How do unknown scenarios impact your products and services?

Products and services involve talking to customers about problems, identifying opportunities, and quantifying the benefits. This is not simple, and benefit data often needs to be convincing—activity times, flow rates, up-times, etc—that generate more revenue or reduce costs for customers (especially, in B2B). One of the trickiest parts is determining the value that the market will place on a new development.



Market value often gets discounted until proven in the field, and it's not uncommon to see projections vary widely. Sometimes, forecasts might be too optimistic, while other times it’s just impossible to keep up. In either case, everything could fall apart when something changes or doesn’t go according to plan...



This might be connected to underlying assumptions and dependencies. Projections about oil prices, currency rates, consumer demand, labor rates and other basics will almost certainly fluctuate, especially in the long term. But, it’s easy to underestimate the impact of variability when developing products and services because people need to move fast.



Of course, I could be wrong—but trying to make better predictions probably won’t work, especially far into the future. How do unknown scenarios impact your products and services?