Product Sense: How to Think Like a Product Manager
A guide to improving your product sense, and why product sense is more like a 🧑🚒 firefighter cooking than magic.
Product people think differently.
What sets them apart is product sense. It’s a critical product manager skill that is sometimes called “product thinking,” “product intuition,” or “product judgment.”
We’ll learn what product sense is, why it’s so important, and how you can develop this skill, and we’ll practice it together!
This post is part four of my five-part Product Management Crash Course, based on my recent guest lecture at MIT. Don’t miss it; subscribe.
What is product sense?
There are so many definitions for this term. I like to describe it like this:
Product sense is thinking creatively and critically about a product’s strengths and weaknesses.
It is a unique way of looking at products.
Before I became a product manager, whenever I’d use a new tech product, I’d think about how it affected me personally.
Do I like this device?
Is this app useful to me?
Will I use this subscription?
I rarely thought beyond myself. What a selfish brat. 😜
When I became a PM, something changed. Every new product I interacted with became a point of curiosity, an opportunity to learn. Now I ask questions like:
Will most people like this device?
Is this app useful to business users in X market?
What would make someone consider using this subscription?
After more than a decade of building products, this thinking is second nature to me. I can’t turn it off, which is not fun for my husband. When he complains about a product, I almost always put my product thinking hat on 🎩 and dive into all the pros and cons and why other people probably like the thing he’s not into. I often stop myself from taking the product manager’s side and say, “Yes, honey, that product stinks; only your bizarre use case matters.” 😂
Product sense is looking beyond your opinion and preference about a product to anticipate how the broader market will react.
What it’s not
Product sense is often mistaken for other product concepts, so let’s take a sec to clarify what product sense is not.
Product sense is not about evaluating the company, pricing, or marketing. Product sense is focused on the product itself.
Product sense is not about decisions based on design principles or coding standards. Those are industry guidelines for consistency and compatibility. With product sense, your decisions are based on what a user will love.
Product sense is not just focused on front-end design and UX. Product sense is about understanding all your users’ needs, which often includes stuff that lives under the hood of your product, like default settings and performance.
Product sense is focused explicitly on the product itself and judging how people will interact with it.
Why do you need product sense?
I wrote recently about the eight essential skills that set great PMs apart. Seven of those eight skills are necessary for any leadership role, but one skill is unique to Product people. Hint, you’ve been reading about it. Yeah, it’s product sense.
Product sense is the skill that enables you to design products that people adore.
Most companies will test your product sense in PM interviews. According to a 2020 survey of nearly 1,000 product people from 600 companies, product sense is one of the top three most valued skills when hiring a PM. (Source: Lenny’s Newsletter)
You need product sense to become a product manager, and then you'll need it a lot more.
The product manager’s job is to figure out what your team should build with limited time and resources, and you have to do whatever it takes to make your product great.
— Source: Sondra Orozco (yes, it’s me).
It's the PM's job to make great products. Well, how are you going to do that if you can't sense what a great product is? You will learn product sense to make good product decisions faster, more often and ultimately build great products.
It’s not a sixth sense 🔮
Some of the most famous product thinkers make product sense look like magic. Somehow they see the future and consistently design product solutions that people love.
What great product sense looks like from the outside
They can immediately identify a product's strengths and weaknesses.
They accurately predict how people will react to the product based on its attributes.
They deeply understand user needs and human behavior, allowing them to anticipate whether the product will achieve its goals.
They design solutions that meet user needs and elicit love from their users.
And often, PMs with great product sense are doing it in unexpected ways—they’re seeing user needs that others miss or connecting technologies to create solutions that no one else fathomed.
This skill looks like and feels like intuition. PMs with great product sense make better product decisions faster and sometimes even subconsciously. They just know what users will love and what they will hate.
Yeah, it does sound like magic. I’m so intimidated by this list that I almost forgot that I use product sense every day.
Everything seems like magic until you learn how the trick is done.
This would be a good time to note that some product leaders cringe at the term “product sense” or “product intuition” because the terms sound limiting. They insinuate that either you have it or you don’t; you’re born great, or you’re not.
Product sense is not magic. It’s not a sixth sense that comes out of thin air. It’s a skill that you can learn. It’s more like cooking than magic.
Great product sense is like being a great cook 🧑🍳
My husband, Jeremy, has a fantastic sense of cooking. (He’s also the incredible producer behind all our videos!)
I often call his meals magic because he’ll put random food from the fridge together and make something delicious. I’ll ask, “Did you use a recipe? Have you made this before? Did you know it would work?” He’ll respond, “No, no, and no.”
He was a firefighter for ten years. “Not all firefighters are good cooks, but all good firefighters are great cooks,” he says. Cooking meals everyone at the firehouse enjoys is one of the unspoken skills that will boost a firefighter’s career.
I, on the other hand, can follow instructions in a recipe, but if you ask me to create a meal from scratch, I will struggle.
Similarly, watching a PM with great product sense feels like watching a master chef. Product sense is a lot like cooking:
A new PM may struggle to create great product solutions. They will lean on best practices and templates (recipes).
An experienced product manager with great product sense will build products in surprising and unexpected ways from scratch to create products people love. They have a sense of what ingredients might work well together.
Jeremy cooked for so many firefighters (up to 18 at a big firehouse!) for so many years. But experience doesn’t explain his “sixth sense” for making new meals from scratch.
Developing product sense, it’s like learning to cook
Like cooking, product sense is not something you’re just born with or without. It’s a skill that can be learned and developed.
Even I can learn to be a great cook—if I want to. But honestly, I have no motivation; I’d rather just let Jeremy cook. 😋
If I wanted to develop a “sixth sense” for cooking, or product sense, I’d focus on three things:
Observation
Curiosity
Repetition
As an Associate PM, you will not be great at product sense. And that’s ok. You can start out by following recipes—the best practices and templates shared by senior PMs at your company or product thought leaders. This is what Jeremy did as a new firefighter. He followed the best recipes online or advice from senior firefighters. He wanted zero risk as a new firefighter, the same as the risk you’d want as an Associate PM. He says, “A bad meal at the firehouse is worse than a company losing millions on a failed product launch; it’s that serious.” (Sure, honey, it’s totally the same. 🙄)
But there will come a time when you need to design a product solution that there is no recipe for. You’ll be doing something new from scratch, and you’ll need product sense to guide you.
You can start developing your product sense through observation, curiosity, and repetition to prepare you for your chef’s debut.
Observation
Jeremy became a great cook by observing how people reacted to different dishes and noticing which ingredients elicited those reactions. He said that firefighters were especially helpful and descriptive when identifying bad meals. To develop your product sense, you should do the same with products.
Observe how people react to products and break down which product attributes caused those reactions.
Start with yourself. As you use products—they can be digital or physical—observe your reactions.
How does the product make you feel?
Is the product solving a real problem or need that you have?
Next, try to pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of the product. Evaluate the specific attributes that make it a great or flawed product.
Which attributes or features lead to good feelings and real solutions?
Which attributes or features lead to bad feelings or fail to solve your needs?
Finally, infer the company’s goal behind the product. This final step is how you tie product sense back to product goals. Knowing what works and what doesn’t enables you to make product decisions to achieve business goals.
What’s the company’s goal with this product?
Who is the company’s target audience? (Remember, it might not be you.)
Given its strengths and weaknesses, does the product achieve that goal for its intended audience?
How would you improve this product if you were the PM?
Observe how your friends and family interact with products. Listen to how they talk about the products that they use. Ask questions to determine which product attributes lead to their delight or discontent.
And, of course, you want to practice observation with your own product. Talk to your customers. Watch them using your product and pay close attention to their reactions. Try to pinpoint which details of your product made them react by asking questions to understand how they’re thinking and feeling as they use it.
Curiosity
People who are recognized for their product sense are usually applauded for surprising successes. They saw something no one else saw—an opportunity that others missed or an innovative technical solution that no one else thought of. They were creative. Creativity is hard to learn, but you can get better at it through curiosity. Part of creativity is being open to trying new things, especially when those things go against the status quo.
Be curious and open to trying new things to learn what works and what doesn’t.
In the kitchen, Jeremy is always open to trying new things, like new cuisines or mixing unexpected ingredients. When the outcome is delicious, he breaks down why it worked, and when it’s a flop, he notes what didn’t work.
Experimenting with your product is a great way to test new ideas, but do this safely. Just like Jeremy wouldn’t try a risky, experimental recipe on a big group of hungry firefighters, you wouldn’t launch a risky new idea to your users without testing it on a small scale first. You can test mockups or prototypes with your users or run an A/B test on a small allocation of your user base. The key is learning from every attempt.
If you can’t run experiments, no worries; you can learn from others who have. Read case studies of great and failed products to understand how and why some products succeed, and others fail. There are tons of product books and blogs where you can find these stories. I recommend Lenny’s Newsletter as a great starting point.
Another way to spark creativity is to know what’s technically possible. Follow technology trends to see what’s coming and how early adopters react to those innovations. And learn about your product’s tech stack. Study the technologies that it’s built on and note the capabilities and limitations of those technologies. With a deep understanding of what’s possible, you can more easily mix the right ingredients for creative solutions.
Repetition
Simply doing your job as a product manager will develop this skill over time. Every day you’re making product decisions, and you can learn with each decision you make—what worked, what didn’t?
Getting great at anything takes practice. Do the work.
Practice makes progress. Observe and be curious, and do the job. Product sense develops over time. This is why Associate PMs follow the recipes of product leaders. You can't be expected to make great products from ingredients you've never seen before, but as you put in reps, your “intuition” will develop.
How to practice observation
To develop your product sense, you need to practice observation, curiosity, and repetition. Observation is less straightforward than the others, so we’re going to practice it together.
I’ll show you how to do it; then, it’ll be your turn to try it yourself.
Observation exercise: How to think like a product manager
Step 1: Choose a product
Step 2: Use the product
Step 3: Ask yourself these questions:
What’s great about this product?
What’s not great about it?
What is the company’s goal with this product? And who is their target market?
Did they nail it? Does the product design support their goals?
How would I make this product better?
Ok, I’ll go first. Here’s an example of how I’d walk through this observation exercise with one of my favorite products, the Peloton bike + membership. Don’t judge me.
🔖 By the way, I have no affiliation with Peloton. I’m just a customer and fan. These answers are my own. I don’t know how product managers at Peloton would answer these questions, but I don’t have to know the “right” answers to practice observation and develop my product sense. You can do this too.
Step 1: Choose a product
→ Peloton Bike + Membership
Step 2: Use the product
→ I use it almost every day 🚴 (Ok, ok, I try to use it almost every day.)
Step 3: Ask yourself these questions:
a. What’s great about this product?
→ So many things! The screen design so that you’re making eye contact with the coach during a guided ride is brilliant—it feels like they’re in the room encouraging you to keep going. You get tons of data about your workouts. And the community features, like seeing your friends on a ride and giving other riders high-fives, are motivating too.
🔖 Remember, we’re focusing on the attributes or features of this product that are its strengths.
b. What’s not great about it?
→ For people who don’t like guided classes, the user experience is not excellent. You have a massive screen in front of you, but you can’t watch non-Peloton programming, like Netflix or YouTube, while you ride. And super annoyingly, the bike doesn’t work without an internet connection.
🔖 Which features, or lack of features, are weaknesses?
c. What is the company’s goal with this product? And who is their target market?
→ As a subscription business, I believe their goal is to maintain retention (or reduce churn) of their subscription model. They want users to continue paying monthly for this service.
The company’s mission is: “Peloton uses technology and design to connect the world through fitness, empowering people to be the best version of themselves anywhere, anytime.” So they probably have a secondary goal around maintaining retention through the community. And their target market is gonna be people who vibe with a community.
💡 Pro tip: It’s ok to “cheat” on this question. You can look at the company’s website, blog, press releases, and even its investor call transcripts to get clues about its product goals.
d. Did they nail it? Does the product design support their goals?
→ Yes and no. The product features are great for people who like guided classes and are probably worth the monthly fee. The monthly subscription is not worth it for people who don’t like classes. So if your household is a mix like mine (I love the classes, Jeremy doesn’t), you may opt for a product that has a better blend of features to delight everyone in your family.
e. How would I make this product better?
→ If I were a PM at Peloton, I’d look into integrations with content providers to blend the product’s existing community and data features with a personalized watching experience. But this would serve a group that is probably not their target market.
🔖 This is where you apply your product sense! How would you design the most delightful product experience to achieve the business goals?
I taught this lesson during my recent guest lecture at MIT. After sharing my Peloton example, I asked the MBA students to try this observation exercise themselves. They broke into small groups to practice their product thinking, focusing on the YouTube Shorts product.
On their phones and laptops, the students opened YouTube Shorts to watch videos and even record shorts themselves! Then we came back together for a class discussion over the five questions.
Now it’s your turn!
Go through this exercise on your own and discuss your observations with other product managers. You can easily practice observation with any products you use. Over time this will help improve your product sense.
You got this!
Dive deeper 📚
Want to learn more about this topic? I’ve handpicked these resources for you to go deep. Happy learning!
The Power of Product Thinking by Julie Zhuo, Future.com
How to Do a Product Critique by Julie Zhuo, Medium
How to develop product sense by Jules Walter, Lenny’s Newsletter
How to Learn Product Sense by Jackie Bavaro, Medium
Referenced in this post
[Lenny’s Newsletter] A comprehensive survey of Product Management by Lenny Rachitsky
[Academy of Product Management] These 8 skills skyrocketed my product manager career by me
[Academy of Product Management] What is a product manager? Seriously though… by me