Having a clearly articulated vision for your product energizes and empowers the team. Whether this is at the product or the company level, the vision is something that the team should be on board with and be evangelizing internally and externally.

Why is this important?

• Having a clear vision makes decision making easier down the road. It helps the team navigate new partnerships, clients, and product decisions. If the vision is ingrained in the day-to-day, the sales team focuses on the ideal customers, the product team focuses on making those customers happy, and so forth. It empowers the team to say "no" to a client if they are not the right fit for the product and require too much custom work or are competitive with the business.
• Without a strong vision, the product gets pulled into different directions by whomever is the loudest person in the room on a particular day. Every time the market shifts or a big client is signed, the direction will swing too.
• Having the vision statement enables creativity - it “sandboxes” the team into a set of constraints, encouraging them to consider more focused solutions.
• A strong vision prevents a team from adopting the “let’s throw everything against the wall and see what sticks” strategy, which would otherwise cause burn out and frustration from the constant change in direction.

To test whether you have this, ask five different stakeholders to describe the vision. If you get five different statements, you know you have some work to do.