Mastering product sense: an in-depth overview and definition

As a product manager, understanding and implementing product sense makes your products stand out and sell. Understanding what your product users want puts you in a stronger position to create the perfect, or near-to-perfect, product to fulfill their needs and desires.

Product sense takes dedication and time to craft. It may even be the most difficult skill for any product manager.

Yet, it’s the most important.

Product sense takes a pairing of empathy (to understand user needs) and creativity (to conceive of and create a product that meets those needs). You need to understand the market and potential users' needs while being aware of the competition.

Product sense is understanding what makes a product successful and how you can improve upon that success.

Identifying customer problems and solving them with a product is the definition of product thinking.

Using both approaches for any product will help extend its lifespan.

There are several components to product sense. Each is crucial for creating products that are in demand and will sell.

Understand your users

First, get to know your product's target audience to design that product with their needs and desires in mind. In particular, research the following aspects of the product’s audience:

• Age group: Few products appeal to, or are needed by, every age group. A product aimed at young children is highly unlikely to appeal to teenagers.

• Gender: While many products appeal to any gender, some products are more attractive to either men or women, such as clothing, cosmetics, and fragrances.

• Interests: Audience interests can have a vast scope, from hobbies and sports to theater and music. Is your product of interest to more active people or those with more sedentary hobbies?

• Location: Understand your audience's location, including climate, size of their home town or city, whether they live in an urban or rural environment, and how far they live from where they can pick up your product.

• Occupation: Your product may appeal more to people in a specific occupation or a grouping of occupations, whether construction, medicine, or entrepreneurship.

• Relationships and family: Your customer’s relationship situation, whether single, married, cohabiting, or other, can impact their product choices.

Follow up by combining these categories. For example, the target audience for your product could be professional men aged 25–45 who have families with school-age children. Determining your specific target audience is the first step in establishing product sense.

Understanding who your target audience is not can be just as important.

Market analysis and trends

Understanding your target audience will be invaluable as you carry out market analysis. Look for trends and gaps; see if you can fill any spaces.

How will you do your analysis? Consider the following methods:

• Conduct interviews online, through social media, or by collecting data from your buyers.

• Use Google Analytics to access a variety of data about your website visitors.

• Be curious. Watch for technological trends of comparable products and possible regulations for your products and similar ones.

• Identify industry trends, not just for your product, but your competitors as well.

• Don’t be afraid to revise your structure. Market analysis and product sense are ever-changing and ongoing.

Develop strong product strategies

Understanding your product goals and developing a business strategy for them is the key to success. Don’t be afraid to compare yourself with your competitors; you can be sure they’re collecting data about your business too.

Product marketing is important and coincides with marketplace trends. In addition, continually compare your distribution and marketing to that of your competition.

User empathy and user experience

Empathy may not be the first term you think of when considering user experience, but it is essential for mastering product sense.

To develop empathy toward your product users, observe users interacting with your products and those of your competitors. Are they happy or frustrated? Relieved or confused?

Check out users' body language and facial expressions. Try to determine whether they are comfortable or apprehensive and whether they had an overall positive or negative experience.

Ask questions of users that need more than a yes or no answer. Asking open-ended questions can help you determine whether those users understand the purpose of the product and, in turn, can improve upon your product sense.

Here are some questions you could ask:

• What do you feel best describes this product's purpose or goal?

• Is this product designed for someone like you? If not, who do you think it is for?

• What would be your next step in using this product, and do you understand how to proceed with that step?

• How does this make you feel?

• What would you say when suggesting this product to someone else?

You can cater these questions to better apply to your specific product.

Observation and follow-up questions provide insights that are unavailable in reports and spreadsheets. Seeing through the eyes of the user provides you with a greater variety of minute reactions.

This approach also helps you improve your instincts about the user experience with your products or comparable ones. The more you study user experience, the better you will understand your audience.

Product managers do not have innate product sense. Sure, some product managers may have a better understanding of user needs, but product sense is a learned skill that can be refined and improved upon.

You may be looking for the right answer. There isn't one in product sense. As a product manager, you and your team need to look at all the options and explore pros and cons.

Experience alone does not equal good product sense. Likewise, product sense goes beyond design to understand what makes a product successful.

Use research, analysis, and experimentation to extend your knowledge and produce a solid solution.

We've already discussed research and development tools to evaluate a product and garner product sense.

To take it to the next level, consider observing users in their natural environment, whether at work, home, or play. Set up appointments with product users in their normal setting. Look for ease of use and consider the product value for the user. How beneficial is the product to them? Ignore your feelings and gather insight into each user as an individual. Keep asking questions.

Gain domain expertise

Remember how crucial empathy is when developing product sense. Stay current with the industry and users’ needs and desires. Never assume anything.

Use the IMPACT mindset

IMPACT stands for: interesting, meaningful, people, actionable, clear, testable. Is your product:

• Interesting enough to entice customers to care more about it than similar products?

• Meaningful enough to provide value to users?

• Beneficial enough to your target audience?

• Actionable enough to be developed?

• Clear enough for anyone to understand?

• Tested enough to invest in to prove its success?

Do sweat the small stuff

In the case of product sense, sweating the small stuff is important. Don't forget the minor details. How can the product manager help make the user experience efficient, pleasant, and timely? You can do this by putting yourself in the mindset of the user, rather than looking through the lens of the product manager.

Practice does make perfect

Pick a product you use routinely or, more challenging, something you know of but understand little about how it works. Research:

• Who the product is designed for

• How it works and serves the intended user

• How well it works for that intended user

• If the experience is positive or negative for users

Did the product developer hit the intended target for users?

Decide what information will help you understand the details of your product to see if it is on target for decision-making through your product sense.

You can make informed decisions by collecting and analyzing actionable data and developing your product roadmap.

Prioritizing your product roadmap

Your product roadmap is an action plan, an outline of the vision for your product, incorporating its direction and priorities. Through ongoing collection methods, that vision, direction, goals, and priorities will change over time.

Balancing user needs and business goals

Determine the most critical user needs and expectations and balance them with your business goals. Be adaptable and don't be afraid to change things should priorities change for your users or your company.

Evaluating a competitive landscape

It’s important to know what’s going on with your competitors:

• Know who your competitors are

• Analyze the content of their product

• Track your competitors through social media content

• Consider their price point and promotional activity

• Understand their position compared with your own

Evaluating and understanding the competitive landscape can help you gain insight into their marketing strategies while helping you discover untapped product-feature ideas and ways to improve user experience.

Reading and evaluating case studies can help you better understand product sense in action. 

One of the most notable examples of successful product sense comes from Apple’s development of the iPhone. Others include:

• Google Maps

• Nike Air shoes

• Coca-Cola

These product managers know their products and their value. Studying these case studies can help you make decisions and solve problems in your quest for product management and product sense.

Steve Jobs and Apple products

We all know Steve Jobs was a phenomenally successful entrepreneur, and we continue to see improvements in the products he and Apple, the company he co-founded, created, including the iPhone, iPod, and iPad.

Upon Jobs' death in 2011, President Obama said, "Steve was among the greatest of American innovators—brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it."

What Jobs sought to do was take technology and make it easy, simple, and fun. From the first Apple computer to the iPhone, Jobs did just that. Through product sense, he identified market gaps and filled them, leaving behind his expertise and a legacy for the company to continue to build upon to this day.

Shreyas Doshi and social media

Shreyas Doshi is a world-renowned guru in product management. He started as Stripe's product manager and has helped social media platforms, including X (formerly known as Twitter), Google, and Yahoo with their strategies and management.

Doshi is now focusing on advising startups and product managers of the future through his company, High Leverage LLC. He has a multitude of videos available on YouTube.

To apply successful product manager approaches:

• Research the role of their product in the marketplace

• Study their objectives

• Create an analysis using their framework

• Examine and spell out your thoughts

• Regularly review a variety of case studies

• Examine product sense in different categories

Although the basic principles of product sense are the same for a range of products, product sense can be interpreted differently in different subsets. This can be seen in the design and strategy of software products versus hardware and electronics. The same thing goes for consumer goods and services versus enterprise products.

User-centric product sense

Applying a user-centric product sense that realizes the needs and preferences of the user is of the utmost importance in developing a successful product. Seek to create efficient, intuitive, and highly functional products which are pleasing to the eye.

Incorporating user feedback

Don't be afraid to ask users for feedback. This is crucial to product performance and potential changes in the future. Just ask.

Using product sense in product management is critical in developing a strategy for a successful product. Learning what your potential product users want and need is key to that product's success.