We’re obsessed with the happy path. As Product Managers, we craft elegant user stories, celebrate hockey-stick growth charts, and build for the ideal user who does exactly what we want. We ship, we measure, and we move on.

But there’s a dark side to this relentless focus on forward momentum: every feature we launch has a shadow, a set of unintended consequences that we ignore at our peril.

Your Brilliant Feature Might Be a Ticking Time Bomb

Think your new feature is a guaranteed win? Let’s talk about that AI-powered support agent you’re so excited about. You sold it as a marvel of efficiency that would slash support costs.

But what if it’s also a trust-destroying machine? What if it confidently hallucinates answers that get your company in legal trouble? Or what if it’s so cold and unhelpful that it makes your most loyal customers feel like a line item on a spreadsheet?

Your cost-saving feature just became your churn-creating nightmare. This is the central paradox of product development: an idea’s potential for good is often directly proportional to its potential for harm.

Negligence Is Not an Excuse

"We didn't see it coming" is no longer a valid excuse. Ignoring the potential for misuse, abuse, and collateral damage is a failure of leadership. This negligence has real costs:

• Trust: Once broken, it’s nearly impossible to rebuild.
• Reputation: Your brand can be permanently tainted by a feature that enables harassment, spreads misinformation, or exploits vulnerable users.
• Ethics: Are you building tools that make the world better, or just more efficient at being worse?

Your job isn't just to ship. It's to be the first line of defense for your users and your company's integrity.

How to See Around Corners

Anticipating the negative isn't about negativity; it's about professional diligence. Here’s how to make it part of your DNA:

1. Run a "Premortem," Not a Postmortem. Before a single line of code is written, gather your team and ask: "How does this feature fail in the most epic way possible?" Encourage brutal honesty. To take this a step further, I use AI as my dedicated sparring partner. I'll prompt an agent like Alfred to become my worst nightmare: a bad actor trying to exploit the feature, a competitor looking for weaknesses, or a cynical user determined to misunderstand it. This form of adversarial thinking forces out the ugly possibilities before they become reality.
2. Assume Your Users Aren't Saints (or Experts). Design for reality. How will a troll abuse this feature? How will a confused user break it? How could it be weaponized by a bad actor? Build for the worst-case user, not just the best-case one.
3. Install Circuit Breakers. Don't launch a powerful tool without an off-switch. Build in guardrails from day one: rate limits, clear disclaimers, user-controlled privacy settings, and dead-simple "escape hatches" to talk to a real human.
4. Treat Launch Day as Day Zero. Your job isn't done when the feature is live. It's just started. Watch the data like a hawk—not just the vanity metrics, but the support tickets, the social media complaints, and the weird usage patterns. Be humble enough to admit when you got it wrong and agile enough to fix it fast.

Stop Building Fragile Products

Building with foresight isn't about adding bureaucracy. It’s about forging antifragile products that can withstand the chaos of the real world. It’s the difference between being a feature factory and being an institution that people trust.

So, the next time you write a PRD, stop and think. What's the worst thing someone could do with this? And how do we stop them?

Good PMs build what’s on the roadmap. Great PMs build what lasts.