Ep 31: Don't Predict, Build.

Trying out a new way of doing audio on Substack— sorry the quality isn’t great, but I swear the content is! And now I have transcripts!This is re-run of an episode I recorded before that never actually uploaded. How are the best products made? Are they the result of a brilliant seer who predicts the needs of the market? Or are they the result of an inspiring leader who wills their company and the market to manifest their envisioned reality?Transcript:Hello, I apologize if you tried to listen to my podcast the last few days, it seems like my audio never uploaded. So I was just tempting you with titles and brief descriptions and not providing anything to actually listen to. But now I'll provide that. Now, I'm gonna redo the last three episodes. And it'll be even better the second time I promise. So starting with the one from three days ago, which I think was titled: Don't predict the future, build it. Sounds kind of like a the title for some self-help book but I swear this is probably a better episode than most self-help books. It has to do with my job. The job I sometimes do, which is Product Management. I don't like all the parts of my PM job but I do like some of them in the parts that I like usually have to do with research like doing product research. I love digging into a product problem to basically put all the pieces together: user research to know what users want. What does the market want? What are the trends in the market? What are other companies doing? I do this in order to form a compelling vision for what a product could be. That to me is really exciting. But sometimes I get over-excited and I have to remind myself what the purpose of this research really is. And contrary to what I believed in the past and what I think many still believe today the main utility of this kind of product research isn't really to predict the future. It isn't really to be a seer and look into the market and say “this is what people want” or “this is what people are going to want in five years, let's get on this wave”. Because that's not how markets work. Markets aren't just these totally independent things that are going on their own track that you can just predict. You influence the market. Every decision you make as a product maker changes the direction of the market. And so, you're not really predicting the market you're driving it. You're creating a future. Let's think about Steve Jobs for a second. If, Jobs had envisioned the iPhone as we know it and sketched it and came up with all the ideas that he came up with but never actually released the phone, if he scrapped the idea, would our phones still look the way they do today? Almost certainly no. We might not have app stores in the way we have them today. Maybe our phones would be visually very different— maybe square instead of rectangle maybe they wouldn't be touch screens at all who knows. But the one thing I pretty sure of, though you'll never be able to prove me wrong or right, is that they wouldn't look like they look today. Because Steve Jobs wasn't predicting the future, he was building it. He was painting a compelling vision in order to get his team and the market aligned on that vision so they can make it a reality because making things happen is hard. You can't do it alone so you create a pitch in order to build a team that can make it happen and that team will include your users. So, when I do product research now I have to remember that's the point. And if I want to remind myself of this I'll think back to my experience in China. When I went to China for the first time it was to build a company there, a digital company. I used a bunch of Chinese websites to try to get a sense for you know, what was the expectation for application there and even when translated these websites were basically unusable for me. They totally ugly and impossible to understand. Even when translated. And when I launched my application over there after having a really good US designer work on it, it was also ugly and unusable for them. It's a reminder that, because China is basically it enclosed to ecosystem and has been able to develop its own kind of vision for the future, there are many different visions for the future is possible or possible. China is living in an alternate reality where Google didn't define the future of the internet, where internet was defined by Jack Ma and Baidu and whoever the founder of tencent is. I guess I need to remember this because sometimes I get so caught up in my product research that I forget that the point of it is just to convince people that this future is possible, not to be right, and there's many different ways it convincing somebody a future is possible. I often think about a pitch in terms of data and graphs, but some people want to hear emotional stories and that's what Jobs was really good at after all. Pitching his vision not based on research, but based on a really compelling story told by an impressive dude wearing a turtle neck. Anyway, is this how you view product management or tech? Leave your comments below. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gaynor.substack.com