https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/product-sense
👋 Hey, Lenny here! Welcome to a ✨ monthly free edition ✨ of my weekly newsletter. Each week I tackle reader questions about building product, driving growth, working with humans, and anything else that’s stressing you out about work.
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Your question implies that it can be developed, and to that point, I 1,000% agree. Contrary to what a lot of PMs believe, product sense is not something you need to be born with. It’s a learned skill, just like any other PM skill. Sure, some people are naturally better at it, but that’s OK. You don’t need to be in the 99th percentile of this skill to be an incredibly successful PM. That being said, you are building a product as your job, and are often the final word on product decisions, so you absolutely do need to develop your product sense muscle, especially as you move up in seniority.
To help you build your product sense, I’ve asked Jules Walter, a longtime PM at Slack and YouTube who’s also a prominent leader in the broader PM community, to share his hard-earned wisdom with us. Below, Jules unravels the mystery that is product sense. He shares a ton of actionable and practical advice to develop your product sense, explains what product sense is, how to know if you’re getting better, and dives deep into four concrete ways to build this skill with a bunch of examples from his own experience. Enjoy!
You can follow Jules on Twitter and LinkedIn.
P.S. You can now hear this post in audio form 👇
Product sense is not only one of the most important PM skills (see chart below from Lenny’s survey of ~1,000 PMs)—it’s also the most vague. And it’s often the hardest to learn.
There isn’t much written on the subject, and as a PM trying to improve your product sense, you may not know if you’re any good at it, or how to get better. I want to help.
