The product vision plays a key role because it provides the context for making decisions throughout the product’s life and it aligns all stakeholders in a common direction, It is made at an early stage before all details are known.

 It typically covers areas like the problem to be solved, for whom, alternatives, unique differentiators, success factors and go/no go criteria

Before a project is initiated it is necessary to carefully examine that the idea is worth to pursue. Is the product something that will be used and paid for? Can the project be realized with the resources?

Product value is not only relevant in the beginning of a project. It is topic that is relevant throughout the project life cycle. Many things can impact whether the product stays valuable.

• The product may show more difficult to create than expected
• The product may not become better than competing products
• The market conditions can change
• Technical limitations may reduce ability to create the product

Evaluating product value is both relevant on an overall level but equally important on feature level since everything that is being built into a product should create value.  Consider the below observation:

20% of features are used often, 50% of features are hardly ever or never used. (CHAOS Manifesto, 2013, Standish Group)