Roadmap, Business Strategy, Product Strategy, and Product Vision (Four Conflated Artifacts)

Overview

Companies routinely conflate four distinct artifacts, most often mistaking a roadmap or a recycled OKR slide for an actual strategy:

Roadmap — a sequenced list of outputs/features, not a strategy.
Business strategy — company-level objectives and market positioning.
Product vision ("the mountaintop") — the long-term direction that aligns teams; exists to keep everyone pointed the same way over years.
Product strategy — the discipline of prioritizing and sequencing problems in service of both the vision and current business objectives; see Product Strategy as Explicit Choice-Making.

Why the distinction matters

Vision answers "where are we going and why does everyone agree on that." Strategy answers "given that destination and this quarter's business objectives, which problems do we tackle first, and which do we explicitly not touch yet." Collapsing the four into one artifact is what produces wishful-thinking strategies and unresolved prioritization problems.