The Palantír — Revelation-Driven Product Management

© New Line Cinema

“A Palantír is a dangerous tool, Saruman.” — Gandalf

Using a palantír required a person with great strength of will and wisdom.The palantíri were meant to be used to communicate between kingdoms of Middle Earth, and during the War of the Ring, the palantíri were also used by few individuals, including Saruman. Being able to see distant events from the past and future often gave him an edge during the War.

A major theme of palantír usage is that while the stones show real objects or events, they are an unreliable guide to action, and it is often unclear whether events are past or future: what is not shown may be more important than what is selectively presented. Further, users with sufficient power can choose what to show and what to conceal: in The Lord of the Rings, all uses of palantíri influence the action through deception or misreading of what is shown.

The term “revelation” used in the title and the fact that palantíri were perfectly smooth, shining spheres could probably bring up the “shiny objects” syndrome widely known in product management discipline. However, we’re tackling a bit of a different issue here. Revelation-driven product management, as we will call it, cuts deeper. While shiny objects apply more to prioritization and delivery, we focus on the problem-solution fit stage of product discovery.

(By the way, the story of “Eating the halflings” touches the issue of distraction by something new and attractive.)

The Nature of revelations

Generally speaking, both problem identification and solution proposition are processes. It can be more formally described, conducted step by step according to some methodology, or rather chaotic, based on gut feelings and experience. Either way, there’s always space for these “Aha!” moments, which probably an inherent part of any creative process. However, when they become the centerpiece of discovery, that’s when things go south. In Revelation-driven PM, they do.

Revelations are most often triggered by small incidents that eventually turn out to be critical. A single conversation with the client. A web page of a possible competitor. An article or even seemingly unrelated episode of a favourite Netflix series, all of these can become a pivotal moment for the whole product. Business model, client and value proposition included. These revelations, just like palantír, quickly become a mystical experience of the enlightened, unreachable for mere mortals. Most of the cases the subject of a revelation is a complete package of newly discovered need and a sudden solution that appeared right from the enlightenment.

The trick is, they’re never true revelations, there’s no enlightenment nor even any groundbreaking discoveries. They are only smoke and mirrors set up to hide that we’re lost. For the “Revelations” happen, when we don’t know how to learn from mistakes and outcomes of wrong decisions. It’s much harder to draw conclusions and transparently present them to stakeholders, than just announce “We were all so wrong, but now we finally KNOW. Now we’re all safe”. These moments of enlightenment can also indicate lack of trust to our own decision making process. If it’s shaky and biased (due to, among others, poor craftsmanship or time pressure) creating the mystical image of our position makes it a little bit harder to deny.

Ofcourse, to make Revelations-driven Product Management effective and sustainable, some conditions have to be met. The product culture has to be immature to get away with bad product discovery practices, or the stakeholders unable/unwilling to intervene. But the sine qua non condition for the Saruman holding palantír to work is being a skilled orator. One has to be persuasive enough to make stakeholders believe that THIS TIME we really got it. No worries, next time he comes with a new revelation, they won’t remember the former and again, be thankful for saving their lives. And on, and on, as long as there’s money for wrong decisions.

Avoiding the Palantíri

To follow revelations is also obviously risky. The critic Jane Chance Nitzsche writes that Saruman’s sin, in Christian terms, is to seek Godlike knowledge by gazing in a short-sighted way into the Orthanc palantír in the hope of rivalling Sauron, and, quoting Tolkien in The Two Towers, exploring “all those arts and subtle devices, for which he forsook his former wisdom”. She explains that he is in this way giving up actual wisdom for “mere knowledge”, imagining the arts were his own but in fact coming from Sauron. This prideful exaltation of himself leads to his fall. She notes that it is ironic in this context that palantír means “far-sighted”. So, the Product Management Revelations, being only smoke and mirrors, or the final straw for making decisions, can be more destructive than just a rhetorical way of announcing changes and mistakes.

To avoid using palantíri in your product discovery, you have to gain some trust from yourself and your team. It’s not that easy, and for young product teams can be pretty challenging. Yet, a few of advice:

1. Time spent understanding your client always pays off. You don’t always get straight answers, but at least helps you pay attention to the important stuff.
2. Assume that finding you were wrong is a success. The number of hypotheses or misconceptions you’ve uncovered might be a measurement of your performance.
3. Hire a proven way of finding problem-solution fit. There’s probably lots of them. I’d personally suggest https://jobs-to-be-done.com/ being an implementation of the late Clayton Christensen’s concept.
4. If you’ve already embraced learning as your main responsibility and adopted a process, make product discovery as transparent as it can be. It’s crucial for you to be trusted also by your team and stakeholders, and there’s no trust without openness. Then it will be much easier to have a buy-in for your methods. And frankly, you’ll need it, as benefits of product discovery aren’t immediate.