The shape of vision work when everything is changing fast
Tools for staying strategically grounded in a high-velocity environment.
Vision is hard. But it’s not optional.
In a world where LLM vendors drop paradigm-shifting models quarterly and your roadmap gets reshuffled every few weeks, long-term thinking feels like a luxury or worse, a hallucination. Why plan years ahead when you don’t even know what next week’s launch will bring?
But then again if you don’t define a direction, you’re not navigating, you’re drifting. You’ll end up optimizing what’s visible instead of what’s important. And in product work, especially now, that’s a fast route to irrelevance.
This isn’t about writing a five-year plan or finding the perfect mission statment. This is about the gritty, iterative craft of vision work. The kind that gives you and your team a sense of coherence, even when clarity is out of reach.
Vision isn’t a statement, it’s a shape
Most people treat vision like a headline: something polished, fixed, and slogan-worthy. That doesn’t work when the ground is shifting under your feet.
Instead, think of vision as a shape - a directional outline that orients thinking without pretending to predict outcomes. It’s more like a magnetic field than a map. You’re not telling people exactly where to go, you’re helping them move in the same direction, even as the terrain changes.
Four tools for vision in a fog
Here are a few useful tools when trying to lead with vision in uncertain environments:
1. The strategic horizon board
Break your thinking into three tiers:
0–6 months: Execution clarity - what we’re doing now.
6–18 months: Thematic direction - bets and themes we’re exploring.
18–36 months: Beliefs and possibilities - where we might play if trends unfold.
This framing lets you hold both focus and flexibility. Like a roadmap and a radar.
2. The draftable vision
Treat your vision like code: versioned, imperfect, and revisable. Write a one-pager that captures where you think you’re going. Call it v0.3. Then iterate. Then review it quarterly. The point isn’t to be right, it’s to build shared confidence over time.
3. Vision-backlog pairing
When grooming your backlogses, link each item to a vision element. Ask:
How does this help move us toward the future we want to build?
It’s a forcing function to ensure the work supports the why. There’s not much more to it.
4. The “False precision” filter
Avoid the trap of over-specificity. Instead of saying “we’ll build a tool that writes your code”, say:
“we believe building software will feel more colaborative, intuitive, and context-aware and our role is to enable that shift.”
Predict user expectations, not features.
A quick example
Right now, there’s a wave of new tools trying to reinvent how people code with AI, from copilots to auto-complete to full-on agents. But the how is still evolving daily: model speeds change, UX metaphors shift, and what feels magical today might feel clunky next week.
A strong vision here doesn’t look like “we’ll build an AI that writes all your code.” It looks more like:
“We believe the future of building software is conversational, iterative, and sensory, a fluid back-and-forth between human intent and machine capability. We’re designing tools that let people prototype ideas as easily as they can describe a vibe.”
That’s not a spec. It’s a shape. And it gives your team permission to explore boldly while staying grounded in purpose.
Build in the mist
The fog isn’t lifting anytime soon. The tools, models, and interfaces will keep evolving. But your job as a PM or founder isn’t to predict the exact future. It’s to create enough coherence for your team to explore it meaningfully. So don’t wait for the vision to get clear.
P.S. There used to be an award-winning time old cartoon called “Hedgehog in the fog”, where a determined youngling was trying to visit his friend to watch stars. This youngling had a vision. It was tested and challenged but it came through and it kept going in the direction.
Be like the hedgehog. Build in the mist.