Developing Your Product Sense

Below, we discuss improving your product sense with Shreyas Doshi, a renowned product leader who has led teams and built successful products at Stripe, Google, Yahoo, and Twitter.

What is product sense?

It's simple. Product sense is the ability to design products that address user needs.

It combines empathy, domain knowledge, and creativity by identifying significant problems users need solving.

Modern product teams need leaders who can identify and develop solutions that users will use.

Here are some products that were developed with a strong product sense:

• Spotify: Recognizing that users wanted instant access to a vast music library without the hassle of downloading or piracy. Spotify introduced a seamless streaming experience with personalized recommendations and a simple subscription.
• Airbnb: Traditional hotels didn't always meet the needs of travelers seeking affordable, unique, or home-like accommodations. Airbnb leveraged the idea that people would be willing to rent their homes, creating a marketplace that transformed the hospitality industry.
• Figma: While design tools existed, collaboration was a pain point for teams. Figma identified the need for real-time, browser-based design collaboration, allowing teams to work together without the friction of file transfers.

Improving Your Product Sense

Exponent: How does a product manager improve their product sense?

The first step to improving one's product sense is understanding what it really is.

I define it as the ability to make correct decisions even when faced with considerable ambiguity.

This should be at multiple levels of product development.

First, at the "what product should we build" level. But also regarding user interactions, interfaces, and everything in between. Product sense is about the entire experience.

There are three elements to good product sense:

1. Empathy is the ability to simulate the mental processes of multiple personas that are nothing like you. It means saying, "Well, in this situation, this type of user will react like this." Or, "Our partners will react like this. And our competitors will perceive our actions like that."
2. Domain knowledge will naturally lead to better and more accurate ideas about what product to build and how to build it. Focus on knowledge about your customers and users, the competition and their actions, and technology limitations or opportunities.
3. Creativity is the most elusive but nonetheless important aspect of product sense. It involves thinking differently and developing new ideas for addressing a particular problem.

Empathy

Exponent: How should a product manager improve their sense of empathy?

One surefire way to improve your empathy is to talk to different types of users and partners.

Don't just talk to them and take the information they're giving you. Try to evaluate why they are saying what they're saying.

You may not always have the user in front of you to ask them what would work, but you can reliably predict it by understanding why they feel or react in a certain way.

The second tool for improving empathy is a deep understanding of psychology.

One way I have done this is to read as much as possible about cognitive biases, including behavioral economics. General psychology literature is also beneficial for building user archetypes for any situation and empathizing with each such archetype.

Domain Knowledge

Exponent: What about domain knowledge?

I won't spend too much time on domain knowledge.

This just requires the grunt work of identifying relevant resources and reviewing those resources on a regular basis. I've found that diving into books, online resources, and podcasts is a great way to gain domain knowledge.

Creativity

Exponent: You mentioned creativity as the most elusive one. Do you have any tips for improving your ability to be creative?

You can't teach creativity; it's one of those things that you're mostly born with. It will be challenging if you aren't naturally gifted here, but it isn't impossible.

That's because you can hack creativity for the purposes of product sense.

Exponent: What's one way to hack creativity?

One technique is to familiarize yourself with everything in your domain. For example, if you're building smartphone apps, play with more apps than anyone else.

Diligently inspect the details of those apps. Ask questions such as why this button was put in this place, or why this animation was done in that manner.

Next time you encounter a problem without an obvious solution, you can call upon your extensive experience. It's sort of like enabling creativity with pattern matching.

Product Manager Tips

Exponent: What advice do you have for future product leaders?

There are three essential senses that a PM should possess:

• Execution sense: aligning people towards an objective and orchestrating complex projects.
• Analytical sense: the ability to frame the right questions, evaluate a problem from multiple facets, simulate outcomes, and use data.
• Product sense: the ability to make correct product decisions even when significant ambiguity exists.

It turns out that human beings are not built in such a way that they can simultaneously be great at all three without putting in any work.

What is more typical of good PMs is their natural bias towards one of these senses.

Product management is one of the few domains in which you cannot merely focus on your strengths. You also need to work on minimizing your weaknesses.

In my personal case, I was naturally strong in the product sense and extremely weak in execution. To improve upon this weakness, I put myself in uncomfortable situations, working on many complex projects that required me to be organized, communicate more than usual, and orchestrate large teams to meet particular objectives.

Product Sense Books

Exponent: Are there any books, blogs, websites, or podcasts that you would recommend to an aspiring product manager?

The most valuable books and resources change as you gain more product management proficiency.

In my case, the Getting Things Done book was useful earlier in my career.

Then, as you grow as a product manager, your thinking needs to be more nuanced. Your quality as a product manager is no longer just the quality of your execution; it is the quality of your decisions.

At that stage in your career, I’d recommend The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli.

As you grow further, your success or failure at later leadership stages relies on managing your own psychology above everything else. The book I recommend is Courage to be Disliked, which provides non-obvious but on-point insights into managing one's emotions and reactions.