This is a time of massive cost-cutting: Jobs, contracts, budgets are all getting cut because of bad executive decisions made throughout the pandemic. Governments acknowledge they overspent to protect the quality of life of citizens and tech corporations significantly over hired because they expected headcount to solve their notorious unprofitability.

That’s why we’re talking about layoffs and rising taxes in 2023 instead a new vision for tomorrow. We got billions of mismanaged pandemic payouts and hallucinations of a ridiculous metaverse instead of a vision for how to rebuild the fabric of communities that are going extinct.

But these problems are happening at a departmental level too.

Teams aren’t asking what the future of their product or service should be. They’re instead focused on meeting arbitrary targets about releases, KPIs, NPS, and other vanity metrics that reward optimizing the status quo.

And this year’s aggressive cost-cutting is making it worse by shortening the time and resources you have available. Do more with less is 2023’s mantra, being preached to executives and sold to customers.

How can we see the future when we’re blinded everyday by a two hundred item roadmap backlog?

Short-termism is institutional

Facing disruptors and competitors is one greatest fears of CEOs in 2023 and pressure is mounting from new technologies. Yet, product teams are handcuffed to short-termism.

And the do more with less mandate is putting extra pressure on PMs who already had a tough job of prioritizing roadmaps. While there are many methodologies to help with prioritizing, organizations reward consistent short-term delivery.

The operational quicksand has also trapped researchers who would love to explore the future but are instead studying myopic questions. This might be a big reason why Organizational structure / bureaucracy was flagged as the biggest frustration of UXRs.

The benefits of exploring the future of your product or service

The pandemic was the perfect case study for why to prepare for potential futures. A tool used in strategic future work is the futures cone that enables orgs to plan for projected, probably, plausible, and preposterous futures.

Futures cones enable orgs plan for projected, probably, plausible, and preposterous futures.

This opens the possibility of scenario planning that enables you to take advantage of future opportunities and mitigate against risks.

Leadership can then update their vision and strategies accordingly, plus highlight potential challengers and partners. You’ll also be able to recognize which roadmap items may deliver a high long-term yield.

But none of this is possible if your team isn’t collecting insights about the future:

• Changes to consumer behaviour and perceptions
• Changes to usage patterns and use cases
• Changes to competitive & partnership landscape
• Changes to standards and policies

Innovation happens when we dive into the unknown

Airbnb’s CEO Brian Chesky is obsessed with delivering ambitious experiences and he does it by challenging what we know is possible:

If you want to build something that’s truly viral you have to create a total mindf**k experience that you tell everyone about. So what would a 10-star check in be? A 10-star check in would be The Beatles check in. In 1964. I’d get off the plane and there’d be 5,000 high school kids cheering my name with cars welcoming me to the country. I’d get to the front yard of your house and there’d be a press conference for me, and it would be just a mindf**k experience.

Apple’s Steve Jobs infamously said he trusted what customers say and instead focused on how they reacted to innovative concepts:

Some people say give the customers what they want, but that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, ‘If I’d ask customers what they wanted, they would’ve told me a faster horse.’ People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.

To build more resilient and innovative products & services we need researchers and product managers to be given the mandate to challenge the status quo. We need them to feel comfortable challenging long-held assumptions and testing fresh perspectives.

The power of challenging long-held assumptions

As a consultant, there’s nothing more rewarding than presenting data and insights that challenge a client’s assumptions.

You feel the mood in the room/call change. You know you’ve found something that has implications to multiple teams and multiple roadmaps. You may have found something that will force them to change a strategy or that could save or earn them millions in revenue.

Some examples from our work at our consultancy:

• Discovering that the analytics product of one of the world’s biggest streaming platforms was not helping users make the business decisions that actually mattered
• Discovering that a major telehealth provider was missing out on a huge pool of potential customers because they were moving them too quickly through the intake process
• Discovering that a major telecom had a massive customer trust problem that led self-service information to be disregarded

Each of these forced a client to rethink a strategy. They all had strong products built on good user needs research. What they lacked was an understanding of what their users dreamed of as a solution.

Go beyond user needs to discover what will solve their problems

In the hundreds of user interviews I’ve conducted, there were only a handful of participants who could think about what an ideal product or service would need to do.

Being unable to think about the future is more than you think — the human brain loathes thinking about uncertainty:

Your brain receives patterns from the outside world, stores them as memories, and makes predictions by combining what it has seen before and what is happening now

We’re hardwired to imagine only incremental improvements and that’s why most research comes up with obvious insights.

To decipher what actually matters to users we need to understand why your product matters in their lives. Indi Young calls this the problem space. It’s where you can start building a systemic view of how your product impacts a user’s life or business decisions. It’s also where you can start imagining dream scenarios for solving their problem.

Case study of exploring new possibilities

User research is often so grounded in asking about needs that we can’t see past the present. Sometimes our goal should be to create magic by imagining a new future full of possibilities.

In Rory Sutherland’s book Alchemy, he details that many of the most exciting ideas from the 20th century come from trying out the unimaginable. He details many examples in this interview, like how many foods were completely undesirable until they were repositioned.

This video is a perfect contemporary example of user research needing to be more open-ended co-creation processes. Google brings their new LLM tools to raper Lupe Fiasco and find out that he wants to leverage generative AI for the unimaginable: expand his lyricism. The result is magical and gives us hope about what artists can do with these new technologies.

Prototype the future of your product or service

Prototyping supercharges research by providing participants with a whole new list of possibilities. The benefits of prototyping have been well documented, with examples including improving the ability to tackle open-ended design tasks and to identify unknown unknowns of future products.

Prototyping give you an opportunity to directly challenge assumptions and test hypotheses that go beyond superficial improvements. You can test out new interaction models, new features, and entirely new strategies.

It’s also an opportunity to try mini-visioning exercises where participants can give you ongoing feedback on the future of your product and organization.

Deliver impact by exploring different futures

Organizations struggle to envision the future because they’re obsessed about users needs and not considering what users dream about. Our job as product managers, researchers, and designers should be to keep exploring what is possible today and tomorrow.

Short-termism is limiting and only considers what your org needs/wants. We need to be allies for users and help them imagine new possibilities.

This can injected into every test, survey, and co-creation session.

The future of your product shouldn’t be left only to the futurists and CEOs. Each one of us can be agents of change by collecting the data and insights needed to evaluate potential futures. We can build business cases that drive change at leadership levels.

And thankfully there are many agents of change in other orgs working to create mindset shifts within large organizations about co-creation that we all can learn from.