Professor Tetlock, who’s based at the University of Pennsylvania, famously did a 20-year study of political predictions involving more than 280 experts, and found that on balance their rate of accuracy was little better than chance. In November 2007, economists in the Philadelphia Federal Reserve’s Survey of Professional Forecasters predicted just a 20 percent chance of “negative growth”—read: decline—in the U.S. economy any time in 2008, despite visible signals of an impending recession. The data shows humans are terrible at predicting the future. A product manager is a human. Therefore, product managers are not much better at predicting the future.
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