Fernand Braudel and Why Product Managers Focus on the Wrong Things
What product managers can learn from Fernand Braudel about events, trends, structures, AI, and long-term product strategy.
Or: Why Your Competitor’s New Feature Probably Does Not Matter As Much As You Think
One of the most useful thinkers product managers have never heard of is the French historian Fernand Braudel, which is slightly unfortunate because Braudel may have understood change better than most strategy consultants, transformation programmes, innovation teams and LinkedIn influencers combined.
Braudel’s central argument was deceptively simple. Most people focus on events: the things happening right now, the visible things, the dramatic things and the things people post about in capital letters. History, however, is usually shaped by something deeper, and product management increasingly suffers because we forget this.
The Tyranny of Events
Braudel once described events as:
“the ephemera of history”
His point was not that events are irrelevant. They matter, but they are often symptoms rather than causes. A war may appear suddenly, while the forces creating it may have been developing for decades. A government may collapse in a week, while the pressures behind that collapse may have existed for generations. A product category may appear to disappear overnight, even though the underlying conditions have often been changing for years.
Most organisations, however, become obsessed with events. A competitor launches a feature and panic begins. A startup raises funding and panic increases. A Gartner report appears and suddenly everyone needs a strategy session. Someone posts “AI will kill SaaS” on LinkedIn and the result is mass panic, followed by seventeen workshops and a PowerPoint deck containing the phrase “digital transformation journey” at least forty-two times.
Braudel would probably have looked at all this and asked what deeper forces sit underneath these events. That is usually the better question.
The Three Layers of Reality
Braudel argued that history operates across different timescales. The first and shortest timescale is the level of events. This is the daily noise of announcements, launches, earnings calls, product releases and conference presentations. These things are visible, immediate and often overvalued because they are easy to see.
The second layer is slower and can be understood as the level of trends. Mobile adoption, cloud computing, remote working, artificial intelligence, changing customer expectations and new commercial models all sit in this category. These shifts emerge over years, and they usually matter more than individual events because they change the context in which events occur.
Then comes the deepest layer: structures. These are the forces reshaping entire societies and markets, such as communication costs, access to knowledge, education, energy, infrastructure, demographics, regulation, labour markets and capital availability. These operate across decades, and Braudel called this the longue durée, or the long duration. This was the level that fascinated him because this is where history is really made.
Why Most Product Strategy Is Too Short-Term
Many product teams spend their lives operating almost entirely at the event layer. Roadmaps, competitor analysis, quarterly planning and release schedules are all useful and necessary, but they are often too narrow if they are not connected to deeper shifts.
The danger is that teams become obsessed with visible movement while missing structural change. Consider AI. Many organisations are currently asking which AI feature they should add, how they can summarise meetings, how they can generate requirements, how they can automate support tickets, and how they can bolt AI onto the roadmap without looking like they panicked in a board meeting.
These are event-level questions. Braudel would probably ask something far larger: what happens when the cost of knowledge work collapses? That is a structural question, and structural questions usually matter more.
The Death of SaaS. Again.
Every few weeks someone announces the death of SaaS, usually accompanied by a blurry AI-generated image and enough confidence to invade a medium-sized country. Perhaps SaaS will change dramatically, and perhaps some companies will disappear, but history suggests caution.
The printing press did not eliminate knowledge. Electricity did not eliminate factories. The internet did not eliminate business. These technologies changed where value lived, which is a more useful way of thinking about AI than simply asking whether software will survive.
The structural question is not whether AI will replace software. The better question is what becomes valuable when intelligence becomes cheap. History repeatedly shows that when something becomes abundant, value migrates elsewhere. If intelligence becomes abundant, then perhaps the scarce things become context, trust, governance, integration, human judgement, domain expertise, distribution and accountability.
The event is AI. The structural shift is changing the economics of knowledge itself, and those are not the same thing.
Charlie Chaplin Understood This Better Than Most Product Managers
One of the most remarkable critiques of industrial society came not from an economist or historian, but from Charlie Chaplin. In Modern Times and later The Great Dictator, Chaplin repeatedly warned about a world becoming obsessed with machinery while forgetting people.
One of his most famous lines was:
“More than machinery we need humanity.”
That line feels increasingly relevant because many AI discussions focus almost entirely on capability. The discussion is usually about whether something can be made faster, cheaper, more efficient or more automated. Chaplin’s question was different because he was asking what kind of society we are creating.
Braudel would have appreciated that question because it focuses on structures rather than events. The better product question is not only what the machine can do, but how the machine reshapes human behaviour over time. Those are profoundly different questions, and the second is usually the more strategic one.
The Grapes of Wrath and Structural Change
John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is another example of this way of thinking. At first glance, it is a novel about a family, but beneath the surface it is really about structural change: mechanisation, migration, economic transformation and the collapse of old ways of life.
The tragedy in Steinbeck’s world is not caused by a single event. It emerges from deeper forces reshaping society itself, which is exactly how major product shifts often occur.
Companies frequently search for a single explanation when customers leave, adoption falls, a startup wins or a once-safe category suddenly becomes vulnerable. The answer is often not one event. It is usually the accumulation of slower changes that have been quietly unfolding for years. By the time the event becomes visible, the structural battle has often already been lost.
The Mark Corrigan Problem
Mark Corrigan from Peep Show would be terrible at Braudel because Mark lives almost entirely in the short term. His attention constantly swings between immediate crises, and every awkward meeting or social interaction feels historically significant in the moment.
Many organisations behave in exactly the same way. The latest customer escalation becomes the most important thing in the world. The latest competitor launch becomes existential. The latest technology trend becomes inevitable.
Braudel’s lesson is that perspective matters. As Chaplin once observed:
“Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”
That might be the most Braudelian quote ever spoken because Braudel’s entire intellectual project was essentially telling people to step back much further than they were comfortable stepping.
Product Managers Should Think in Decades
The most valuable lesson Braudel offers product managers is that we should not confuse movement with change. Many things move, but far fewer things truly change.
A competitor release is movement, while a reduction in the cost of intelligence is change. A new feature is movement, while a shift in how humans interact with knowledge is change. A quarterly metric is movement, while a generational behavioural shift is change.
The best product managers learn to see both, but they focus disproportionately on the deeper forces because those forces shape everything else.
What This Means for Product Strategy
A Braudelian product manager does not ignore the short term, because that would be naive. Events still matter, roadmaps still matter, quarterly targets still matter, customers still need support and competitors still need watching. The point is not to pretend the short term does not exist, but to avoid mistaking it for the whole picture.
The stronger product question is rarely, “What just happened?” It is usually, “What slow-moving force made this possible?” or “What structural shift are we failing to notice?” That change in framing is what moves product strategy beyond reaction.
Instead of only asking what competitors are shipping, what features customers are requesting and what can be delivered this quarter, product managers should also ask what is becoming cheaper, what is becoming abundant, what is becoming scarce, what behaviour is changing slowly but permanently, which market assumptions are becoming fragile and where value is migrating.
That is where product strategy starts to become genuinely strategic.
Final Thoughts
Braudel spent his career encouraging historians to stop staring at the surface of events and start examining the deeper currents underneath them. Product managers should probably do the same.
The next time somebody announces the death of an industry, the arrival of a revolutionary technology or the launch of a supposedly game-changing feature, it is worth pausing before joining the panic. The better question is what structural force is actually changing.
History suggests the visible event is usually not the story. It is merely the headline. The real story is often unfolding much more slowly beneath the surface, and by the time most people notice it, the future has already arrived.