Product Sense
Whether deciding what to build next, enhancing an existing product, or determining how to measure success, a product manager is expected to demonstrate strong product sense.
Product sense is essentially well-informed common sense, which can be structured into a framework to guide decision-making. Applying this framework consistently in your daily role helps you make thoughtful, customer-centric decisions and achieve meaningful outcomes.
Here’s my 9-step (!) framework which I hope will guide you as effectively as it has guided me in the past.
DEFINE THE CONTEXT
Company mission - What business is your company in? What vision or mission defines your purpose and drives your company forward?
Product mission - Develop a product mission that directly aligns with and supports the company’s overarching mission, ensuring it reflects the core purpose and values of the organization while addressing specific customer needs
Product Objective - What is the key objective for your product? As a PM, consider what you are optimizing for—whether it's adoption, engagement, retention, or monetization—and ensure it aligns with the product mission and overall company goals.
DEFINE WHAT TO BUILD
Users - Define your users and personas Who are they? What are their roles and goals? Why do they need your product, and how does it fit into their lives or workflows?
Pain points - This is your opportunity to stand out as a PM by truly understanding and addressing obstacles in the user's journey. Put on your empathy hat and dig deep
Remember: A need is not a pain point. A pain point is a barrier or hindrance preventing users from achieving their desired outcome. Identifying and resolving these pain points is key to creating a product that delivers real value
Solutions - Now you’re ready to start solutioning. Begin by analyzing the market and competitors to identify opportunities to differentiate your product and stand out. Your unique solution might even draw inspiration from an entirely unrelated industry or product—great ideas can come from anywhere!
Collaborate with stakeholders like UX and engineering to develop prototypes and experiments. Use these to explore and test different alternatives, iterating based on feedback to ensure your solution resonates with users and aligns with your product’s goals.
MEASURE SUCCESS
Success metric(s) - Revisit the Product Objective to recap what you’re optimizing for—be it adoption, engagement, retention, or monetization.
Build the capability to measure your product's performance against this objective. Is your North Star metric trending in the right direction? Tracking this will provide valuable insights into whether your product is achieving product-market fit and guide future iterations.
Trade-offs: Consider whether focusing on a single metric might cause other parts of your product to suffer. Does optimizing for one area—such as adoption or retention—come at the cost of other important aspects, like user experience or feature quality?
Ask yourself: Does a single metric truly capture everything needed to build and grow a successful product? Often, a more holistic approach is necessary to balance short-term goals with long-term success.
Iterate and Innovate: The process doesn't stop after the first solution. Lather, rinse, repeat—continuously gather feedback, refine your approach, and innovate based on new insights. Product development is an ongoing cycle of iteration, where each version should be better than the last, driving you closer to your goal and ensuring you’re always delivering more value to your users.
And there you have it! I hope this article made you realize that by approaching challenges with a blend of empathy, insight, and common sense, we can create products that resonate and truly make a difference.
