Vision board
A product vision board on one page: the vision, who it is for, what they need, what the product is, and what the business gets out of it. You describe the product; Piko fills the board, then does the part nobody enjoys and tells you which squares contradict each other or rest on nothing.
- Asks for
- What the product is and who it is for, in a few sentences
- What the business wants out of it
- Links worth checking it against, if you have them
- Gives back
- The five squares filled: vision, target group, needs, product, business goals
- What does not hold — the contradictions and the squares resting on nothing
- Where a claim is one any competitor could make word for word
- Each round of fixes kept as a version, and a hand-off into research or a survey
- Plan
- Free
What it gives you
Target group — Product managers at companies of 20–200, working alone. Needs — "Finish the artefact, not start it." Evidence: 4 interviews. Does not hold: Business goal says "land and expand into teams". Target group is people working alone, who have nobody to expand to. One of the two is wrong. "Saves time" — Notion AI, ChatGPT and three competitors say this verbatim. It is not differentiation; it is table stakes.
How it works
A vision board is five squares that have to agree. The common failure is not an empty square but five full ones that quietly disagree: a target group who would never pay for the business goal, needs that the product as described does not meet, a vision that would be true even if the product did not exist.
So this does two passes. The first fills the board from what you say — and it starts from a guess rather than a form, so you are correcting a draft instead of staring at five empty boxes. The second reads the filled board back and reports what does not hold: the need with no product answer, the goal with no path from the target group, the claim that any competitor could make word for word.
The checks can also be run against the world rather than just against themselves. Give it links — your own site, a competitor, an analyst page — and it will tell you where your differentiation claim is one anybody could make. Each round of fixes is filed as a version, so the board has a history and you can see what you believed in September.
Who it is for
A PM or founder who has to put the product on one page for a board meeting, a new joiner or themselves, and would rather find the weak square now than in the meeting.
Where it stops
It checks the board for coherence and for claims anyone could make; it cannot tell you the vision is wrong. A board can be perfectly consistent about a product nobody wants, and the only cure for that is talking to the target group — which is why the fixes hand off into an interview guide or a survey rather than another document.
Questions people ask
What is a product vision board?
A one-page frame with five parts: the vision, the target group, their needs, the product itself, and the business goals. Roman Pichler put it forward as a lighter alternative to a vision document, and the value is in the constraint — five squares on one page force you to say who it is for and what the business gets, which a long document lets you defer. The squares also have to agree with each other, and that is where most boards fail.
Do I have to fill in a form first?
No. You describe the product in a few sentences and Piko makes a first pass at all five squares, including the ones you did not mention, and shows you the guess. Correcting a draft is a different job from filling in a blank frame: you find out immediately whether the thing you said describes a product anybody would recognise, and the squares you disagree with are the interesting ones.
What does it mean to check the board against links?
You give it addresses — your own site, a competitor, a review page — and it reads them to test the claims on the board. The usual finding is that a differentiation claim is one three other products make in the same words, which is worth knowing before it reaches a slide. It is checking what is publicly said rather than auditing a market, and the result is a prompt to sharpen a claim, not a competitive analysis.
Run it on your own work
Vision board needs an account, because it writes against what you give it and remembers what you have told it before. It runs on the Free plan. Or see what the plans cost first.