A failure mode where a leader builds a 'vision' by polling every team for what they're currently working on, compiling the resulting list, and wrapping a narrative around it after the fact — rather than forming a genuine declarative point of view on the future first. The tell is directionality: a real Product Vision gathers insight, takes a stand on where the product/market should go, and forces hard prioritization trade-offs before it's communicated; inventory-as-vision runs the sequence backward, so the 'vision' can never actually say no to anything already in flight because it was built out of what's already in flight. It sits alongside other roadmap anti-patterns and shares the surface-level plausibility of Transformation Theater — it looks like leadership because it produces a document, but it never required the leader to decide anything.