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Trend forecasting for product managers — how to predict the future
Boost your product growth by predicting what comes next.
People change, markets change, and the whole world changes. These big, long-term changes, also called trends, open doors for new inventions. And kill whole business models.
Understanding and noticing these changes as they happen — rather than post-factum, as most people do — gives us an opportunity to 10X our product growth and thus our career.
While not every product must be trendy, every product manager should have at least a basic understanding of how trend forecasting works.
Let’s dig into it.
Trend definition
Let’s first understand what trend is and what it isn’t.
Trends are a manifestation of sustained, long-term change. This long-term sustainability is what distinguishes trends from temporary fads.
Fads are often quick and abrupt spike of interest which doesn’t last long. Take a fidget spinner as an example. It did a massive boom at some point, and nowadays, no one seems to talk about it anymore.
Trends, on the other hand, are here to stay. A decade ago, no one heard about buy now pay later, and nowadays, every major company implements it, recently including Apple. The conclusion is simple, BNPL is here to stay and grow over the foreseeable future.
Why should a product manager monitor trends?
Whether or not we care about being ‘trendy’, trends significantly impact products and markets. It might be both a positive impact to capitalise on or a negative impact to mitigate.
Reasons to monitor trends:
- Trends teach us about the market and our customers. Trends don’t appear out of thin air; changes in customer behaviour drive them. Observing how trends change helps us understand how our customers change.
- Trends present new opportunities. When a new trend develops, the demand suddenly…
