Product managers must constantly navigate the gap between planning for longer-term business strategy while planning for shorter-term sprints—without falling into the abyss between them. It's not easy!

No one likes the idea of pouring precious time and effort into creating a product or product functionality that bombs in market.

Getting agreement on your product plans can be an uphill, bloody battle. As a product manager, you’re likely more immersed in your product and have the closest thing to a 360-degree view than nearly anyone else in your company. You know your customers. You know the market and what’s needed to sell and support your product. You know what engineering can, wants, and needs to do to keep things running. But you need stakeholder buy in, and, sometimes, formal approval.

Dante’s Inferno has nine circles of Hell. Fortunately, product teams don’t have to navigate them all to address their planning challenges without getting burned. The main goal of product planning is to identify and prioritize candidate features most likely to succeed in the market given resource and time constraints. How do you know what’s most likely to succeed? Validation.