Product management is full of ambiguity. Problems are unclear, information is limited, and there are rarely straightforward answers. Yet some product managers consistently make good decisions despite the uncertainty. How do they do it? The answer lies in developing a strong product sense.
What is product sense?
Product sense is the ability to find the right solution for users and the business, even when faced with ambiguous problems and limited information. It enables product managers to cut through the fog and drive real impact.
Developing product sense is critical for creating successful products. But it doesn’t happen overnight. It takes intention and practice. In this post, we’ll explore a framework for strengthening your product sense.
A Framework for Developing Product Sense
Here are some key activities and practices to help sharpen your product sense:
Create/Clarify the Overall Goal
Defining an overall goal is the critical first step in developing product sense. Without a clear, concrete goal, it’s impossible to effectively evaluate potential ideas or prioritize what to focus on.
Setting an overly broad goal like “delight customers” won’t provide enough guidance. Goals need to be specific and tied to important business outcomes.
For example, “Increase cross-sell revenue from existing customers by 20% in the next 6 months.” This connects to a clear business metric and includes a measurable target.
In contrast, “Build a new recommendation feature” focuses on an output rather than an outcome. The goal should be about what you want the feature to achieve, not the feature itself.
Ensure the goal is ambitious but realistic given constraints like development resources and timelines. It may require some debate and refinement to land on the right goal.
Clarifying the overall goal sets the stage for the entire product sense framework. It enables assessing potential ideas and prioritizing what matters most. Revisit the goal often as you move through the process to ensure solutions stay aligned.
Defining the right goal is challenging but pays dividends. It brings focus and purpose to ambiguous problems and unlimited possible solutions. An unclear goal leads to wasted effort on misaligned priorities. Do the work upfront to get it right.
User Discovery
The next step is identifying all the users who interact with your product. This includes end users, customers, internal team members, partners, or anyone else who uses or is impacted by the product.
Create an exhaustive list of user personas across the entire ecosystem. Then pare it down to 1-2 priority users who are most critical for achieving the overall goal.
For example, if the goal is increasing cross-sell revenue, existing customers who already understand and use your product are likely the priority user segment.
Resist the temptation to choose easy-to-reach users like yourself or your team. Prioritize users based on importance to the goal, not convenience.
Once you’ve identified priority users, your next task is developing deep empathy and understanding of them. What are their needs, behaviors, and pain points?
Powerful techniques for user discovery include:
- Observational research – Watch users interact with your product in real environments
- Interviews – Have authentic conversations to uncover backstory and emotions
- Surveys – Gather broad inputs from a range of users
- Data analysis – Identify trends and patterns in product usage
Dedicate time to not just listing your users but truly walking in their shoes. User discovery lays the foundation for identifying the right problems to solve. Don’t gloss over this step.
Problem Discovery
With priority users identified, the next step is uncovering their biggest problems and pain points. This is one of the most difficult yet most crucial aspects of developing product sense.
Conduct user interviews and observe real behavior to identify both conscious and unconscious needs. Ask probing questions to get to the root of problems, beyond surface frustrations.
Layer in usage data and analytics to spot issues and opportunities. Look for patterns of behavior and feedback that indicate struggles.
Problem discovery requires deep empathy and avoiding assumptions. For example, you may assume a certain feature is useful based on your own perspective. However, research and observation could reveal users barely notice or use it.
Use frameworks like jobs-to-be-done to unpack the deeper motivations and goals behind user actions. Understand both functional and emotional needs.
Don’t limit yourself to current pain points. Also, look for untapped opportunities and needs users don’t even know they have yet. The goal is a holistic view.
Problem discovery takes time and active listening. But it beats building solutions for issues users don’t actually have. Resist the temptation to skip to brainstorming solutions.
Vet your findings with real users. Ask clarifying questions and validate you have captured their core problems accurately. The problems you choose to focus on will drive the entire product sense process. So do the work to get clear on the right ones.
Solution Discovery
With a clear understanding of priority user problems, it’s time to brainstorm solutions. The key is to generate a wide range of ideas first, without getting bogged down analyzing each one.
Encourage wild creativity and build off others’ suggestions. Leverage techniques like listing assumptions, using analogies from other domains, and embracing constraints to spark new directions.
With a list of solutions in hand, start prioritizing and clustering similar ideas. Look for approaches that address multiple user needs and offer upside on the overall goal.
Evaluate potential solutions against criteria like feasibility, time to implement, and probable impact. But don’t automatically default to convenient or familiar ideas.
Beware of solution traps like only considering small iterations on existing features or letting opinion and hiPPOs override evidence.
Identify a few top solutions that score highly across criteria. Select a mix of quick wins and bold bets. Then pressure test them through customer validation and experiments before fully building them out.
Solution discovery is creative work. But it must stay grounded in truly addressing user problems and driving towards the overall goal. Resist shiny objects that fail to move the needle on outcomes. A powerful solution discovery process lays the foundation for product sense.
Alignment with Larger Goals
As you evaluate potential solutions, continuously check that they ladder up to your overall goal. This alignment is crucial.
It’s easy to fall in love with a solution that delights users but does little to move the needle on desired business outcomes. Guard against pursuing great ideas that don’t actually address the right problems.
Set up a simple scoring system to rate how well each solution aligns with the goal. For example:
- 1 = weak or no alignment
- 3 = moderate alignment
- 5 = strong alignment
Be rigorous in checking solutions against the goal. Eliminate or de-prioritize ideas that rate low on alignment. Double down on ones closely tied to the outcomes you want to achieve.
Keep asking “How does this solution connect back to what we’re trying to accomplish?” Use that question to guide evaluation and stay on track.
The overall goal is your North Star when navigating ambiguous problems and endless possible solutions. Refer back to it constantly to avoid meandering down fruitless paths.
Ruthlessly cut ideas that fail the alignment test, even if they seem appealing on other dimensions. Stay focused on driving real impact, not just novelty.
Building and Delivering
Once you’ve aligned on high-potential solutions, it’s time to start building. Begin by creating prototypes and minimum viable products (MVPs) to validate assumptions.
Prototyping is a quick, low-cost way to explore multiple possibilities before investing in full development. Share prototypes with real users to get feedback.
Use their reactions to refine the strongest ideas into MVPs – stripped-down versions with just enough features to demonstrate core value.
The key with MVPs is accelerating learning, not providing a fully polished product. Resist packing everything into early releases.
Launch MVPs to small pilot groups of users. Measure their engagement, satisfaction, and business impact.
Be prepared to iterate based on what you learn. Pivot as needed to find the optimal product-market fit.
Use direct customer feedback along with usage data and analytics to drive ongoing refinement. Double down on what works while eliminating what doesn’t.
The build-measure-learn cycle continues throughout the product lifecycle, enabling your solutions to evolve with user needs. But it all starts with turning ideas into something tangible that brings you closer to your goals.
Measure and Learn
The final ongoing step is measuring results and learning from them. Once your solution reaches users, closely monitor how it delivers on the overall goal.
Identify key metrics early and track them relentlessly. For example, if your goal is revenue growth, measure revenue, conversion rates, adoption rates, churn, and more.
Look for positive and negative trends. Dig into the drivers behind the data. Find leading indicators that predict future results.
But data alone isn’t enough. Gather qualitative insights through surveys, interviews, and moderated tests.
Ask open-ended questions to learn how the solution lands and where it falls short. Observe real usage to uncover unconscious pain points.
Analyze feedback to understand the “why” behind metrics. Synthesize quantitative and qualitative data for powerful insights.
Use what you learn to sharpen product sense and your intuition over time. Spot patterns across successes and failures. Improve your ability to quickly size up ideas and predict impact.
The build-measure-learn cycle is foundational to developing product sense. Measurement provides the soil for intuition and wisdom to take root and grow.
The Toughest Parts: Problem Discovery and Solution Discovery
The most challenging aspects of developing product sense are problem discovery and solution discovery.
In problem discovery, you must deeply understand users you likely don’t share context with. Powerful techniques like jobs-to-be-done interviews and observational research help.
Solution discovery requires creativity and avoiding biases toward familiar or convenient ideas. Push past obvious answers to uncover breakthroughs. Leverage thought starters like analogy thinking.
Mastering problem and solution discovery will level up your product sense. But it requires rolling up your sleeves to truly see through the eyes of users.
In Summary
Product sense is a learnable superpower. By following the right process, product managers can cut through ambiguity to build solutions that deliver real value.
Focus on nailing problem discovery through hands-on research. Expand your solution imagination. And always connect back to the overarching goal.
Developing product sense takes work. But it enables you to thrive in complexity and craft outstanding products. The effort is well worth it.
