Product teams are burning cash on the wrong vision

A new study from Herbig Labs looked at how product teams actually build their vision — and what goes wrong when they skip the real work.

The short version: most teams treat vision like a slide. They write it, present it, and move on. That’s not vision. That’s a poster on a wall.

The paper breaks down what actually works. Teams that get it right treat vision as a living thing. It gets challenged. It gets updated. It gets argued over at 2pm on a Tuesday.

Most teams don’t do that. They write a one-pager, get sign-off, and then wonder why their roadmap drifts six months later.

The research also looked at what happens when teams skip the hard part — the part where you actually talk to the people who use the thing. Not the CEO. Not the board. The actual users.

Teams that skip that step tend to build features nobody asked for. Again. And again.

The takeaway isn’t complicated. Vision is not a document. It’s a conversation. And if you’re not having it every week, you’re not building product. You’re building a museum.

Why this matters for us: most of us are the ones building the product, not the ones writing the slide. When the vision is wrong, we’re the ones who end up working on features that don’t matter. This is a reminder to push back when the roadmap doesn’t match the real work.