Your question implies that it can be developed, and to that point, I 1,000% agree. Contrary to what a lot of PMs believe, product sense is not something you need to be born with. It’s a learned skill, just like any other PM skill.
Love this article. Would add one other big bucket outside of "Build empathy" and "Improve creativity":
3. Dissect the product sense loop:
a. Identify all product and users assumptions
b. Construct experiments and approaches to prove/disprove
c. Deeply analyze outcomes, and reflect on why you were right or wrong [and repeat]
This last piece is the way to _prove_ and know that you are actually improving product sense over time. If your product assumptions get proven more and more frequently (i.e. when you started, you were right 2/10 times and now you are right 8/10 times), you know your product sense is improving. The process of actively reflecting on this helps speed up the skill being developed.
How to get better at working with engineers, cross functional teams, other pm's, stakeholders, and defining metrics to measure success and failure of the product? More of how to build an execution muscle from day to day stand point?
Thanks Lenny. That might be a good feature to add. I think that’s a request to Substack . There is so much valuable content shared in your newsletter, so highlighting it and referring them quick will be great
This is really insightful. I had a question. So if we take an example of a B2B legacy enterprise product, where the users are just concerned with the jobs to be done and not with other aspects like user experience and parameters, how do we ensure that we are adding value to the product
Great question. For B2B, you can apply the tips in the article to uncover new jobs to be done or to reframe feature requests in a way that enables the team to come up with better solutions (e.g. ones that get to the underlying issue vs the specific way customers frame it). It’s also helpful to improve the way users get the job done with your product.
Love this article. Would add one other big bucket outside of "Build empathy" and "Improve creativity":
3. Dissect the product sense loop:
a. Identify all product and users assumptions
b. Construct experiments and approaches to prove/disprove
c. Deeply analyze outcomes, and reflect on why you were right or wrong [and repeat]
This last piece is the way to _prove_ and know that you are actually improving product sense over time. If your product assumptions get proven more and more frequently (i.e. when you started, you were right 2/10 times and now you are right 8/10 times), you know your product sense is improving. The process of actively reflecting on this helps speed up the skill being developed.
This is a great article and opportunity to learn! Thank you so much for sharing this!
thank you so much for this article! So helpful and filled with so much related content!
Fantastic article! Lots for me to learn from this.
Great article with practical takeaways!
So much wisdom in one such article - Looking forward to article on how to get better at execution.
Which elements of execution?
How to get better at working with engineers, cross functional teams, other pm's, stakeholders, and defining metrics to measure success and failure of the product? More of how to build an execution muscle from day to day stand point?
Thanks Jules and Lenny. Very good read with so many useful nuggets of information. Product Sense is art + science combined :)
very interesting article to read as a ux researcher.
Amazing article! So many gems. Also, shout out BPM!! Good stuff Jules👏🏾
Is it possible to highlight specific lines using a highlighter in Substack app or in web?
I’m on the app team at Substack- this is definitely something we’d like to add! Thanks for the suggestion
Don't believe so :(
Thanks Lenny. That might be a good feature to add. I think that’s a request to Substack . There is so much valuable content shared in your newsletter, so highlighting it and referring them quick will be great
This is really insightful. I had a question. So if we take an example of a B2B legacy enterprise product, where the users are just concerned with the jobs to be done and not with other aspects like user experience and parameters, how do we ensure that we are adding value to the product
Great question. For B2B, you can apply the tips in the article to uncover new jobs to be done or to reframe feature requests in a way that enables the team to come up with better solutions (e.g. ones that get to the underlying issue vs the specific way customers frame it). It’s also helpful to improve the way users get the job done with your product.