Without that, a roadmap is just a list of activity. You can deliver everything on it and still not have moved the product or the business in a meaningful direction.
Choose a place to play
Not every opportunity is right for every organisation. If you have a team of highly specialised aerospace engineers, selling lemonade on the street is probably not where you should focus. If you are a group of farmers who grow lemons, it might be a reasonable place to start.
The point is not the lemonade. It is that a vision needs to fit the capabilities you have, the market you want to be in and the customers you can genuinely help. It should make it easier to say no to interesting things that would take you away from that direction.
A vision needs a horizon
A vision also needs a timeframe. Are you trying to get there in two years, three years or ten? That changes the type of opportunities you can take on. It changes how much risk you can afford, how patient you can be and what success should look like along the way.
If the vision has a three-year horizon, you should be cautious about filling the roadmap with five-year bets. You may still make one, but it needs to be a deliberate decision rather than something that slipped in because it sounded big.
Make it concrete enough to guide choices
“Be the best travel product” is too broad to be useful. It sounds nice, but it does not tell anyone what to do differently on Monday.
A more useful vision says who you are helping, what you want to be true for them, and why you are in a position to make it happen. For example: “Help independent travellers make confident decisions when plans change, using the price and availability signals we already understand.” You can challenge it, improve it and turn it into product choices.
You should also be able to describe what success looks like. What will customers do differently? What will the business be able to achieve? What would you expect to hear or see if the vision is becoming real?
Selling the vision
A vision only matters if it changes decisions. That means it needs to be repeated, explained and connected to the work people are doing.
Different people will need different parts of the story. Leadership may want to understand the commercial opportunity and the risk. A delivery team needs to understand the problem, the principles and the boundaries. Customer-facing teams need a version that they recognise in real customer pain.
A very good measure of success is hearing your own words back from other people. Not because they have memorised a slide, but because they can explain the direction in their own words and use it to make a decision. That is when you know the message has landed.
Keeping it useful
A vision should be stable enough to create focus, but not so rigid that it ignores new information. Keep coming back to it as the market changes and as you learn. Ask whether the work on the roadmap is still helping you get there, and whether the risk you are taking is right for the horizon you have set.
That is how a vision becomes more than a statement. It becomes a practical tool for deciding what matters.