Predictability vs Outcomes

Marty Cagan of the Silicon Valley Product Group argues that companies which value predictable delivery dates over results will use AI to ship more without achieving more.

Marty Cagan founded the Silicon Valley Product Group, which advises companies on product management, and has long argued that results matter more than output. He now writes that the real trade-off is between results and predictable delivery. Most companies, in his view, choose predictability, and AI lets them produce more output without better results.

• Cagan writes that AI has made plentiful output with few results a bigger problem than ever before.
• Companies still on the project model, where feature teams exist to serve the business, put predictability first and hope that results follow from shipping what was promised.
• Putting results first means accepting that many ideas on a roadmap will not work, and finding that out quickly through product discovery.
• He also faults product leaders and product managers who put untested ideas on roadmaps with dates or timeframes attached.

A product team can ask its leaders which they reward when the two conflict, a promised date or a measured result. This is an inference and is not the author's claim.

Derived by Working Surface from the article; more in the Playbook. Source line: The real trade-off is the relative priority of outcomes versus predictability.

18 October 2026: as AI agents make code and prototypes cheap, teams are writing down which work needs a human check and which ideas have earned more effort.