It’s the best time and the worst time to be a product manager today. Let me explain.

We were taught that the best way to asses what to build is to take a customer problem (or delighter) and solve it fully.

It won't work well now. Customer discovery is going to be near impossible (not that PMs used to do it very well earlier as well, even the good ones)

What do you know about customer problems in this world? Which ones of them are permanent? Which ones will remain or multiply when the world goes back to x% normalcy, and y% orthogonal new problems?

Which ones will stop being a big problem or will be ranked way lower as a preference driver to your service.

The underlying infrastructure and core assumptions around which customers had these problems to begin with will change. Many, many will accentuate and newer ones will emerge.

In today’s world, as a PM you will need to make mid-long ranged assumptions about the world and play multiple scenarios in your head. Assumptions about economy, supply chains, extent and spookiness of the coronavirus and what not.

On top of these assumptions you will build assumptions about future consumer behaviour, which unfortunately you can’t validate by speaking with them. Not even hearing the unknown or the Sonar capability that great PMs have will help. Consumer don't know the future themselves :)

Much of previous data will likely be junk for guiding the future or directional at best. You’re kinda screwed.

On this house of cards of assumptions, you lay your creative ideas and make bets that _some_ of these will work.

1) You can take chances that you will be focused and choose fewer bets with high confidence if assumptions in your market are immune to Coronavirus, or your product is a winner anyway. Or maybe your company has enough money to see through the wave of unsettled behaviours

2)Or place multiple, fully logical, scenario agnostic semi-working bets for the next year and get to shipping / validating. You keep catching soft signals throughout the journey and adapt fast.

1 and 2 both have their failure rates. I prefer 2.

The real winners will be the PMs who are able to predict the future more than the average Joe, creatively imagine the solutions for that future, convince the company to go after that future, and help the company in adopting a culture of creativity and adaptability.