The Future is Invisible introduces the new concept of Generational Products - products that evolve and endure for a multi-generational lifespan.
Creating new products is risky, expensive and often leads to failure. Companies struggle to create new products, waste trillions of dollars making products that simply don’t last in market and lose to competitors.
We are asked often how entrepreneurs, product owners, corporates and investors can develop foresight to see what comes next so they can make products that will endure. We wrote this book to share our learnings how modern products evolve generationally, enable others to develop foresight and empower product creators to build Generational Products that last.
The book establishes a new framework for product creators and companies of all sizes to build Generational Products that last. There are seven distinct phases that modern products go through on their path to eventually becoming invisible. The framework explores the seven generations: Reactive, Proactive, Instructive, Predictive, Prescriptive, Reductive, and Invisible.
The result is a new way of thinking about creating new products, identifying generational whitespace and a practical framework that shows exactly how to build Generational Products.
Why does this matter?
You may be wondering why Generational Products and the Product Generations Framework matter. It’s a great question with a very simple answer.
Trillions of dollars, countless hours of human effort and a massive amount of resources go into creating new products. The vast majority of them fail. Less than 1% of new products find an audience, build a viable customer base and earn enough revenue to remain in the market.
This amounts to an incredible amount of waste and the opportunity cost is staggering. Creating a new product is one of the lowest probability of success activities that a company can undertake. There are countless reasons for why this happens which we document in this book.
The vast majority of products fail.
We recognized another very important reason why products fail. Product creators typically follow one of 9 master product strategies and/or 80 subordinate strategies when making new products. These strategies are used to create short-term results without an affordance or consideration for how to make that product last beyond it’s first generation.
What’s missing is a product strategy and framework that clearly articulates how to create products that grow and evolve generationally so they can endure for an incredibly long time. It was this realization that led us to write this book.
We know how hard it is to build products that find success. We want founders, product professionals, investors, futurists, policy makers and executives to benefit from having a blueprint to make their products successful.
We have used the framework, best practices and principles in this book to build Generational Products and experienced the difference in going from -5 to 0 to 1 to scale which gives us tremendous conviction for its effectiveness and value.
Blueprint for success.
Product Generations Framework
The framework includes the 7 generations that a Generational Product progresses through in it’s path to become invisible. A summary of each generation from the book is listed in this section.
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