Had our quarterly planning session today. These are always exhausting but necessary. The key insight that emerged: we’ve been spreading ourselves too thin across three product lines when we should be going deep on one.
It’s counterintuitive—feels like we’re leaving opportunity on the table—but focus compounds. Every successful product I’ve worked on got there by saying no to good ideas in service of great ones.
Tomorrow we’ll start the hard conversations about what to sunset.
There’s a moment in every product manager’s career when you realize that data alone won’t save you. You have all the metrics, the user research, the competitive analysis—and yet the path forward isn’t clear. This is where intuition comes in.
Product intuition isn’t magic. It’s pattern recognition built from thousands of small observations. It’s the accumulated residue of every customer interview, every feature launch, every failed experiment. The PMs who seem to “just know” what to build have simply been paying attention longer.
I’ve come to believe product intuition has three core components:
Customer empathy at scale. Not just understanding one user’s problem, but sensing the shape of a problem across thousands of users. This comes from doing enough customer interviews that you start hearing the same pain points expressed in different words.
Technical possibility awareness. Knowing what’s easy, what’s hard, and what’s impossible with current technology. This doesn’t mean you need to code, but you need enough conversations with engineers to develop a feel for complexity.
Business model coherence. Understanding how value flows through a system. A feature might delight users but destroy your unit economics. Intuition helps you spot these traps before you walk into them.
The bad news: there are no shortcuts. The good news: the path is straightforward, even if it’s not fast.
Talk to customers constantly. Not just during formal research phases, but all the time. The PMs with the best intuition are the ones who’ve done hundreds of customer conversations. They can predict objections before customers voice them.
Ship and observe. Every feature you ship is a hypothesis. Watch what happens. Did users behave the way you expected? If not, why not? This feedback loop is where intuition gets calibrated.
Study adjacent products. Your users don’t compare you to your direct competitors—they compare you to the last great experience they had. Study products outside your category. What can you learn from how Notion handles collaboration? How Linear handles speed? How Apple handles polish?
Write down your predictions. Before you look at the data from a launch, write down what you expect to see. Then compare. This practice surfaces the gap between your intuition and reality.
Even well-developed intuition has limits. It’s pattern matching, which means it works best when the future resembles the past. In genuinely novel situations—new markets, new technologies, new user behaviors—intuition can mislead you.
The best PMs know when to trust their gut and when to experiment. They use intuition to generate hypotheses, then test those hypotheses rigorously. They’re confident but not certain. They have strong opinions, loosely held.
Building product intuition is a career-long project. The PMs I admire most are the ones who, after twenty years, are still curious. They’re still doing customer interviews. They’re still shipping and observing. They know that intuition isn’t a destination—it’s a practice.
Start today. Talk to a customer. Ship something small. Write down your prediction. Then pay attention to what happens. That’s all intuition is: attention, compounded over time.
Testing the archive feature with an October 2025 post. This should appear in the archive links as “Oct” under 2025.