Future Backward — also called "Big S" strategy — is Chandra Janakiraman's aspirational counterpart to Present Forward: A Five-Phase Process for Problem-Focused Strategy ("small-s" strategy). Where Present Forward is problem-focused and runs 8-12 weeks on a roughly 2-year horizon, Future Backward is anchored in mission and vision (Mission → Vision → Strategy → Roadmap Hierarchy), aimed at a 5-10 year horizon, and can run up to six months.
Process: scan long-term cultural, social, and technological trends; interview leadership about the 5-10 year future; generate three distinct possible futures; build "concept car" prototypes for each — built to inspire and provoke reaction, not to ship; test the concept cars with real users; converge the findings into the roadmap. Unlike Present Forward, which is PM-led, Future Backward is led by design/UXR.
Small-s and Big-S work run as parallel, ongoing streams rather than a strict sequence — like two tributaries feeding the same river — and both ultimately merge into the same Roadmap (Feature/Project List). Big-S supplies the long-horizon inspiration and possible-futures framing that Present Forward's shorter, problem-focused cycle has no room for.
Design and UXR — not product management — own this track. The theory: blue-sky, open-minded thinkers should be pointed at open-ended, unconstrained futures work, while metric-focused thinkers stay on the nearer-term, problem-solving Present Forward: A Five-Phase Process for Problem-Focused Strategy.
The concrete artifact used mid-process is Concept-Car Prototyping (Big-S Strategy): building throwaway prototypes of each candidate future purely to extract one inspiring nugget, not to ship.