Futurecasting
Headwinds + opportunities of product impact.
Purpose
- Futurecasting is a strategic foresight practice that helps founders anticipate how their products might shape—or be shaped by—future societal, technological, and environmental developments.
- By systematically exploring potential impacts, both positive and negative, you can gain crucial insights to guide ethical product development, mitigate risks, and identify opportunities before they emerge.
- Futurecasting transforms abstract concerns into actionable intelligence, allowing you to build more resilient and responsible companies.
- Futurecasting gives you an expanded vision about your product and company roadmap, inviting deep innovation that can differentiate and provide a meaningful moat against competition.
Method
- Getting in the mindset
As futurist Jim Dator famously stated, “Any useful idea about the future should appear to be ridiculous” – in other words, truly transformative futures often seem implausible from our present perspective.
Companies that change the world rarely do it because of incremental change. Futurecasting is imagining the (nearly) impossible. - Set horizons + assumptions
Set a specific time horizon—3, 5, or 10 years ahead—and establish key assumptions about how your product will evolve and scale. Start by focusing on product – the things you can control. - Use the futures cone
Use the “futures cone,” and work backwards from potential futures to present decisions. Delineate a variety of futures: possible, plausible, probable, and preferable.
This model will help you distinguish the difference between what could technically happen (possible), what might reasonably occur (plausible), what is likely to unfold (probable), and what you actually want (preferable).
Keep in mind these categories often don’t overlap as much as we assume. The first three deal with likelihood or believability (from weakest to strongest: possible → plausible → probable), while preferable deals with desirability or preference rather than probability.
- Possible - Something that can happen or exist. In other words – not impossible.
- Plausible - Something that seems reasonable or believable based on what we know. You might need to spend some time aligning the team on “what we know.” This has to do with credibility rather than just capability.
- Probable - Something that is likely to happen based on evidence or logic. More likely to happen than something that is “Possible.”
- Preferable - Something that is better than alternatives and more desirable for some reason.
- Build scenarios
Create multiple scenarios for your product -- not just your ideal outcome. Think about possible, plausible and probable product futures. What tradeoffs might be necessary? Where might a radical pivot take you?
Use one of the prompts in the Tools section to get you started. - Consider first, second, and third order effects
Consider your product’s impact on individuals, communities, markets, environments, and social structures. Ask questions like “Who benefits most?” and “Who bears hidden costs?” Examine second and third-order effects beyond immediate use cases.
Check out the Customer Ripple Effect to get a sense of how your secondary and tertiary customers might both discover your product and then be affected by it. - Spot product implications
Map dependencies and interactions with existing systems. How might your product alter established behaviors or institutions? Identify inflection points where small changes could trigger significant shifts in adoption or impact. - Be specific
Successful futurecasting outputs should identify specific, plausible consequences rather than vague warnings. The goal isn’t perfect prediction but expanded awareness of possibilities that inform better decision-making today. Document these insights and revisit them regularly as your product evolves. - Sidebar
If you want to learn more about futurecasting, check out Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, pioneers of “speculative design” who advocate for using design not just to solve problems but to pose critical questions about potential futures. Their approach uses tangible prototypes and scenarios to make abstract futures visceral and discussable – turning “what if” questions into experiences that provoke meaningful debate about the kind of future people want or don’t want.
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Trap Doors
- Trapping of preference…
If you’re a founder, odds are you’re an optimist. Try to avoid the trap of unconsciously assuming that what’s likely to happen is what you want to happen. Keep the “preferable” part of the Futures Cone separate. - Missing product implications…
It’s easy to view negative outcomes as PR problems rather than product design challenges. Remember that futurecasting meant to expand product vision not paralyze with fear. - Avoiding the hard thing…
Founders do hard things. Don’t avoid the hard thing of including responsibility alongside innovation.
Common futurecasting mistakes include exploring only preferred futures.
Confirmation bias, assuming linear change rather than systemic shifts, and focusing exclusively on technological capabilities while ignoring social adaptation are also very common pitfallsto fall into.
Cases
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Patagonia routinely conducts material impact forecasting to understand how manufacturing choices might affect ecosystems decades later, influencing current supply chain decisions. Read more about their “Worn Wear” program and futurecasting scenarios for product lifecycle impacts.
Stripe's internal exercises, which ask, “What future are we creating?” have informed its approach to climate initiatives. Read more about it here.
Who to Enlist
Anyone on the core team can participate in futurecasting.
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Whoever is working on product and interacts the most with customers should be part of the conversation.
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If you get really stuck, create a project with an LLM and give it specific detail about your product roadmap along with the scenario and see where it goes. Be sure to include the probable/plausible/possible/preferable framing.