The vision problem
Vision has become a commodity - every product claims one. The real question: was it earned, or assembled from parts already floating in the air?
The inflation of vision
Today, a product vision is trivially easy to produce. It contains the right words in roughly the right order: user-centric, behavioral insight, systemic change, category definition. It's coherent enough to survive a board presentation. In almost every sense you can quickly assess, it's indistinguishable from a vision that was hard-won.
This is a problem. Not because bad visions are new, but because the gap between a generated vision and an earned one has become nearly invisible at first contact - and completely visible at the moment of execution.
What a borrowed vision costs
A vision assembled from credible-sounding components carries a specific structural weakness: it has no load-bearing relationship to the human problem it claims to address. It describes a better world - who wouldn't want that - but it lacks a specific, pressure-tested insight about why this product, built this way, for these users, in this moment, is the one that makes that world real.
When the first hard product decision arrives - what to cut, who to prioritize, which constraint to accept - a borrowed vision offers no guidance. Every direction feels equally defensible, because the vision was never anchored to anything specific enough to rule anything out.
How vision gets earned
Earned vision is a residue of close contact with a real problem. It forms slowly, under the pressure of contradictory evidence, through the discipline of refusing to resolve the contradiction until you understand it. It contains something uncomfortable - a choice that disadvantages someone, a user segment it's not for, a market position it's explicitly not claiming. Its specificity is the proof of its honesty.
The process that produces it looks nothing like a strategy offsite or a vision workshop. It looks like sitting with founders and users in the fog for longer than feels productive, asking questions that don't have clean answers, and waiting for the structural truth to become visible.
The tell
A product vision that can absorb any new information without changing is not a vision. It's a backdrop. Real vision has a texture - it chafes against certain directions, resists certain decisions, creates friction in certain meetings. If everyone in the room agrees with the vision immediately, the vision is too vague to be useful.
The work
Earning a vision takes time that most teams won't protect. The step-zero discipline - the work before the roadmap, before the sprint, before the first prototype - is the only context in which it can form. Skipping it produces a product that looks like it has direction and behaves like it doesn't.