How to develop product sense

https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/product-sense

Product sense is the skill of consistently being able to craft products (or make changes to existing products) that have the intended impact on their users. Product sense relies on (1) empathy to discover meaningful user needs and (2) creativity to come up with solutions that effectively address those needs.

Building empathy:

1. Observe people interacting with products
2. Deconstruct everyday products

Improving creativity:

1. Learn from great product thinkers
2. Be curious about changes in technology and your domain

1. Observe people interacting with products 🕵🏾

1. What do you think the purpose of this product is? Who do you think it’s for? This will give you a sense of how effective your product’s landing page is. It also gives you ideas for words to describe your product that resonate with people.
2. Now that you’re in the product, what actions do you want to take? This will help you understand which features are easy to discover and how clear your product’s navigation and calls to action are.

3. What are you thinking right now? How does that make you feel? I tend to ask this at every new step the user lands on, because people tend not to notice their self-talk and feelings otherwise.

4. People are time-crunched and distracted when they use your product. They might not read labels or text and might not be willing to spend even a few seconds to figure out what to do next. Pick the right defaults and use visual design and cues to make primary actions obvious (e.g. prominence, lack of distractions).
5. People will drop out of a product flow as soon as they feel confused or nervous that they might be doing something wrong. Make sure labels are unambiguous and contrast options appropriately.
6. Don’t give people too much information at once, because once they feel overwhelmed, they tend to leave. For example, we ran pricing page experiments at Slack and saw increases in purchases when we moved some of the information on the various purchase options behind a dropdown list.
7. Context impacts decisions. Use tools like comparisons, contrasting, and social proof to make it easier for users to make a decision.
8. Make sure the goal of your product and possible actions are clear to users. At Slack, we often heard from users that they didn’t know what Slack was really about and what they could do with the app. We experimented with various onboarding experiences to address that issue, and one early experiment on mobile increased user retention just by telling new users what Slack is and linking to a video showing people how a work team might use it on desktop and mobile.

2. Deconstruct everyday products 👨🏾‍🔧️

1. What’s the experience of getting started or signing up?
2. How does this app explain itself in the first minute?
3. How easy to use was the app?
4. How did you feel while exploring the app?
5. Did the app deliver on your expectations?

3. Learn from great product thinkers 📓

One of the biggest levers for developing creativity (and again, product sense) is to spend time with people who already have it.

My creativity improved significantly after I joined Slack, partly because I observed how people like CEO Stewart Butterfield approached building products. If you’ve never worked at a company with strong product thinkers, I recommend joining such a company at some point in your career to strengthen your product fundamentals—the earlier, the better. If you’re not sure which companies to consider, start by thinking of companies whose products you use and love.

One of the things I learned from my exposure to Stewart Butterfield is that every detail about the user experience matters. “The details are not the details,” he would say, quoting designer Charles Eames. “They make the design.” Stewart’s obsession with the details is one of the main reasons why Slack exists and is used by millions of people.

Another lesson I learned from Stewart is to spend time understanding user problems and framing them in a way that sets strong constraints for the team. Many PMs jump into solution-finding before they truly understand the problem. This leads to ineffective solutions, or indecisiveness as their teams struggle to eliminate potential solutions. If you understand why a problem exists and frame it clearly, you will identify enough constraints that only a few solutions will be left, streamlining the decision-making process. For example, in the article Are You Solving the Right Problems?, Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg gives an example of how two different framings of a problem lead to completely different solutions:

If you’re able to connect with great product thinkers, here are some sample questions you can ask to better understand their processes and insights:

• What prompted you to build your product? This will give you a sense of the type of user insights you should be looking for and the process to get them.
• What were the key decision points along the way?
• What alternative approaches did you consider? For ambiguous problems, you have to explore multiple approaches before you land on one that works. Understanding the solutions that were discarded, and why, will help you get a sense of how they test hypotheses and make trade-offs.
• What were surprising insights or results? Knowing when their initial hypotheses were wrong and understanding why can help you uncover great insights.
• What principles or frameworks helped you navigate the ambiguity? Great product thinkers internalize product principles they use to evaluate solutions. If you can uncover those principles, you can use them to guide your decisions as well.

4. Be curious about changes in technology and your domain📱

Another practice for developing creativity is to spend time learning about emerging trends in technology, society, and regulations. Changes in the industry create opportunities for launching new products that can address user needs in new ways. As a PM, you want to understand what’s possible in your domain in order to come up with creative solutions. For example:

While the macro trends are helpful in seeing where the industry is going, many of the non-obvious opportunities lie in deeply understanding micro changes that may unlock new possibilities. For example, Figma’s high-quality browser-based application for designers became possible only once WebGL became performant enough. In order to understand the nuances of micro changes, I recommend meeting with engineers and domain experts and going deep with them on topics of interest, such as new APIs or platform capabilities.

As Paul Graham said in How to Get Startup Ideas, “Live in the future, then build what’s missing.” Living in the future is also an effective approach to developing your product sense.