Demystifying Product Sense

What’s the difference between great products & not so great ones and more importantly what's it goes into elevating them to those “impeccably great” levels?

True Diversity & Seamless Inclusion

On the subject of diversity and inclusion in the workplace and given the corporate set-up & startup organizations alike, the real diversity I believe is seen in the product space with people from really a variety of backgrounds / expertise / experience who happen to get fascinated and make it to product roles.

Indeed! There is absolutely no bar as to who can break into product and take up the role of a product manager. And time stands testimony to the fact the people with such backgrounds have managed to firstly fit in and then excel at it as well.

Check out this stat showing percentages of people who have made it to product roles from various backgrounds other than software engineering:

Image Credits: mindtheproduct.com

And, purely based on my personal experience right now, I can quote a few such branches who have been a part of my cohorts: customer support, mechanical engineering, automobile engineering, pre-sales, sales & business development business analysts, talent acquisition, HR.

You can get an MBA, a certification in product management, you could also get a mentor and get him to advise you over the steps, but nobody can ever teach you product sense by the books.

I’ve personally seen how some people have that quality inbuilt to a large extent when some others would need proper practical exposure before they can even begin to feel comfortable with it - “practical experience” being the KEY here.

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Gist of Product Sense?

Take a consensus of this question “what is product sense?” and the answers one gets could roughly be on the lines of “it is an essential skill & more often than not it happens to be the striking difference that contributes to great products” in other words is something paves the way for seamless “user adoption”.

When that could be on the borderline of an acceptable definition for a person outside the product world, it has got to get deeper when one is referring to someone in a product team & that ought to cover a few aspects like:

• “how are products built?”

• “how are ideas generated?” &

• “what process goes into building products?”

So, our definition could now change to:

“the act of knowing what’s befitting and where from the standpoint of each of these parameters viz., problems, solutions, markets, customer segments & business”

Some proportion of people do believe that product sense is directly linked to analytical ability which is correlative to solving problems on logical reasoning, critical thinking, research, data analysis.

When there is a bit of truth in there, it is definitely not the whole truth as one could build analytical ability & it could be the start of it all but product sense ought to have a lot more ground covered.

Take a look at this figure & you’ll find the 5 elements representing analytical ability inscribed into that square on the left side.

Product Sense split over the Problem & the Solution domains

Let’s now deep-dive into some of those contributing factors.

Problem Domain

There ought to be enough time given and spent towards identifying problems in a given space and that could be done by following a few simple steps.

1. User Empathy

People who belong to product / solutioning teams ought to learn to develop the art of empathizing with the users and their needs / pain points and that needs to go deeper than just listening to and jotting down those points. Being empathetic means to able to feel and then understand the emotions and motivations behind those issues your user groups could be facing.

2. Common knowledge

When this aspect gets discounted from a lot of lists, I’d give it a bit of importance and include it here as it is mostly true of PMs that they happen to come from really diverse backgrounds and most times one can’t help but feel the crunch as it could be difficult to find one person who carries all that multivariate experience right from support, sales, marketing, discovery, market research, technology, solutioning, problem solving, innovation needed to handle the role. A basic – working knowledge of the workflow of all teams would help greatly.

3. Domain / subject knowledge

Sometimes PMs ought to carry deep subject / domain knowledge and that’s a given. Going by the JD it could be clear that role would have a huge technical overlap like for instance say: AI / ML, Robotics, IoT, APIs, Pharmaceuticals, Automobiles or even Computer Hardware products for that matter. Without acute subject / domain knowledge one could really suffer as a new entrant PM.

4. Problem identification

Usually meticulously carried out research spanning into discovery activities ought to lead to the identification of many problems and an acute understanding of the reasons behind their occurring though which ones are the most important & need immediate attention so as to prioritize them and take them ahead into the next major phase of solutioning though vaguely known, is good to be perceived as unknown at this juncture.

This is also the culmination of the first phase – the problem domain.

Solution Domain

Enough time ought to be allotted and meticulously spent towards identifying all alternate solutions & picking “THE SOLUTION” over these steps.

5. Problem prioritization

At this stage of solutioning one could have an exodus of problems lying there haphazardly in what could be totally unorganized, which then calls for some bequeathing of other smaller problems so as to pick one such problem that makes sense to pin on & prioritize. Solving for it usually ought to lead to a WIN-WIN for both the users of a target market and the organization that’s getting its foot into building a solution.

6. Solution identification

In the world of solutioning there could be many ways to solve a problem and when nobody is really vouching for THE Guinness Book of Records when it comes to a solution what’s important is for teams to rummage through the lot of them and pick one (or in some cases say, narrow it down to the TOP THREE) so that it could then be used for further analysis & deep dives / brainstorming.

7. Solution fitment

The 3 alternate solutions then ought to be passed on to brainstorming session(s) amongst the teams themselves so as to arrive at a “BEST FIT” wherein they’d use the insight obtained from the field by studying data, building what could be thought of as an Elevated Trapdoors with Hi-Fi Mocks / MVP / MLP / Prototype depending on the type of product and subject it to some acute user testing to validate fitment.

8. Business value

When most TECH members make it to product teams with a prior stint over arriving at solutions (solutioning), it could be easy to condone the importance of the business value it would add. Also, extending that thought in reality, business value could be perceived to be a two-way street. As much as it is important to ponder over, analyze & arrive at the value added to the users / user groups, it is equally important to consider how that would convert to Revenue / PnL for the organization building the products.

9. Growth projections (sustainable growth)

Yes, adding value to the users is imperative. But, what’s also important is to weigh out all A, B, C options and come up with some sort of a fluid plan over the routes to take so as to incorporate it into the roadmap and have proper clarity on the numbers that matter post release – the growth projections. And, having a roadmap charted out so as to strategically line-up those build & feature releases would be an icing on cake and a step in the right direction of sustainable growth.

And now, here’s a tabular representation of ideally how one ought to go about to gain a mastery over all 9 factors, settling the whole debate of whether the skill could be imbibed over theory - as in by reading books or whether one is would need practice and perhaps truckloads of it.

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Conclusion

Gaining an understanding of a skill and possessing skills are two different things altogether and in many cases it could also be deemed to be poles apart. If you’re serious about a career in product, building product sense ought to be atop that list of skills to have got to acquire and the best way to do that is to practically work amongst teams, take initiatives and explore all of it on the field.

“Mistakes may be made, that’s perhaps why it is justified to step onto that practice turf as it wouldn’t hurt much, it being a part of the learning curve”.

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