John Moore (SVPG) argues the dominant real-world failure isn't a bad Product Vision leading a company astray — it's that roughly 80% of companies have no real vision at all. That leaves a gap between the enduring mission and yearly revenue targets, and the gap doesn't stay empty: it gets filled ad hoc, project by project, with nothing connecting the choices back to a coherent "what we'll do over the next few years."
This is distinct from mistaking a mission for a vision (see Mission → Vision → Strategy → Roadmap Hierarchy) — companies with a vision vacuum often lack even a mission-shaped placeholder, just a backlog of disconnected initiatives.
The same vacuum failure mode shows up one level up, in the transformation effort itself: starting a Product Model (vs. Roadmap Model) transformation without a clear purpose or "big why" is called the single most damaging anti-pattern in the field guide, because there is nothing to reach back to when energy dips or the Loop of Transformation Failure starts pulling the org backward. As with company vision generally, an absent purpose is worse than an imperfect one — teams can debate and refine a stated why, but they can't rally around a missing one. Part of the Product-Model Transformation Anti-Patterns (Taxonomy) taxonomy.