As Product Managers , my work primarily involves making a decisions with incomplete information. Incomplete not because I am lazy ( a debatable topic ) and haven’t bothered to figure it but that  is the nature of the beast.

  • Incomplete information on the  market you are serving
  • Incomplete information on user needs and motivations
  • Incomplete information on your technical ability to deliver
  • Incomplete information on the what the future looks like

As Product managers you are betting on the future state of your users. As with all forecasting, there is an element of unknown. What makes it more challenging is you need to channel all this incomplete information into coherent information to your team and stakeholders.

How does one manage this ?

Firstly being self aware of your limits. Operating in product teams makes you quickly aware of your limits of your competence. Warren Buffet calls it the Circle of competence. He defines it as an area where you have significant experience and studied deeply. In my case, I might understand how data is used to deliver insights to develop products,  but I may not know about entering a new market. I might understand what it means to develop an MVP for a complex enterprise API but it doesn't mean I could do the same for a B2C SaaS.  What is crucial is not the surface area of the knowledge but a clarity on the limitations of your knowledge.

Secondly be aware that product management like many other disciplines is a collaborative sport, you need to recruit your own board of experts for different areas of the product. An engineer on the team might have an uncanny expertise in a specific domain, a sales rep might have a deep knowledge of customer problem, an engineering manager might know how to scale a solution and what to avoid. It is your job in product to recruit the right expert for the problem at hand. The iteration one uses in experimenting and testing should be extended in information discovery.

Lastly being directionally accurate with incomplete information is enough in most cases. It significantly better than analysis paralysis over completeness. Embracing the uncertainty is the best part about product management.

Let me know how do you manage when you have incomplete information ?

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