Product Management is About Prediction

Part 1 — Why Is It Prediction?

In this series of articles, I will present the case that product management, or more particularly, product strategy, is all about predicting the future. That’s the essence of what successful product managers do. Although people will tell you that prediction is impossible, because nobody has a crystal ball, it turns out that there is a method to triangulate toward reasonably reliable predictions, based on evidence. It’s not the same as pulling lucky numbers out of a hat, at random, at all.

Strategy, as it used to be practised, wasn’t agile and didn’t take continuous soundings from the market, to correct strategic direction every time you knew better. It was a “set and forget” process, with strategies tragically misaligned with real world imperatives much of the time. As good as the initial inputs may have been, when arriving at a strategy, unless it was continuously adjusted and re-vectored, in light of direct evidence from the field, it was prone to drift into a reality distortion field.

Customers hire your product to do a job. That job, though, changes over time with context. As other ways to do the work become available (or the nature of the work to be done changes), the job your product is hired to do changes. That is to say, even if you understand the job a customer wants your product to do perfectly, at the outset, within a short time, their requirements will change. Your product strategy has to change, too, or you risk your product becoming irrelevant (i.e. a poor candidate to do the work that the customer needs your product to do for them).

Because product development takes time, if you want your product to be useful to customers by the time it’s ready to deliver, you have to predict and forecast the jobs customers will be willing to hire your product to do in the future. How far ahead depends on your product development and delivery tempo and clearly shows that the shorter you can make that cycle, the more likely you will be able to accurately predict what customers will want, when it’s ready.

The alternative to prediction is to wait until you are certain what the customer needs your product to do and is willing to pay to hire it to do that work. Due to development and delivery lead times, by the time your product does that, their needs will have changed. Your product will fall short of expectations, by the time you release it. Again, shorter development cycle times can help, but if a competitor predicts correctly and you don’t, you could see the market for your product defect to the alternative at a stroke.

A good product manager uses the available information to make probable predictions about what the market will need, by the time you can make it available. They take current usage and competitive patterns into consideration, then extrapolate forward to guide the development team toward a feature set that will hit the market sweet spot, on release. Sometimes, that means pivoting the basic product concept.

Future articles in this series will give some insight into how that extrapolation is done.

About the author

Michael Topic is a freelance Product Manager with over thirty years experience delivering products that didn’t exist before. He welcomes contract enquiries to define new, competitive products, design them and deliver them. His speciality is software-based products.

Disclaimer

The opinions offered in this article are intended to describe common scenarios that sometimes occur in general product management practice. They are in no way intended to be read as referring to any particular employer, past or present.

About the “Product Management is About Prediction” Series

This multi-part series examines the many ways in which effective product management has become reliant on high speed, high quality predictions of future customer needs. It is based on psychological research and experience.

Today’s winning companies are getting better at more accurately forecasting customer needs, with enough lead time to respond to them. The series also addresses some common product strategy pitfalls and how to avoid them.