Mission and Vision Statement

Once we brought up mission and vision statements, the first question I had was, what's the difference? I always thought the terms were used interchangeably. Unfortunately, I missed the class session in which we talked about these topics in detail, but after a bit of research and asking around, I learned that a vision statement was a statement that highlights where you see your company in the future, and a mission statement is what you will do day to day to get there. I had to do more thinking than I thought to figure out what my vision and mission statements were. Eventually though, I figured it out by thinking about what I wanted my product to do. I want my product to make parking easier for students, so my vision statement would be something like, "Looking to improve the university experience for students across University of Washington campuses." Of course, as my product gets bigger, it would be more general instead of only focusing on University of Washington campuses. My mission statement would be something like, "Developing smart and easy to use software solutions to parking issues across university campuses." Once again, we will first focus on UW campuses before branching off. One other thing to consider would be whether or not to add teachers as well as students, or to just stick with students. On one hand, it could potentially widen our audience. On the other hand, students generally have more problems with parking than teachers. For now, we will just focus on students.