Abundance needs curation
Mini-musing #4
When we live in scarcity, we crave abundance. But when we live in abundance, we crave scarcity. The former is more obvious, while the latter is less so - but both are equally true. When we don’t have enough, we need more. But when we have too much, less is (suddenly) more. Our relationship with both scarcity or abundance is a ying-yang of sorts.
As product folks, we are now living in a world where one of our scarcest resource - the capacity to build and engineer product - is radically compressing. The rate at which this transformation is happening feels both awe-inspiring and jarring. Much has been written about why this is so incredibly exciting, and much has also been written about why this feels existentially threatening. And perhaps - like a more complicated ying-yang - we carry both of those emotions these days!
If our capacity to build becomes more abundant, we will inevitably crave scarcity elsewhere. In the context of product, the natural desire for ‘less is more’ will likely shift downstream, closer to our customers and our businesses. We will find more valuable scarcity there, because of user attention being finite, their appetite for rapid consumption & change being limited, their demand for a coherent user experience (even if the user is their agent), their discretion when it comes to share-of-wallet or willingness to pay, etc. These constraints won’t matter less; in fact, they will matter more.
Prioritization doesn’t go away; it shifts. And in this shifts, both our instincts and our workflows must flex too. The real product problem of figuring out what people want, and what merits the right to touch our customers, remains. But where and how we make those decisions will adapt, and happen more organically and continuously across discovery, validation, development and deployment. This evolution will represent a mindset shift both for the ‘no-first’ and the ‘yes-first’ personas in our teams; we are far less accustomed to a ‘no-later’ approach to prioritization. That means being willing to discard prototypes as you find the best solutions, throw away code without feeling like it was a failure, thereby succumbing to sunk-cost fallacy. It means allowing roadmaps be more emergent and discovered, not just preplanned and committed. And it means investing in the systems and playbooks that keep the overall experience coherent, even as individual features ship faster than ever
The abundance that AI promises now is exciting. But, more than its unboundedness, I am excited about the opportunity it creates for us to converge around the real constraints. The right constraints. Abundance creates the desire for discretion. Discretion and judgement remain, even if they’re applied at different points than today. And for us, as PMs, it means our roles may feel more like museum curators, and much less like watchmen or castle-guards.
Wrap
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