How Product Managers can actually become antifragile so they can survive and thrive

Product Managers are exposed to a lot of stress and frustration. Because of that, many training sessions for PMs describe antifragility, tell you that you should strive to become antifragile, but don’t tell you how.

Not terribly useful.

A person, thing or system is antifragile if, when subjected to stress (up to a point), it not only survives, but actually becomes stronger.

The concept was created by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book Antifragile. More than a pep talk, Taleb gives practical guidelines on how to become antifragile.

Convexity happens when a system (a person, investment, activity, whatever) has an unbounded upside and a bounded downside. That means that, in the worst case, you don’t lose much but, if things go well, you may win big.

You can limit the downside of an idea for a feature in your product by testing the value of the idea before investing heavily in it. The book Testing Business Ideas, by David Bland et al, gives a ton of techniques.

Most convex bets will not pan out. So you need to make a lot of them to get good results. But it’s still risky.

So Taleb proposes that you make most of your portfolio (about 85%) safe to the point of being boring, and the rest highly speculative (but convex). No moderately risky bets.

If none of your convex bets pays off, you still operate at 85% efficiency. If one of them works, you may win big.

This short essay is to show that there is more to antifragility than the advice to “be antifragile”. You should definitely read Antifragility — and act on it.

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