 Welcome everyone to today's webinar, how to up-level your product sense. Before we dig in, I just wanted to give you a little bit of background about myself. My name is Sam. I've been in product management for 10 years, started in 2012 transitioning from sales slash account management. I have a background in mobile gaming, ad tech and most recently podcasting. I have a BA in film and media studies, which I only say to reinforce the notion that you don't need an engineering degree or other technical background to break into product management. I identify myself as a dad, a gamer, and an amateur rapper, which is the last reference here to that today. All right. Let's dig into it. What are we covering today? We're going to go over what product sense is for those who are unfamiliar with the term, why it's important, and what you can do to improve your product sense. So let's start with what product sense is. I would say that product sense has a bit of a mystical aura around it. And my personal opinion is I think this is a bit manufactured to gatekeep product management as a vocation, which is why this GIF is a metaphor. But there are a lot of definitions out there. And I tend to think that these definitions kind of fall on the ends of a spectrum between either overly simple or overly complicated. So I'd like to submit my own humble definition for you today. Good judgment applied to product decisions. Now, this is admittedly abstract, which is kind of on par for product management as a vocation, if you ask me. But I think it's worth taking a second to deconstruct this definition. So let's start with judgment or good judgment. My personal favorite definition is from Benjamin Todd of the wonderful website, 80,000 Hours. And he defines judgment as the ability to wait complex information and reach calibrated conclusions. Now, this is still a bit abstract or esoteric. So let me take a real life example of applying good judgment to a situation. I have my kid in the backseat of my car. Again, I'm a dad and he does not want to buckle his seatbelt. He's a bit older than this stock photo here. So he's capable of buckling a seatbelt, but he does not want to. Ultimately, I could buckle it for him or I could wait until he buckles himself. But there are actually other options I could consider. I could sit and wait patiently until he does it. I could try to convince him to do it, make up a story. I could threaten punishment and prey on his innate loss of version bias and withholding access to a toy if he doesn't do it. But there's actually more information to consider here. In general, he's been on good behavior. He's been buckling his seat on his own. He wasn't feeling well this morning and when he doesn't feel well, he tends to lean on others for help more. And finally, I have an important work meeting in 20 minutes. So in this case, I value time to resolution and my son's emotional state over factors like reinforcing independence and I buckle his seatbelt. And you can see what weights I've chosen that go into my decision here. And that's me using my judgment to make that call. So that's good judgment. Now let's go into product decisions. Well, product decisions are as broad as a scope of a PM's job. You might be familiar with this infographic, pretty renowned. Product management is this intersection of all these different kind of roles and domains. And so product decisions can be applied to UX. They can be applied to technology decisions, roadmap decisions, scoping, pricing, et cetera, et cetera. And these decisions are always contextual. And again, bringing it back to the car seat. I had the context of my son's general behavior, his general demeanor. And of course, the information that I had a work meeting coming up. And some of you might be asking at this point, what about intuition? Isn't that why it's called product sense? Aren't we glossing over that kind of important factor here? And I would say that intuition is under the umbrella of judgment. And it just falls into the subconscious category. And, you know, quite frankly, I wasn't sitting there in the car pulling out a spreadsheet and assigning weights to these different factors. This all happened very quickly, happened probably subconsciously, but it's still a form of judgment. OK, one more thing before we move on. There are decisions that do not rely on product sense at all. There are design principles like when to use a switch versus a checkbox does not require judgment or product sense. There are, you know, standards for how to stand up a RESTful API or how to conduct an A-B test. You do not need product sense for these things. But I tend to think, and I think most PMs would agree that the decisions that require a finely honed judgment are the most interesting and impactful. I didn't explain this before. I'm a PM at Amazon and we term decisions that are not easily undone as one way door decisions because you go through the door and the world has changed. You can't go back again. These kind of decisions require a high degree of product sense. Achieving product market fit, same thing. Even kind of decisions relating to creativity and innovation require good judgment because you need it to recognize valuable ideas and execute on them. OK, we've defined product sense, or at least we have a working definition. So let's briefly go over why it's important. This is a little goes without saying, considering we're basically just talking about good judgment. But there are two kind of practical reasons to emphasize its importance. First, it's critical to your employability. Being employed is great, maybe not better than being willfully unemployed, but this infographic is taken from a newsletter that I subscribe to. Shout out Lenny's newsletter.com in which Lenny, a former Airbnb product lead and product dot leader, conducted a survey of over a thousand product managers and adjacent roles and found that product sense was the number three most mentioned skill that's valued in hiring decisions. So it's really important if you want to get hired in product. Anecdotally, pretty much every product interview I've been in, there have been product sense questions and I ask product sense questions when I interview candidates. Now, I'm going to let you read this quote for a second. So the key takeaway from this is that any of these really important and valuable attributes drive charisma, creativity, while great to have as a product person are not enough on their own to be successful. Judgment is really the key that unlocks your full potential as a PM. Perhaps this isn't true at organizations where PMs are just kind of project managers. But this isn't the case if you want to continue doing product management at the highest level and you have ambitions to lead a product team or start a successful product company. There are a ton of examples of, you know, the importance of product sense and a company success. I just want to give you one. There's a gentleman by the name of Tony Fidel, who's credited with inventing the iPod, and he was a founder of Nest. And when they first started shipping their smart thermostats, they needed to make a judgment call about what screws to include for mounting the devices on various wall materials. And they initially included a few different screw types for different materials. But as I started getting feedback from customers, they realized customers were getting confused. They didn't know which screws to use, and this adversely affected their first time experience with a product, which is really critical to gain traction. And as a result, they did something pretty radical. They invented a new type of screw that would work on a variety of surfaces. And, you know, as he put it, the investors thought they were crazy, but they knew how important it was to simplify the installation of their product. And ultimately, that was kind of a foundational aspect of them scaling their business. OK, so we know what product sense is. We know why it's important. Let's talk about how you can improve it. I will say that there's kind of conventional wisdom out there that product sense is just something that comes with experience. We'll come back to that in a bit. As with most things in life, there are kind of two broad categories of activities you can engage in to develop any skill or ability, learning and doing. So let's start with learning. One of the best things you can do is observe people whose judgment is strong. No product manager is an island. We're closer to a bridge, but I'm not going to go down that analogy train. Over time, you will consciously or subconsciously pick up habits from the people around you, whether they're PMs or designers or engineers or other leaders. So pay attention to the questions they ask and the tradeoffs they consider and how they measure success. I would say the only gotcha here is making sure you're soaking up good judgment, not just any judgment. So ideally, these are people whose success in decision making is already evident. Read product case studies. You should seek out examples of how others have made product decisions and solved problems. I recently read a fascinating story from an engineer at Bethesda, which is a popular gaming studio, and they were dealing with a problem in their game Morrowind, which was a huge kind of open world sandbox kind of RPG game. And this game was pushing the limits of the Xbox hardware to the point where the device, the hardware was running low on memory. And they could have solved this problem by refactoring the game to reduce memory usage or optimize it. But they found a much more economical and clever approach. There were loading sequences all over the game. It's a huge game, huge world. Users are very accustomed to waiting to get into a new area. They found that they could reboot the Xbox, literally restart the system silently in the background during a loading screen. And the users would have no idea. Really clever. Learn more about how people think it behaves. So, you know, whether you mean to or not, you are going to leverage concepts of psychology and cognitive, you know, biases and behavioral economics and sociology when you're building products and making decisions that affect your customer. So it's good to be aware of these principles or of these concepts so that you can use them intentionally. They're very powerful when used intentionally. So one example of this stitch fix, if you're not familiar, it's a personal styling service that recommends clothing based on, you know, your size and your budget and your style. They intentionally added friction to their customer onboarding flow, which defies kind of all conventions of, you know, product. You want users to get into your product as quickly as possible and onboard it as quickly as possible. But they did this for a very good reason. Users who made it through this flow were more invested in their service. And this was probably due to factors like the IKEA effect, which is where people tend to place a higher value on products. They have had a hand in creating and the sunk cost fallacy where people have a reluctance to abandon a course of action after they've invested in it heavily. This was great for them. They could really qualify their leads and a key component of their service being personalization. They were able to collect all this data upfront. And they would not have been able to execute the strategy if they were not familiar with kind of how people think and behave. Stay on top of tech trends. This may sound a little intimidating, or like you might be getting to the point, who has time for all these things? And I'll go over resources a bit later, but this doesn't have to be something you really go out of your way to do, per se. You don't need to know the ins and outs of every technology. But you should think about the technologies that affect every industry. Think about when personal computing came about or the internet or the cell phone. I think now, you know, key concepts are web three, artificial intelligence, machine learning. These are kind of seismic shifts in technology that affect every industry can affect every business. So you should be at least aware of them. You should be at least familiar with the key concepts because, you know, whether you like it or not, they will apply to your business or your competitors' businesses. And then the last one here is expose yourself to new things. This is a, I'd say, general recipe for creativity, which is often a unique combination of distinct ideas. You can pick up these lessons anywhere. I recently went to an indoor playground with my son that didn't allow adults to join their kids in the climbing area. And as you can imagine, that could have been kind of disastrous because what am I supposed to do while I'm there? And the company was really smart. The small business was really, really smart in how they address this problem. They realized that while kids are the users of their kind of product, their gym, their indoor playground, the adults are actually the customers making the purchase decisions, deciding how long the kids get to stay, whether they get to purchase snacks and arcade tokens there. So what they did was they offered ample, comfortable seating. They offered free Wi-Fi and they even had paid massage chairs. Incredibly smart. And something that, again, I didn't go out of my way to kind of pick up on this. I was just being observant. I was thinking about how are they going to solve this problem? I read on the website that adults weren't going to be allowed into the playground area. So I figured I wouldn't be spending much time there. But I was really wowed. One other thing I'll mention is in the vein of unique combinations. Being a general recipe for creativity. I'll give a pause going back to kind of unique combinations of distinct ideas, being a recipe for creativity. Think about typography and user interfaces. Or more recently, live streaming and exercise equipment. OK, moving on to things you can do. We talked about ways you can learn and kind of improve your product sense. Now let's talk about some concrete things you can do. Meet with your customers. PMs are not self-made again. They're dependent on their teams, their peers, their reports, their stakeholders. Talk to the people that talk to your customers. It may sound ridiculous, but a lot of PMs don't do this. I have an example of how this solved a very important problem for our business. We designed an interface thinking that users would select five to ten items at a time. And due to performance constraints, we didn't load all of the items into the list that they could select from, so you had to search for each one. But we expected that to be not such a huge deal if you're searching for five things at a time. We released it and we found that users would actually select hundreds of items at a time in practice and it would take them hours to get through filling out a form. And we knew we had to address this problem. Many solutions were considered and the leading one was to allow customers to create groups of items so they would only have to select a few groups as opposed to a bunch of individual items. We talked to customers and we found out we were dead wrong. We had misplaced the problem. The groups were, you know, a bunch of individual items. The groups were distinct for every form. They were not reusable and creating the groups was a slow deliberate process by design. They had to think consciously about which items they want to select for a given opportunity or form. The problem was getting that list once it was decided on into our system. It was an operational issue. And through talking to customers, we found that the list was most commonly generated in a tabular format so we built a CSV ingestion workflow. And it reduced the time it took to complete a form from hours to minutes. And if we hadn't really dug into this problem, if we hadn't talked to our customers and figured out who the problem was for and in what context, we would have over engineered the wrong solution. I mentioned this before. Listen to your teammates. One thing I just want to point out here is that it's important how you kind of project yourself or how you put yourself out there in your organization. If you give off two busy vibes or if you are kind of short with people who come to you with feedback because you're too busy or you think the idea they gave you is not so great, they're not going to keep coming back to you. And they're going to self edit their feedback when solicited. So it's an important soft skill that you're approachable as a PM. Use and examine your products. Sounds very obvious, but you'd be surprised how many people who work on products who do product development don't use their products or don't use their products in the same way that their customers do. And that's really critical for building empathy. So the product I currently work on is a kind of one-stop shop for podcasters to host, distribute and monetize their shows. A couple of years ago as part of a team offsite, we actually did a podcastathon where we had small teams break out, create a short podcast and then use our product to upload their show and configure ad settings and actually insert an ad dynamically, which our product does. And this was a totally eye-opening experience for many of our team members who had never actually gone through the end-to-end workflow of creating a new show. They had worked on individual features. They had provided support for customers. They had even designed or developed different aspects of the product, but they had not gone through the experience that a customer goes through every day using our product. And again, I said before, product sense is very contextual and domain-specific. If you want to apply product sense to your product, you need to know it inside it out and you need to know it in the way that your customers know it. I was only able to make a decision for my son because I was very familiar with the context and the domain. You can also tear down other products. If you don't currently work in a product capacity, I recommend reading useronboard.com for kind of an example of how you could do a tear down related to onboarding, but there's really no substitute for doing it yourself. You don't really need to go out of your way to do this. The next time you're going to try a new app or a new service or even a physical product, just open a page in Evernote or Google Docs and Notion or whatever floats your boat and write down your observations on their onboarding flow. What are they doing well? Where are you confused? What would you do differently? I recently did this for a companion app that came with a piece of workout equipment and ended up sharing my feedback with a company who has since made updates to their app. So it can be kind of self-serving too. Audit yourself. People measure a lot of things about themselves. They audit their sleep habits, their diet, their exercise routines. So why not your past decisions? Whenever you're making a big consequential decision, note it down in a running list and revisit this list periodically to review what happened. With hindsight, what did you miss? What could you have done better? And what did you get right? If you recently joined a new company, maybe you just started your career in product management, ask to see some older PRDs and read about the decisions that were made and then contrast that to reality. You can interview the PMs who made those decisions and why they made those decisions and ask them how did it turn out. One other thing I want to leave you with is the importance of always considering another option. Research on decision-making has found that whether or not decisions where you really only have one option or another were much less likely to be judged successful versus those where several options were simultaneously compared and the theory is kind of that these scenarios frame the problem too narrowly. There are almost always other options. Even if that means not doing anything or waiting until you have more information to make a decision. And one trick that is courtesy of a gentleman by the name of Philip Tetlock is to say to yourself, on the one hand, on the other hand, on the third hand, because PMs are aliens. One other trick you can do here is reading about first principles which can often kind of take you back farther and say, how did we get to this point where we only have these couple options to think about? Let's revisit our thinking here. And one other thing, it's not the product manager's job to come up with all the options. It's their job to aggregate them and make a judgment call using their product sense about which option is best for the circumstances or even delegating someone else with more domain experience to do so. So there's a very strong correlation between ice cream sales and shark attacks. But we know that correlation isn't causation. And with regards to whether product sense comes with experience, I have a feeling if you map the two on a chart like this, it would look pretty similar. More experience, more product sense. But this is misleading. Product sense comes with experience because the longer you work in product, the more time you have to refine your product sense doing all the things I already mentioned above, whether you're doing it consciously or not. So the PMs with experience have product sense. The PMs without experience are new and need to develop their product sense to be successful. They might actually have some already courtesy of doing some of the things that I mentioned above knowing that they were refining their product sense. But I would say there are no PMs with experience without some product sense because they would have churned out of product. And I'm actually willing to bet that a non-PM who engages in the kind of activities and actively tries to learn and better their product sense is going to have a more refined product sense than a PM who doesn't go out of their way to improve it. And maybe we need to start an annual product sense competition to test this theory. One more thing. I don't actually like the term product sense. I think sense implies innateness with few exceptions. I do want to get lasik, but you can't really improve a sense. And that contradicts what we've just covered that you can improve it. So I'm proposing that we phase out this term and replace it with product muscle. Product muscle instead. Feel free to attribute that to me. Just to recap, product sense is good judgment applied to product decisions, something you can develop like a muscle. And to accelerate your development, you should be talking to customers. You should be using products critically, evaluating your decisions and staying curious about your industry, technology, and the world. Here are some resources. I will share these slides so you don't need to write these down. These are general product resources that have helped me become a better product manager. They're all things that I've used myself. I want to provide some acknowledgments here. Product managers like all of, you know, civilization stand on the shoulders of giants. So shout out to these PMs and thought leaders who helped me refine my own product sense and put together this presentation. And of course, thanks to Product School for giving me this opportunity to talk to you today. Despite outward appearances, I'm actually not very social. You can't find me on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter. I have that stuff locked down. But I invite you to contact me with questions via email, connect with me on LinkedIn. I'd really appreciate it if you took a three-question survey about this presentation. Thank you for sparing your most precious resource with me.