The Product Manager's Survival Guide

by Steven Haines

PRESTO is not a magician’s word. It’s an acronym that all product people should know. It stands for: P: The political environment that determines how governments and political parties treat businesses R: The regulatory environment that relates to the laws that govern how businesses are to behave in a given area E: The economic environment in any area that creates context for favorable or unfavorable business conditions S: The social or societal environment that influences given trends and activities with respect to behaviors and attitudes of people in different customer groupings T: The technological environment in any area that provides indicators related to the pace of innovation or the enabling techniques that become available for exploitation O: Other aspects of the environmental domain that may provide clues to investment cycles or funding trends, business organizational structures (see Chapter 2), and so on PRESTO refers to the characterization of a multifaceted, ever-changing landscape in which your company does business. Each aspect of the PRESTO model, each indicator, can vary based on the areas in which your company operates. Some of the aspects that you can explore are: 1. Industry sectors or groupings (e.g., communications, financial services, healthcare, etc.) 2. Competitive intensity or the degree of concentration or fragmentation of various competitors 3. Competitive scale—meaning the relative size (revenue) of the competitive companies; some industries are ...