How do I stop chasing customer requirements and create a visionary roadmap?

I’ve heard this question from multiple product leaders over the last few weeks. It’s usually not asked as a tactical question, but as a moral one. As if responding to what customers ask for means you’re not really doing your job.

There’s an expectation hiding underneath. That a “real” product leader should rise above customer demands, craft a grand vision, and show a clearer path into the bright future. And if the roadmap looks too much like what customers already want, it must mean something is missing.

I think this framing is deeply misleading.

Not because vision or long-term thinking aren’t important or part of your job (they definitely are). But because it creates a false dichotomy between listening to customers and leading the product. When I write it that way, you might already see that this separation is false and misleading, but it still makes product leaders feel guilty for doing work that is often essential to fulfilling their real responsibility toward the future.

Customer-driven work is not the problem

Part of what makes customer-driven work feel so uncomfortable is what many product managers were taught about their role.

Product leadership is often framed around saying no. No to customers. No to stakeholders. No to ideas that don’t fit the vision. And there is truth in that. Focus matters. Tradeoffs matter. Impact doesn’t come from doing everything.

But when this idea is taken too far, it creates a quiet anxiety. If I mostly do what customers ask for, am I still doing product work at all? If I don’t push back, am I adding any value? At some point, doesn’t this make me a project manager rather than a product leader?

This fear is understandable. There are situations where blindly fulfilling requests turns a product into a collection of one‑off commitments. No product leader wants to end up there.

What’s often missed is that doing customer-driven work does not automatically mean operating with a project mindset.

You can respond to customer needs while still shaping direction. You can say yes without giving up ownership. And you can immerse yourself in customer requests without letting them define the product’s future.

The discomfort doesn’t come from the work itself. It comes from the story we tell ourselves about what this work means for our role and our impact.

Vision is not an innovation lab

Once product leaders start feeling uncomfortable with customer-driven work, they often swing to the other extreme.

If listening to customers feels too reactive, then vision must mean something else entirely. Something bigger. More inspiring. Further into the future. Roadmaps start filling up with bold bets, innovation themes, and ideas that are intentionally detached from what customers are asking for.

This move is understandable. It feels like leadership. It feels proactive. It creates distance from the fear of becoming a project manager. But it also leans on a quiet illusion: that coming up with big, bold ideas is the hard part.

In reality, it’s often the easiest part. If I give you an hour and ask you to come up with as many big ideas as possible for where the product could go next, you’ll have no trouble filling the time. Do the same exercise with a few people across the company, and you’ll end up with dozens of shiny, ambitious, and seemingly innovative directions.

Most of those ideas will sound bold. Some will sound like a must-go move. Many will feel exciting. And most of them will be useless.

Not because they aren’t clever, but because they are disconnected from reality. They usually emerge from what we think we can build, what would be new, disruptive, differentiated, or impressive – not from a deep understanding of what the world actually needs.

Innovation without a real customer pain to solve is weak innovation. It doesn’t help you make better decisions, it doesn’t create real leverage, and it doesn’t move the product meaningfully forward.

This is the other side of the same false dichotomy. If customer-driven work feels too small, vision gets inflated until it feels important again. But separating the two doesn’t solve the problem. It just replaces one kind of emptiness with another.

Where vision actually comes from

If neither blindly chasing customer requests nor inventing big ideas in isolation leads to strong product direction, the question becomes more interesting: where does real vision come from?

Vision doesn’t appear when you step away from customers. It forms when you stay close long enough to see patterns instead of individual asks. When similar problems repeat across customers of the same type. When the same friction shows up again and again, even if it’s described differently each time.

This is where customer-driven work changes character. It stops being about satisfying whoever is loudest or closest, and starts becoming a way to understand what actually matters. Which pains are specific, and which ones point to something broader. Which requests are symptoms, and which ones hint at a deeper problem worth solving.

That shift doesn’t happen because you suddenly say no more often. It happens because you start holding customer input differently. You listen not just to decide what to build next, but to decide what kind of product you are building, for whom, and why.

Over time, this creates direction. You succeed with a small number of customers of a certain profile. You see what works, what scales, and what doesn’t. You make deliberate choices about what to generalize, what to leave behind, and which problems are worth investing in next.

This is how vision and customer-driven work reconnect. Vision is no longer something you add on top of requests, and customer work is no longer something you have to escape. They become part of the same learning loop, grounded in reality and constantly moving toward the next level.

You don’t need to stop listening to customers. You need to be willing to let that work shape your understanding of the future, instead of treating it as something to grow out of.