I’ve been at two organizations now where the young and/or new folks to the org are ‘afraid’ to give feedback; or they don’t want to; or they feel like they can’t. Or they feel like their feedback isn’t being heard.

On the other side of the coin: I feel like I’m in a feast and famine: I am constantly asking for and not getting feedback on the things that I think matter. I am also always getting feedback on things that don’t matter.

So, a plucky Product Manager might ask herself: what gives?

The tricky thing about building products or features is that you have to imagine them before you can build them. While PMs live in this space, most people do not live in this imagination space. Most people need to see it and play with it and touch it and imagine it in their workflow before they can meaningfully provide feedback. Of course, for many things, by the time the PM has heard nothing, built the feature, and then gotten it into the hands of the user: it is too late.

Product orgs have come up with clever ways around the issue that most people cannot imagine things and then react to the imagined world. There are prototypes, user interviews, A/B tests. These are all ways of attempting to bring something into the real world with more or less “realness” to see what other people will say. Usually, feedback from other people becomes available at some point along that slow progression from imagined to real.

However: as development times shorten, the interstitial time between “imagine a world…” and “this is a world where…” will move to 0. There will be no ability for other orgs to react to something before it is “real.”

To the people who are not part of the builders at an org: I have some tough advice. You have to get better at living in the imaginary if you want to continue to be relevant. You simply must.