VISION: The Word the New Product Managers Keep Skipping

A few years back, before AI changed the shape of every product job, I was sitting in a conference room with another PM at a company I used to work for. We were knee-deep in a market-validation methodology, surveys, customer interviews, the whole ceremony, for a feature both of us already had the answer on. At some point he looked at me and asked the obvious question. Why are we doing all this when we already know what to build?

I didn't have a clean answer in the moment. What I had was the slow realization that the validation wasn't there to find truth. It was there because leadership didn't have a vision, and a process-heavy methodology gave them something mechanical to point at instead. The framework was a crutch. We were running drills because nobody was calling the play.

That conversation is what made me sit down and try to define what vision actually was. The acronym below is what I came up with, and I've been beating on it ever since.

The Same Problem, A New Audience

Now the same problem has shown up again, in a completely new form, with a completely new audience. Vibe coders.

You opened Claude or Cursor on a Saturday, hit Lovable or Bolt for the scaffold, pushed to Vercel before dinner, and by Sunday night you had a working product on a real domain. That used to take a team six months. Now it takes a weekend and a Stripe key. You're the PM now, the founder now, the leader now, even if nobody handed you the title.

And you're inheriting the same crutch the old shop had, just at a higher frame rate. Where leadership used to lean on validation ceremony to hide the absence of vision, you can lean on AI velocity to do the same thing. The dopamine of npm run dev booting clean is its own ceremony. The X demo with two hundred views is its own ceremony. The GitHub stars trickling in at fourteen over three days is its own ceremony. Shipping at AI speed produces something to point at every day, which means the question of whether the thing should exist never has to surface.

The kicker is this isn't a new problem. Vibe coders just inherited it from the rest of the field. A lot of traditional product leaders, the ones who came up through MBA programs and got their VP titles before they ever did the work, never had a real vision to begin with. They learned how to talk to a room, how to define a market segment, how to sell a deck with a fancy label on it. They never learned how to lead. They learned how to run. Those are not the same thing, and AI just made the gap impossible to hide.

My personal leadership principle, adapted from a former manager, is that I wouldn't ask anyone to do something I wouldn't do myself. The shortest version of "vision" is being far enough out ahead that you actually know what you're asking for. Most people in the corner office have never been that far out. They were running someone else's play.

The Framework

Here's what I wrote in that conference room and have been refining ever since. Six letters. Pick it apart, argue with it, but use it the next time someone tells you they have a "vision":

Value, with
Integrity, built on
Strength and
Ingenuity, maintaining
Openness, to account for
Nuance.

It's a journey, not a checklist. Each letter is a phase you actually have to move through. The order matters, and skipping one earlier in the sequence will quietly poison everything downstream.

V — Value

What value do you see, amongst the sea of the problem space?

A sea changes as often as the waves. Most of what you see is going to be other people's ideas, AI's confident suggestions, your own restless instinct, all churning together. Value is the thing you can point at in the middle of all that and say, here, this is the gap, this is what would change if I closed it.

This is the part vibe coders almost get right and then ruin. The "I see the gap" instinct is good. The "I'll have Claude scaffold it tonight" reflex is what produces the wave of look-alike SaaS landing pages currently flooding your feed. Seeing a gap is not the same as understanding the value that fills it. If you can't articulate the value without invoking your stack, if you can only say "it's a Next.js app that uses Supabase and the OpenAI API to draft replies," what you have is a project, not a vision.

I — Integrity

Is it real value, or is it a mirage?

This is the part you can touch. If you set out on the journey to attain it, will it benefit all the parties involved, or only some of them? The product, the user, the buyer, the team, the world the thing exists in. Most products that fail the integrity test fail quietly. They ship. They get traction with a thin slice of users who already wanted exactly this (usually other people in the same vibe-coder tribe who'll try anything new for a week). They scale into customer segments where the original integrity falls apart, and the team patches over the cracks with copy until the landing page reads like a script someone is reading at gunpoint.

If the value only works for some of the parties, what you've found is a transaction, not integrity.

S — Strength

Do you have the conviction to see it through? Strength is a journey, not an exercise.

This is where conviction earns its keep. You're going to be challenged. By users who don't get it. By the YC partner who wants it to be something else. By the competitor whose v0 build dropped on X last week with twice the polish. By Claude itself, three weeks in, suggesting a "smarter direction" that would basically rewrite the whole product. And eventually by your own doubt at 11pm staring at the Replit logs.

Strength means you've tested the vision against reality and it didn't fold. Not "I posted about it and got 40 likes." Reality. Users, money on the line, consequences when you get it wrong. You don't get strength from a brainstorm or a particularly good prompt. You get it from putting the thing in front of the world and watching it survive over time, not over a week.

A vision that can't be defended isn't strong. It's just an opinion you held until the first pushback.

I — Ingenuity

Do you have the adaptability to navigate the changing landscape? What is it that sets you apart, and can you actually scale it?

Ingenuity is the twin of integrity. You're convicted in your direction, AND you know no path is perfect. You're willing to find the next path when this one runs out. You can adapt without losing the thread.

This is where most "visions" actually die. Not because the original was wrong, but because the team treated it like scripture. The world changed and the vision didn't. The model you built on got 10x cheaper overnight and your moat evaporated. A new framework dropped and your whole positioning is suddenly stale. A customer learned something new and your roadmap looks like a fossil.

The second half of ingenuity is the part vibe coders especially need to sit with. What sets you apart? And once you know, can you actually scale that thing? "I'm faster" isn't a moat anymore. "I'm AI-powered" isn't positioning. The differentiation has to be real, and it has to compound as the product grows, or you'll get out-iterated by the next weekend builder who scaffolds your idea with cleaner code on Sunday.

O — Openness

Are you just exploring, or are you carving a path?

Exploring is what you do alone with Claude on a Saturday. Carving a path means others will follow, which means you have to be the kind of leader they would actually follow. A vision that only lives in your head is a hobby. A vision carved into a path requires you to communicate it, share it, and (the part most people skip) actively listen when the people on the path push back.

Openness asks the harder questions. Can the first person you hire explain the vision in their own words, and would you recognize it when they did? Can a customer repeat the value back to a friend without quoting your landing page? Can a contributor open a PR that pushes back on the direction, and do you actually merge the ones that are right? Can a stranger who finds you mid-flight orient themselves without watching the demo video?

I'll out myself here. This is the letter I'm worst at. I built CAMI, a tool that helps people build with AI agents. I have full conviction it works. I have been mediocre at finding the audience. AI tools are noisy and complicated, and I'm a builder by instinct, not a marketer, so I've under-invested in being open in exactly the way Openness asks for. The framework doesn't exempt me. That's the point of writing it down.

If the answer to any of the four questions above is no, the vision is locked in one head, and you've capped its growth at whatever that head can carry.

N — Nuance

Now can you make it all fit?

By the time you reach this letter, the plan has changed. It always changes. People are using the thing in ways you didn't predict. The market shifted. Three new model releases opened up categories that didn't exist a quarter ago. The original roadmap reads like a relic.

Nuance is the upgrade that only becomes possible after the first five letters have done their work. You know things now you didn't know before, and the plan has to reflect that without abandoning the through-line that got you here. The vision is tested across time. The layers underneath it have been swapped in and out a dozen times to keep it true.

Reddit is the cleanest example I can point at. The thing started as a place to share interesting links. It grew with the actual needs of the people using it. Communities, then moderators, then niche subreddits, then the messy long tail of every internet subculture. The vision bent without breaking each time. Intentionally or not, by the time AI showed up, Reddit had quietly built one of the richest training-data goldmines on the internet, and the platform's durability became its own moat. That is what nuance looks like in the wild. The original instinct holds, the world bends around it, and somewhere down the line the through-line itself becomes the asset.

Steve Jobs era Apple is the cliche version of the same shape. Different product, same idea. The vision held across decades while the hardware, software, and business model all got rewritten under it more than once.

Nuance is what separates founders who build durable things from operators who ship a launch every quarter forever. You cannot fake it, you cannot rush it. You walk through the other five letters honestly, or you don't get there.

So What Do You Do With This

Close the IDE for one afternoon and run your work through the six letters. Not the landing page. The actual work. The slow-arc thing. The thing that's going to take longer than a weekend and that you actually care about. A product, a process, your operations, your memoir, whatever. The framework doesn't care which one. It cares whether you can answer the six questions honestly.

Go letter by letter. Out loud, in a Notion doc, scribbled on the back of a sprint board, whatever works. If three or more of them feel hand-wavy when you try to say them, if you find yourself reaching for the stack instead of the value, if "who is this for" becomes "well, technically anyone who…" you're building demo-ware with a domain name. That's fine if you know that's what you're doing. Plenty of weekend builds are exactly that, and they're great practice. It is NOT fine if you think you're building a company.

I focus this piece on vibecoding and product development because those are the spaces where the pace of idea-to-shipped is fastest, and the absence of vision shows up the loudest. But the principle applies anywhere a long-arc thing is asking for your commitment. If you're a traditional product leader wondering why your AI strategy decks aren't landing, or you're writing content with AI and watching engagement flatline, the diagnosis is the same. You're missing vision. The framework works for you too.

There's a tidal wave of product hitting the world right now, and most of it is going to wash past without leaving a mark. The work that lasts is the work somebody actually saw, and valued, and defended, before they shipped it.

So sit with it. Then keep going.