The sixth sense – Product Sense

The What

I am sure you are all familiar with the five senses, see, hear, smell, taste, and touch, but for product people there is a sixth sense, this is product sense, also known as product intuition or product judgement. This sixth sense allows you to dig deep under the covers as to why something would or wouldn’t work. It can also aid you in understanding what is needed to make lovable products, look at the bigger picture of problems, and understand what the end goal will be in order to make lovable products, amazing products.

Unlike the other five senses, product sense isn’t something that you are born with. Product sense can be developed through practice over time, and if you think about it, it is similar to the other five senses, just because you are born with something doesn’t mean you can’t enhance your skills and understanding, or in some cases learn to adapt.

Have you ever had the feeling, deep down in your gut, that you know something is or isn’t the right thing to do? Well using this intuition and natural instinct in product is how you can strengthen your product sense skill.

So, what does good look like?

• - A profound understanding of the business goals and product goals
• - The ability to understand and recognise the opportunities that will bring the most value to the product
• - Try, fail, and learn – understand what works and doesn’t for your teams and organisation
• - Data, understand what is turning the dials in your business and from your customers perspective.

What are the key elements?

• "Empathy" – the ability to understand and share the feelings of another, in the product world, understand our customers/users’ thoughts and feelings
• "Domain Knowledge" – the understanding of a specific industry discipline or activity. This can be hobbies, passions, personal research, professions, or specialisations in an industry
• "Creativity" – the use of imagination or original ideas to create something, in my opinion wakes up your inner 5-year-old.

Let us take a look at the key elements in a little bit more detail.

Empathy

In product management, it is crucial to understand your customers and/or users' pain points, experience, feelings about your product. More importantly it is important to be able to relate and relay those thoughts and feelings back to multiple internal stakeholders. This will allow you to really share a deep understanding across the business of what your customers or users are thinking about the product.

Domain Knowledge

I am going to start by saying no one can know everything about everything. You can spend your career across multiple industries, and it is impossible to become an expert overnight. However, having even a basic understanding of the domain you are working in will really help you in the decision-making process. When you enter a new domain, I would recommend you start by doing some desk research, find courses, articles, webinars and even blogs about the topics you want to uncover. Enhancing this skill will really help you in any demanding situations where you find yourself showing why you should go in a certain direction.

Creativity

The most fun of all the key elements. Invoke your inner 5-year-old and start thinking big! Shake up the possibilities and think of all the wild and outrageous ideas or solutions to problems you can. Having brainstorming sessions with different people across an organisation can really get your creative juices flowing and empower some really “gold dust” ideas that start to flow.

Start practising product teardown

In order to gain an in-depth understanding of the product you are working on, product teardown is a technique which is described as “a comprehensive deconstruction of a product to understand its inner workings, identify the thought process behind its design, and the reason why the product is built the way it was.” If you want to start practising this technique you can by looking at answering these types of key questions:

• - What did I love most about the product?
• - What didn’t I understand about the product?
• - What other observations or feedback did I note down?
• - What did I want to achieve when accessing this product?
• - Is there anything innovative or inspiring from this product?
• - What are other people saying about this product?

How to demonstrate product sense

• - Approach problems methodically, referring to your original goal.
• - Break down the problem, usually there are multiple problems which contribute a bigger problem.
• - Align your design and user experience choices with your key metrics.
• - Understand your users, split them into groups where appropriate and decide who you are targeting.
• - Prioritise what you are addressing now and why, use frameworks to help prioritise key areas, like MoSCoW.
• - Create a hypothesis to determine how you are going to measure success from your deliverables.
• - Invite your inner 5-year-old to the party, look at creative and innovative solutions above and beyond the possible.

How to understand if your product sense skills are improving?

• - You may start to notice more detailed things about the product and users that you are working on.
• - You can start to anticipate the bigger picture and the root cause of problems for the end user.
• - You will start asking more probing questions and dig into the why’s.
• - The feedback you provide to internal stakeholders will become more detailed and contain more empathy for the end user.
• - You will feel as though you are right more often based on your hypothesis and metrics.

Summary

Overall, it is important to take away that product sense is something you can learn as a skill and add it to your product armoury. In my opinion it is a crucial part of product management, and it will contribute towards delivering better solutions for the end users or customers. This skill can be enhanced individually and through collaboration across your organisation and industries. If you are trying to improve your product sense or aiming to navigate your way to learn this as a new skill, then keep your eye on the business and product goal at all times.

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