A product does not exist in a vacuum — it’s nested inside and influenced by many areas. Product managers need to be students of all these areas or risk having costly blindspots.

Some recent examples

• Culture — The Threads app: Meta understanding the culture of distrust at the moment and deprioritizing posts about politics and news

• People — Every crypto scam that preyed on people’s gold rush FOMO headspace the last few years and made millions

• Technology — Microsoft partnering with OpenAI and leveraging it in all their products

• Industry — The Cambrian explosion of EV companies as the car industry retools for electric (a similar process happened with smartphones and their components)

• Company — Boeing’s series of disasters as a result of a company culture focussing on business metrics at the expense of engineering excellence