Anthropic says product planning has become probabilistic because the company has little certainty about which extreme scenarios will occur.

“Like, we'll see about this one in particular, but examples like this have been consistently the way that we've had to actually transform the way we develop our roadmap because, you know, in traditional product management, I guess you can be like, okay, like these are the set of things I hypothesize to happen.”

“They will have like a s- certain sequence, a certain ordering, but you are picking bets in a way that are much more concrete versus, uh, like, you know, the de-deployment of Fable, for example.”

“I don't think any one of us could have guessed that that would've been like a valid use case that would've happened, um, by the government and the way we just like had to go do it.”

“But clearly the probability is non-zero. And so from this form of thinking, it's become deeply probabilistic actually, um, from like a product management standpoint of like, so should we prioritize this?”

“When we look at things like that, we're like, okay, if we are to imagine the most crazy set of possibilities, we probably actually have very little certainty as to where things will go.”