Product Sense: Balance data with experience
How to recognize and resolve the tension between analytics and instinct
Did you ever trust the data completely, only to watch your product fail? You’re not alone, and there’s a reason numbers don’t tell the whole story.
There’s a widespread belief in working data-driven, meaning that opinions shouldn’t dictate direction on their own. When you have data on one side and opinions on the other, conventional wisdom says data should always win.
Product Sense is a form of intuition built over time
This is largely true, yet there’s something equally powerful I’ve come to appreciate: “Product Sense”. It’s a form of intuition that’s fueled by deep customer understanding and sharpened through experience. You develop product sense by making countless decisions and carefully observing their outcomes over time. Eventually, you’ll gain the ability to predict how customers typically react, how they naturally approach problems, and which solutions are most likely to succeed in real-world scenarios.
Product sense doesn’t replace data, just as data cannot substitute for intuition. But it serves as an invaluable corrective when something doesn’t add up. Consider questioning your data-driven decisions and relying on product sense in these situations: when quantitative data feels somehow wrong or incomplete, when the data fails to provide clear direction, when you haven’t been able to test the most critical aspects, or when you’re choosing between multiple UI options that perform similarly.
How to use your product sense
Generally speaking, if you’re an experienced senior expert who has spent years in product management and something feels off, that’s your product sense speaking. And you should listen carefully. In my observation, time spent specifically in product roles matters more than general industry experience, because much of product intuition transfers surprisingly well across different industries and domains.
If you’re not yet the senior expert yourself, you can still leverage other people’s product sense effectively. When working with a seasoned colleague who seems unconvinced by your ideas or appears reluctant for reasons they can’t immediately articulate, that might be their product sense raising red flags. Dig deeper in those moments.
What if you feel a that something is off?
What should you do when you encounter this dissonance between data and intuition?
Dig deeper into the problem.
Conduct more experiments
Schedule additional customer interviews
Track specific (additional) metrics in your product analytics tool
… and work to understand what users genuinely care about beneath the surface-level metrics.
This dissonance is a signal that shouldn’t be ignored but rather investigated until you resolve the underlying tension between what the data shows and what your experience suggests.
What I Read
As usual, I will list some of the best articles I read on the Internet. I will keep a list of the best articles (currently >900) at https://www.digital-product-management.com. These are today’s picks:
One Minute Pitch: Template for creating good elevator pitches.
Communication is The Job: Communicating successfully.
Guiding the future of ethical design: How to translate philosophical theory into practical design principles and responsibility.
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