at the very beginning of your product journey, you may be wondering about the differences between product vision, product strategy, and a product roadmap.

What is a product vision?

Your product vision is a high-level idea of what you want your product to achieve for your customers and what kind of difference you hope it makes in the world. It doesn’t need to be very specific or detailed but it should give your customers and your employees a good idea of what you want to achieve when you’re developing a product.

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For example, the product vision of FeedBear is to empower product managers and business owners to make smart business decisions and become more customer-centric.

Your product vision should be simple, easy to remember, and the guiding force behind all of your product, marketing, and sales decisions. It’s not set in stone and it should actually be redone and revisited once a year or so just to make sure you still believe in the values you had when creating it.

Out of all the three concepts, we’ll focus on today, strategy is the most abstract since it’s on a higher level of thinking.

What is a product strategy?

Once you have a product vision, you’ll need a specific set of steps to achieve it. This is the high-level plan of how you want your product to develop. It includes the main goals of your product development and how you plan to achieve them.

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For example, the strategy at FeedBear is to create a set of tools for product managers and business owners to collect, store and manage feedback and effectively communicate with their customers.

Notice that it doesn’t include any super specific steps on how we plan to achieve it. However, every time we tackle a new challenge in development, we use our strategy as a guideline.

A strategy isn’t permanent either, and you can and should change it occasionally, especially if you made a major change in your product vision.

What is a product roadmap?

At the very bottom of product planning is a roadmap, which includes a specific set of steps you want to follow in order to make your strategy and vision come to life.

A roadmap built in FeedBear

A roadmap is much more tangible, hands-on, and includes specific details. What individual tasks do you want to complete, who will complete them, and in what time frame? Out of all the three elements mentioned today, roadmaps are the most fluid and susceptible to change over time.

An important thing to note is that companies usually have one vision and one strategy, but you can have multiple roadmaps. Out of all the three terms today, a roadmap is the best type of communication with your customers as it shows immediate progress. With a tool like FeedBear, customers can leave comments, vote on ideas, communicate better and sync up with your team.

Which is the most important of the three?

If you’re running a promising product team, the reality is that you need all three: a vision, a strategy, and a roadmap.

While the roadmap is the end of the product journey, it doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. To create a good roadmap, base it on a strong strategy. And before you do that, create a product vision to know where you’re headed.

In short, start with a product vision and the rest will fall in place.

Wrapping up

Having all three aspects of product planning is important. No matter if you’re a small startup with a solo founder or an enterprise software company, great products don’t just happen out of thin air.

And if you’re looking for something to help you with the strategy and road-mapping parts, we have your back. With FeedBear, you can easily collect and manage customer feedback, as well as create roadmaps to make educated product decisions. Ready for a product revolution? Start your free trial today!