I've stolen a bit of a very old post here, and reworked it.
Imagine for a moment you are the product manager for augmented /autonomous driving at Volvo. You have got every different type of snow and ice covered. You have figured out how to find parking at IKEA, at the back of the store where you collect the Billy Bookcases on the mind of its own trolley. (You even have a stage two feature lined up with a robot that manoeuvres the IKEA trolley and loads the car for you, but I digress).
You have figured out how to dodge elks, moose and even reindeer, with or without sleds. Cyclists, well, your Danish colleague has had that figured for a while.
Then someone in head-office has the idea to do a pilot in Australia. So, you get the heat thing figured out, right hand drive, how to overtake trucks bigger than trains, and you dial back the 14 types of snow requirement for the first release. But one thing catches you by surprise.
Kangaroos.
image via http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40416606
Actually for the last few years Volvo have been filming and analysing Kangaroo movement and behaviour. It causes havoc with the sensors as the hopping makes measuring distance really difficult.
Turns out that Kangaroos account for roughly 80% of vehicle/animal collisions in Australia. See https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/06/volvos-driverless-cars-cant-figure-out-kangaroos/ for more.
So what does this have to do with HR software product management? Well a bit.
The best way to minimize kangaroos is to minimize the distance between you and your ideal customers, and build a process where you are continually learning and experimenting. Think of it as the product counterpart of continuous delivery. You can't just gather requirements once and then build, it needs to be iterative.
Teresa Torres, one of the leading experts in Product Management, has come up with an excellent methodology. She calls it Continuous Discovery. Head over to her blog and read more. Buy the book too. Continuous Discovery Habits. I'll review the book in a forthcoming post, there is so much goodness in it.