How to Develop Product Sense?

Product sense, otherwise known as Product Intuition or Product judgment. It is the art of knowing what makes a product successful. Your main job as a founder or Product manager is to know what and why you’re building what you’re building. In this blog, we’ll discuss how you can go about thinking and achieving product success.

Depending on your company goals, is this product achieving those goals?

1. If it’s an existing product, what features would move the needle or retain customers?
2. If the strategy and goal is revenue, are your new product enhancements delivering?
3. If the goal is product adoption, are more people buying or signing onto your platform?
4. If this is a new product, is there market demand for this product? Does this product solve a problem? Will this product have a positive ROI (return on investment)?

Your product sense can be developed and evolve over time. There are no set rules. Look around us. Successful companies and products do things differently to solve or provide value for their customer and users. But there are frameworks you can use to explore your ideas.

How to develop and build on your Product Intuition?

I’m sharing tactical questions to ask yourself. By answering these questions, you’ll learn how to lead and vet your product ideas. You don’t need to have all these questions answered at first. If you do, then congrats you’re a mature product creator!

The most important question to answer is the “WHY.” The others can be answered with or by different team members. Here is a reference to different software development team members.

1. WHY – why are you leading the team to build this?
   • Think, business and market alignment
   • Buzz words
     • Competitive – market leader
     • Revenue – ROI – Goals
     • Strategic – Scalability
     • Prioritization
2. WHO/WHAT – customer and user-centric
   • What problem or value add are you trying to build?
   • How is this impactful for your customers/users?
   • Buzz words
     • Customer-centric
     • Problem centric
     • Empathy – UX Design
     • Workarounds
3. HOW – from a product perspective, how are you going to build and launch this offering? For the technical details, you’ll partner with your development team on this. G2M (Go to Market) wise, you’ll partner with relevant folks on this. Who you collaborate with, depends on your company size and process.
   • Execution – tactical work that needs to happen
   • Buzz words
     • Solutions, Development
     • G2M
     • Design thinking, prototyping
     • Data-driven
     • Release plan- multiple rollouts
     • Feedback loop

Product Manager Interviews

Product sense is something that will come up in your product interviews, in one form or another. Here is a great Medium article on how to prepare for that.