Probabilistic Products

Product Management, Design, and Development’s next big thing

In 2016, during my tenure as head of product at an AI startup, I used the term “Probabilistic Product” in some personal discussions and public speaking engagements. When discussing AI/ML product planning I noticed that we were thinking differently about how to approach product than before. With the more recent developments in GenAI, it’s more relevant than ever.

For years, we built deterministic products — input A and B, then expect C behavior and output. That’s what I was used to. But I sensed a shift. A new era of product and product management was dawning, one driven by probabilities rather than certainties. I believe that as AI continues to evolve, probabilistic products will become central to taking AI and applying it to use cases. But what exactly is a “Probabilistic Product”?

What is a Probabilistic Product?

In the traditional software world, we’ve mostly built products that are deterministic — predictable systems where inputs and outputs are well-defined and predictable. For decades we’ve mostly collected data, stored data, managed data (CRUD) in databases, made calculations on numbers, formatted text, ran algorithms, and created very predictable output. Almost all of the B2B and B2C software you use…