Product Collective - Making sense of product management

Getting a sense of product sense

Whenever I hear the term product sense, I think back to a Seinfeld episode about write-offs (with a little artistic license).

In reality, many companies try to hire for product sense. So, to help you out the next time you find yourself in a product sense interview, here is a description of what it is, how to get it, what it really should be called, and how to succeed in an interview about it.

Meanwhile, in product news, non-competes are out, Stripe is splitting up its financial services, Perplexity appeals to grown up orgs, and Google… does the opposite.

Product sense: What is it, why it’s needed, and how to keep it fresh. Acquiring product sense takes time and is never complete. It calls for blending your unique experiences with customer empathy and creative problem-solving. Diana Stepner was recently asked, how do you grow product sense? To answer that question, Diana explains what product sense is, how to get it, and explores whether it’s necessary.

Finding and fostering great product sense. Hiring product builders with great product sense is one of the most critical make-or-break moves a startup can make. A great product is the foundation for a successful tech business; only teams with great product sense can build great products. The folks at Stay SaaSy define high-quality product sense as the ability to do two things without having extensive data: generate many solid, highly profitable ideas for ways to make money, and sense whether a product is likely to be successful with high confidence.

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This Week’s Interview: Why more data can lead to worse decisions

Demystifying product mindset, sense, and thinking. Product mindset. Product sense. Product thinking. The product advice landscape is awash in vague terms that often hurt more than they help. Aspiring product managers know they need "it", but no one can really describe "it". Much advice is rooted heavily in Silicon Valley worldviews and belief systems, making it hard for many people to relate, learn, and apply what they read. We risk creating an exclusionary, sink-or-swim profession where "we'll know it when we see it" (or "do it how we did it at X") is the norm.

​In this talk, John Cutler discusses specific skills, knowledge areas, and competencies. His hypothesis is that mindset, sense, and thinking are placeholders for specific skills that can be taught and learned. He digs deep into those skills, and suggests a learning path for you and your organization.

This video and many others like it are available on our Member Hub. If you don’t have access to the Member Hub, you can join the community today for free.

Product Sense

This week, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Praful Chavda, Founder and CEO of Chisel, to talk about the topic of product sense. Praful has an impressive background as a product leader at Microsoft and executive at several startups. A few takeaways from our chat:

1. Simply put, product sense is the ability to understand your customers' needs and build successful products that satisfy those needs.
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2. Contrary to popular belief, product sense is not something you're born with—it's a skill that can be developed and honed over time. Praful recommends seeking out training programs, books, and tools to help you improve in four distinct areas: understanding customer needs, domain knowledge, analytical problem-solving skills, and creative thinking.
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3. While years of experience in a specific domain can be valuable, it's not the only factor in developing strong product sense. Demonstrating a deep understanding of the domain and providing insights based on data can help you overcome any bias toward years of experience.
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4. Balancing intuition and data-driven decision-making is crucial, and the approach may vary depending on the stage of your product. Early on, judgment and understanding of customer needs play a significant role, while later stages require a balance between data and vision to avoid becoming too reactive.
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5. As AI and other tech advancements continue to evolve, product managers will have access to tools that can help them analyze customer data, generate creative solutions, and focus on critical judgment and decision-making – all things that will help develop an even stronger product sense

Praful's key message: Always strive for an objective synthesis of the situation by understanding your customers, analyzing the four dimensions of product sense, and building products that truly meet their needs.

It was a fun conversation – and, especially given how hot of a topic that product sense has become for Product Managers and Product Leaders, a very timely one at that!

You can’t tell me where I can work! The Federal Trade Commission has voted to prohibit for-profit US employers from enforcing non-compete clauses in employment agreements. By voiding non-compete clauses, the Federal Trade Commission may open employment options for product people and push employers to reevaluate strategies for protecting intellectual property. We will split up our financial services before someone else makes us. Stripe announced it will de-couple payments from the rest of its financial services stack. This is a big change, considering that in the past, even as Stripe grew its list of services, it required businesses to be payment customers to use any of the rest. Alongside this, the company is adding in several new embedded finance features and a new wave of AI tools. The fintech giant also announced that it will let customers accept cryptocurrency payments after a six-year hiatus (and probably not nearly as relevant). If you’re going to let AI hallucinate for you, at least make it secure. Perplexity has announced a new product called Perplexity Enterprise Pro, which directly targets the enterprise segment. Enterprise companies tend to put a higher premium on data privacy, security, user management, and single sign-on, and this product covers those bases. From this move, it’s apparent that Perplexity is trying to supplant ChatGPT as the AI tool of choice for people in large organizations. Cue the sad trombone. An upcoming update to the Google Phone app will let you tap one of six “Audio Emoji” buttons to play a short sound clip that both sides of the call can hear. There’s clapping, laughing, crying, partying, a drum sting, and... poop, which emits a fart sound. That team’s research showed they need to appeal to adolescents, or the folks on the Google Phone app team may not have as much product sense as we originally thought.

Let's replace "product sense" with the skills that matter. Peter Yang thinks we should retire the phrase “product sense.” He thinks it’s too vague and implies that only a few people can have this skill. In reality, product sense is 3 separate skills: empathy for customer and business needs, creativity for coming up with solutions, and craft for making a quality product.

Mastering product sense and execution interviews. Organizations often misapply the title “product manager”, leading to a disconnect between role expectations and actual responsibilities. As a result, people hiring a product manager need to discern candidates with genuine expertise from those who have merely held a job title. Hiring managers typically do this through interviews focusing on product sense and execution. Keren Koshman suggests how to excel when you find yourself in an interview focusing on product sense and execution.

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Resources and news curated by Kent J. McDonald.