Developing Product Sense: How to See the Forest and the Trees

Every quarter in my Stanford Product Management class, the same question comes up:
“How do I build product sense?”

It’s a good question. Product sense isn’t something you’re born with. It’s not a gift bestowed upon a lucky few PMs or founders. It’s a skill. Like any skill, you develop it through practice, feedback, and conscious effort. And when you put in that effort, you’ll find that product sense becomes one of your most powerful tools. It helps you make faster, better decisions — the kind that build products people love.

What is product sense, really?

At its core, product sense is your ability to see the whole system: the user, the problem, the solution, and the business model — and how they all fit together.

It’s knowing:

• Who is this for?
• What problem are we solving?
• Why does this solution make sense?
• What tradeoffs are we making?
• How does this deliver value, not just functionality?

Good product sense means you can quickly identify bad ideas, refine mediocre ones, and recognize the spark in something rough but promising.

Train it like a skill

Product sense is not built by reading articles or watching videos (though you’re here, so good start). You have to do the reps.

Start with the products you use every day. Pick one and ask:

• What job is this doing for me?
• What friction points do I experience?
• What user segments might exist?
• What assumptions were the builders making?
• Where did they clearly trade off complexity for simplicity?
• How do they create value and what kind (money, users, etc?)

You can do this with anything: your grocery delivery app, your thermostat, even your email client. The more you analyze, the more you start seeing patterns.

Do your own synthesis

Here’s where many people take a shortcut and don’t realize they are only hurting themselves. Don’t outsource your synthesis to AI or anyone else. It’s not just about collecting insights. You are training your brain to think like your users.

When you personally sift through user feedback, interviews, support tickets, and data, you’re building neural pathways that connect your product decisions to real user needs. That synthesis is where product sense lives. The pattern recognition you build through firsthand work is irreplaceable. If you have a user researcher, work with them to find insights… more people means more (and different) insights.

If you hand off synthesis to someone (or something) else, you rob yourself of the practice that makes your instincts sharper.

Talk to real users (and non-users)

Don’t fall into the trap of only talking to your most engaged users. Seek out the people who churned, or who never even adopted your product in the first place. Their stories are often more revealing than your power users’.

Real product sense comes from understanding not only what works, but why it doesn’t work for others. The world is messier than any customer persona doc. Embrace that mess.

Build small bets

Theory is great, but nothing builds product sense like skin in the game. Build a side project. Launch a micro feature. Put something into the world where you can watch users struggle, succeed, or ignore you entirely.

Even internal tools can be great practice grounds. Every real user interaction teaches you something you won’t learn in a spreadsheet.

Know when your gut is wrong

Here’s the kicker: your gut improves with practice, but you have to confront its mistakes. Prediction is a skill.

Before you run a test or launch a feature, force yourself to make a prediction. Write it down:

• What do you expect to happen?
• Why?
• Where do you expect users to stumble?
• How will success look?

Then, after the results are in, compare your predictions to reality. Over time, you’ll start to see your mental models sharpen. Your predictions will get better — and so will your product sense.

Cross-train with your teammates

Don’t limit yourself to PM thinking. Pair with designers, engineers, data analysts, marketers. Each discipline sees different parts of the problem. Borrow their lenses. Ask dumb questions. Trade perspectives.

Good product sense is deeply interdisciplinary — the best PMs I know can speak a little design, a little engineering, a little business, and a lot of human.

Product sense isn’t magic. It’s attention, practice, and reflection.

You don’t need to wait to be assigned the perfect product to start. You can practice today. Pick any product. Ask why it works. Make a prediction. Synthesize what you learn.
And over time, you’ll find that your product sense starts to guide you — not as a voice from nowhere, but as a well-trained, well-practiced skill you’ve deliberately built.