A Practical Guide to Trend Watching
One of the more useful skills I’ve developed over the years is trend watching. Trend watching is a bit of a misnomer as it seems to imply passively sitting by and watching. Instead, it’s an active process of gathering news, sifting through the noise to identify trends. A lot of people who identify themselves as trend watchers or futurists, stop there. They then proceed to tell people about their predictions. But if you want this process to be useful you have to learn how to bundle supporting data behind the trend into something useful (usually a report of some sort) in order to make recommendations of what to do with the trends.
Over the years here’s a small set of decisions I’ve helped drive with trend watching. Marketers use the data a lot to either create new customer segments or reach existing customer segments in new ways. Product managers update existing products with new functionality or build entirely new products. Corporate development (also called business development) use this data to identify new partnerships or acquisition targets. Similarly, venture capitalists have used this data to make portfolio decisions.
Below is a high-level approach I’ve found to work best across multiple different companies and teams. It’s pretty low-tech, relying on email, but I’ve found that to be the most effective since everyone uses email at work. I don’t give a lot of advice on how to write the report because a lot of that will be determined by your company and your audience. When I was on the agency side the output was a PowerPoint deck, ending with ideas we could pitch to clients. At some companies, it was a brief memo sent to a few key executives. At Amazon, I’ve written these up as full 6 pagers, complete with recommendations and financials.
News Gathering
But it starts with something almost everyone does anyway — just reading the news.
I spend 20–30 minutes in the morning reading blogs and maybe an additional 30 minutes over lunch or throughout the day if I have time. If done regularly 30–60 minutes a day will build up a database of relevant news about the marketplace, your industry, and competitors that easily lets you track trends. With 3–4 people doing this, you would typically accumulate about 100 articles a quarter, which eases the burden off one person and gives you the benefit of multiple points of view.
If you’re reading something that you think might be relevant just share the article by sending it via email right from the browser (all browsers have a share function).
Protip: set up an email distribution list, or a shared email account, in advance.
Start subject lines with [Trends]. This allows everyone to set up email filters for [Trends]. ’Trends’ could be replaced with any relevant keyword.
Make sure to include any relevant companies in the subject line. This makes searching through emails easier.
Copy a paragraph or two, but not the whole article, into the email for context. This also helps when doing topic searches later.
Add a sentence or two of your own thoughts. This helps everyone (including yourself when you go back through the email later) understand why you thought the article was important at the time.
Depending on your industry your sources will vary. For me, being in tech, Techmeme is the main source I check and covers the majority of the relevant news. But I also check half a dozen other tech or specific industry blogs regularly for other news.
Pro Tip: Use Feedly to aggregate the RSS feeds of all relevant blogs to provide a mostly one-stop site for all your news.
Writing
When writing my quarterly trends reports I search my [Trends] folder for interesting news and look for frequently occurring or related news. Just because something is covered a lot, doesn’t mean it’s relevant. Usually what you want is something that is just starting to gain ground, but isn’t mainstream yet.
Once I have half a dozen trends I then use Techmeme’s search functionality to find anything I missed. When I want to get more data on specific companies, especially startups, or funding data around a specific trend, I go to CrunchBase. For information on larger companies, especially public companies, I check their public filings. I also do general web searches, check company blogs, and company press rooms to fill in anything else that’s relevant and easily available.
With that, I start the long and painful process of writing. For me, this is the hardest part. Trying to turn nebulous, or non-obvious ideas into something that not just makes sense, but helps very linear business people, make an intuitive leap with me to see what might be, is hard. But it’s a crucial part of the process.
I can tell you that if you have to write these out as a narrative in a Word doc, rather than slides on a PowerPoint, your arguments will be so much more powerful. Even if you then turn that report into slides, it will have more clarity.
I highly recommend doing this every 3–4 months. With that frequency, you start to see what trends fizzle out, what trends you-you got wrong (which is vital to getting better at trend watching), and what trends you miss.
The news gathering part is a valuable exercise for the person or the team doing the gathering, but failing to turn that into something useful is a huge missed opportunity. It’s a lot of work and it can be frustrating (especially when people ignore your advice), but it’s it’s incredibly valuable to the organization as well as to the people writing the report.
