Unlock Your Product Sense: Discover Your True Product Potential!
7 Proven Strategies to Unlock Your Product Intuition
There is a lot written about Product Sense and how important it is for Product Managers. Product Thinking, Product Intuition, and Product Sense all describe the same concept. Product Sense is simply the ability to creatively build products and solutions that solve customer jobs and outcomes. Product Managers are able to do that when they have a deep understanding of the customer, industry, business, and their own products.
However, using the word “sense” might indicate that people have it innately. While some people might be naturally better at it, Product Sense is something that can be developed over time. When I first heard of product sense, I wondered if it was something people innately have and assumed I did not.
I developed a deep empathy for customers, a deeper understanding of what solutions would work, and a holistic view of the industry and other solutions. As a PM building products to improve people’s financial wellness, I developed deep expertise in customers’ financial lives. I spent a decade immersing myself in the lives of financially underserved customers. I probably read every book on poverty, financial inclusion, microfinance, and related topics.
Did I have a natural product sense? Maybe not. Did I develop a deep product sense? Absolutely!
I have seen the following tactics work for people in developing product sense.
🎯 Develop Customer Empathy
Get entrenched in the lives of your customers. Immerse yourself in your customer context. Know about their lives, their contexts, the jobs they are trying to do, what gets in the way, their joys, etc., You can read more about developing customer empathy in my post "Radical Empathy”
👉 Know Your Product
As you build your product, document the entire end-to-end customer experience. This includes the marketing pages customers might see, blogs, API integrations, onboarding, product experience, customer service, and anything that touches your customer experience. A true test of this would be if you are able to demo the entire product to a new customer.
🤔 Learn customer perception of your product
Observe how people interact with your products. This is best done through User Research. Learn about what they think the purpose of your product is, How they interact with your product, how they feel, and what they experience at each step. This will help you gain deep insights that will help you improve your products to solve customer perception.
🔍 Product Critique
Invite folks from different teams to critique your product. Learn from their observation and improve your product and your skills from diverse perspectives
💡 Try other products
Analyze other products and experiences frequently. Observe your own interactions with other products. Try new products, observe how you heard about them, observe new onboarding experiences, think of who ideal customers might be, and understand why things work or don't work. Assess how you might improve these experiences. This should be your favorite new hobby.
📝 Compare products
Compare products from different companies that are solving the same customer or problem. Observe how each of them approaches solving the same problem. Try and analyze why they might have made certain choices. Think about what you would’ve done differently.
💥 Demo Jams
Host demo jams where you invite others to demo their favorite products and share why. This will help you try other products at scale while also helping you learn about other people’s perspectives.
Resources
Diverse perspectives on the concept so that you can form your own perspective of Product Sense.
🔗 Marty Cagan - “Product Sense Demystified”
🔗 Julie Zhou - “The Power of Product Thinking”
🔗 Jules Walter on Lenny’s newsletter - “How To Develop Product Sense”
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