Adaptive preference and shrinking Product Vision
An adaptive preference results when we modify aspirations toward expectations in light of experience.
We come to want what we think is within our grasp.
This is true for individuals and it is true for individual decision-makers within an organisation. It is true for groups and group decision-making.
As humans, we tend to downgrade the value of previously desired outcomes as their realisation becomes less likely and upgrade the value of previously undesired outcomes as their realisation becomes more likely.
The mind plays tricks.
The implications for Product Management is multi-fold:
Product vision downgrades when it meets obstacles.
Obstacles can arrive as market and customer reality - how desirable is this to customers.
Obstacles can arrive as organisational or political reality - how hard it is to convince others to test the vision against market obstacles.
Internal negativity, stagnation and politicking can not only kill good, viable product visions but worse, make the organisation believe it never even desired those audacious visions in the first place.
Market Reality
Adaptive preference in the light of early negative customer feedback shapes the product vision toward something that is more immediately desirable to the market. Typically, this shrinks the audacity of the product vision.
This is the tension between a valid reality distortion field and the cold, hard truth of customer feedback.
Some of the world’s greatest products faced an uphill struggle against the negativity of initial customer feedback - the car, the computer, the mobile. So too, some of the world’s worst. Navigating that tension is the bread and butter of the Product Management literature.
Organisational Reality
Less explored, are the countless, daring product visions that were hamstrung internally long before the market got a look in. And the organisational story-telling that whirred into action to rationalise why ‘we could never have done it, anyway’.
Obstacles introduced by the organisational reality not only make it drastically less likely that we achieve the possibilities of a future-facing product vision, they prevent that vision from first-contact with the market. Then bury the evidence in the organisational consciousness - we train ourselves to not want daring product vision.
If we’re going to succumb to adaptive preference of our product vision, let it be led by feedback from reality. Not by unnecessary internal obstacles that make us aim lower than market reality would demand.