WTF is this product intuition really?

It really is all magic...

For a few years now I’ve been telling PMs on my teams (especially the junior PMs) that their job is to start and continue to build product intuition.

I gave a talk last week, where I wanted to stress the point so started thinking about when I started articulating what I think is the most important PM skill/job in this way.

I’m almost certain it was around 2017 after reading this Amazon shareholder letter by Jeff Bezos. In particular this paragraph:

“Good inventors and designers deeply understand their customer. They spend tremendous energy developing that intuition. They study and understand many anecdotes rather than only the averages you’ll find on surveys. They live with the design.

I’m not against beta testing or surveys. But you, the product or service owner, must understand the customer, have a vision, and love the offering. Then, beta testing and research can help you find your blind spots. A remarkable customer experience starts with heart, intuition, curiosity, play, guts, taste. You won’t find any of it in a survey.”

The word intuition struck a chord with me then and I found it a better way to explain what I thought the job was to other people either on my team or that I was working with.

I’ve been listening to more producty podcasts in the last few weeks and a couple of excellent interviews on 20VC (David Leib and Shreyas Doshi) emphasized this idea for me.

(Both interviews are excellent and I recommend listening to them. I’m paraphrasing just one idea from each below)

Shreyas asserted that good PMs/leaders are simply more right than others. David argued PMing is more art than science, and compared good PMs to AI - the input (customer interviews, analysis etc.) matters but the output is a function of fuzzier factors.

I had a good discussion during my talk and after in informal Q&A on the topic that I’m summarizing below.

How do you build product intuition?

What I’ve always told people is that you do that by first finding ways to build deep user empathy and understanding. Tactically this means spending a lot of time in the data (usage and secondary) looking for and interpreting user behavior. It means studying the market and understanding competitors deeply.

It also means talking to people - lots of people - asking strangers what they think of your product, looking at people using your product in the wild (I got a dirty look once for watching someone’s phone on the NYC subway since they were using something I worked on), sitting in on focus groups and talking to experts; lots of them. I find you stop the analyzing and observing/talking only you’re not learning too many new things from that channel.. and that takes a while.

You start by being a firehose for all the relevant data in your domain. That’s Step 1.

Step 2 is making connections and decisions based on all this input. This is the “kinda-like-AI” part. There’s a lot of value in using frameworks (wether marketing, strategy or product ones). There’s a ton out there that you can apply to a situation and they certainly encourage comprehensive thinking. However, I’ve found these are more useful to explain good product decisions than making them. I think they play a role and often can help, but very often there’s a leap you need to make or a weight you need to attach to a factor in the framework that’s non-obvious (particularly for hard decisions). I find people that spend time in different subjects/domains and thinking about different things tend to be better at this, but it’s not always the case.

So this path above does not offer a perfect plan, and that why I realize it can be very unsatisfying to people. How do you know you’re done building this intuition?

So really, how do you know you’re done?

Ideally you’re never really completely done. If your product and consumer (and you) are evolving this is habit. However, as your role changes (i.e. especially if you get more senior) you might have less time for parts of this and you learn to lean on others for some of this. I’ve also seen really great experienced execs successfully apply intuition learned in one domain to others.

But how do you know you’re good at this? When can you say “I have great product intuition”?

Specifically, the question asked to me was when did I think I had product intuition which was a tricky one to answer.

I was honest in that while I still hate saying that I do have it/developed it, the best way to judge that is track record. I’ve had enough instances over the last ~14 years of PMing where I’ve seen how calls I’ve made have played out and calls I’ve believed in but was not allowed to make have played out.

Execution is definitely always a factor, but at some point I realized my intuition/instincts are right far more often than they are wrong. The process of getting a few things wrong and reflecting on those decisions helps the intuition get better.

And that simply is how you know you’re good at this - do you get product decisions right most of the time or are you wrong often? And the only way to really judge this is to look backwards - i.e. what call did I make 6 months (or a year or even more) ago and how has it played out? Was it the optimum call?

If you find you need to keep reversing your calls or you were wrong, your product intuition needs work. If you find the leaps you took (particularly if it was a non-obvious leap to take) were right most of the time, you may be getting this job.

Having said that, this is a hard thing to teach and a frustrating template to be handed. I’ve seen PMs with similar inputs (same training, access to resources, even the same manager) be very different in terms their product intuition.

How do you get if someone has product intuition in an interview?

I have no idea. In an interview I judge different things and try to get to some sense of product thinking through questions. I have a couple of questions that probe this based on what they’ve done, but I find reference checks and diving into their track record are the only real ways to try to probe this.

That’s all on the topic for now. Let me know what you think! Do you buy the idea of “product intuition”?