As PM the team will often come to you about a decision that needs to be made. You'll need to do everything you can to increase the quality of those decisions.
Having product sense means you’ll usually make the right decision, even when faced with uncertainty. If you can make 10% better decisions than your peers, the compounding results add up.
It's not always easy to know which decision will have the biggest impact. Lucky for us, product sense can be developed through experience and training – giving you better intuition.
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Training your product intuition
I rarely hear from PMs or founders about the steps they’re taking to build their product intuition in the way that people build technical or design skills. Anxiety about whether we have it is rampant. Let me help you find a different approach.
Product intuition is a skill: it is the observation of human behavior, trained by data, and applied to software.
Yes, product intuition is necessary to find product/market fit in early-stage companies and to develop successful product-led growth teams at expansion-stage companies. But before I expand on this further, I want to establish table stakes for developing product intuition: the product hierarchy.
Read Moreby Merci Victoria Grace
medium.com
Even if you're blessed with natural abilities, that alone won't get you to the top 10%. It takes time and commitment to sharpen your judgement.
While some knowledge can be picked up through indirect means (e.g. studying industry reports), most learning will come through direct experiences with colleagues and customers.
Product sense requires specific knowledge across multiple domains, the ability to empathize with your customers, and creativity to find a better solution to their problems.
Go Deeper On
product sense
If you have a deep understanding of the domains you’re operating in, you’ll naturally make better decisions. To become a domain expert...
Empathy is vital at all levels of decision making – from the smallest product details to big strategic decisions. It impacts almost every aspect...
embrace constraints to uniquely solve a problem
Product sense is one of the most valued skills when hiring a PM and specifically tested during the job interview at many companies.
Learn how to acquire the components that make up product sense in the following sections – Domain Knowledge, Empathy, and Creativity.
Or, if you're looking for other perspectives, check below what some of the great minds in product have to say.
Anything Missing?
If you think something is missing from this section, please use the link below and I'll add it if it makes sense.
Suggest ContentOtherwise, continue to the first section in Product Sense – domain knowledge – to learn what it means to be an expert in your product domain.