How do you live in the future?
It's easy to forget it's part of the PM job description...
About 5 years ago, I heard one of my favorite phrases about Product Management. A colleague in the middle of discussing a project on a walk around the Google campus said “Y’know, Product Managers need to live in the future….”
Most of our conversation was about something completely different, but that phrase stayed with me. It’s such a great way to remember a mindset that PMs need to have - the ability to predict the future: of how their customer will evolve, the competition will evolve and indeed the entire ecosystem in which their products exist evolve. What will really matter and what won’t? That span can be months, years or (for some ideas) even decades.The best PMs or product leaders are often those that are exceptional at predicting that end or future state correctly, and are able to navigate their teams’ strategy to win there.
While product intuition informed by deep product empathy is generally the most important PM skill, in some products, you need to predict a future world/consumer/ecosystem to do that well. I’d say that’s somewhat true in my current job.
So, I’m trying to live in the future a lot these days, and an trying to build this muscle up again. I was talking to someone explicitly about how to do this and figured I’d jot a couple of thoughts down. Please let me know if you have better ideas..
Some people are already in the future - talk to them: As the William Gibson quote goes: “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed” - there’s products, companies, people, countries, markets that are ahead of where you are. In some cases, they might be your future state. Study them all; try a lot of cutting edge products, learn from every person, case study etc. that might be helpful.
Understand, map out and try to predict different future states: I remember way back in the day, I was trying to convince a particular product team to spend more time on their mobile experience (they were spending almost none!) and just couldn’t get them to do it. I then asked the team to predict how much of their experience would be mobile in 2 years - all of them said over 50%. It made it a lot harder for them, once they all realized that, to ignore their mobile experience.
Make a habit of talking to people good at this: This might be specific to me (or some subset of people), but I find talking about the future to the right folks - even to your favorite LLM - can help you advance your own thinking. I generally build off conversations and ideas bouncing back and forth, so this is particularly helpful to me. Another thing I do a lot of is…
Make a habit of studying the past, and predicting the future: History is not a perfect predictor of the future, but pattern matching helps me and so I try to learn from the past - successes and mistakes. Also if you try to predict a lot (and see wether you tend to predict correctly or not), it gives you a chance to calibrate your own judgement.
The more time you spend doing this, the better you get at it. It’s also just so much fun intellectually. What are some things you try to live in the future?