Putting your product intuition into words

One of the most-requested skills on a product manager’s job description is the wonderfully nebulous ‘product intuition’. PMs are expected to take in large amounts of new information, process it and come up with sensible evaluative judgments on an almost continuous basis, forming an instinct for the direction their team or product area needs to go in. However, it’s really difficult to define this skill, let alone develop it - most advice in this area centres vaguely on ‘keep learning’ in order to hone product sense. This doesn’t just affect people in the interview stage either; when in the job, working with your team or your senior stakeholders, there will inevitably come a time when you’re asked to justify an opinion or decision and will come up with nothing better than ‘I just know’. Often your opinion is a reasonable judgement as a result of the ‘product intuition’ which is so highly prized, but this type of response won’t be very effective when it comes to convincing other people. So how can you unpick this ‘intuition’ to give a justification that will bring everyone along?

The key factor in using your intuition effectively is to understand what makes it up in the first place. There are two types of decision-making that PMs tend to engage in; one is analytical, in which you outline all the options and consider many factors, either through a pro-and-con list, risk analysis, decision tree or similar. The other is intuitive; you come up with a plan and follow it through, adjusting as you go if necessary. In “Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions”, Gary Klein and his fellow researchers discover and explore these two different methodologies, focusing on individuals in high-pressure decision-making scenarios such as military commanders, fire chiefs and urgent care nurses. They discovered that people in these situations rarely have the time to weigh up different options, but also that they don’t need to - they read a situation, come up with a plan and execute it. Product management is a much less stressful discipline which doesn’t require split-second life and death decision making, but it does involve making many decisions at high pace, which causes us to use our intuition where we can in order to manage our cognitive load appropriately. Klein and his team call this a “recognition-primed decision model”; you understand the situation, and generate a plan based on your accumulated knowledge and experience.

However, this decision-making is still all happening inside your head. In order to help stakeholders understand the decision, we need to break it down further. First, you need to understand if the situation is typical or atypical. For example, is this a common gripe with user experience that you’ve seen before? Or, is it a specific issue relating to a particular user or client? Experienced PMs probably make this kind of evaluation so quickly, that it barely seems conscious, but contextualising it in this way helps people understand that you are a source of expertise in this area. Another key feature of a recognition-primed decision model is a “mental simulation”, or imagining the potential outcomes if a scenario were implemented. This might not be as quick to think through, but most PMs will be able to imagine how users will react if a new screen is introduced, a key UI element is changed, or a new feature launched on a particular day. Again, the key here is to try and verbalise this mental simulation to explain your intuition, using any relevant cues that you think will direct the experience a certain way. This can also be a great way to justify which metric you want to use to measure something; by playing out the scenario in your head, you can help guide your stakeholders to a tangible way of measuring the success of their idea.

Of course, the recognition-primed decision model is not perfect, and there are circumstances in which an evaluative, analytical model is a better approach. These include high-risk decision points, complex multi-option cases such as procurement exercises, and any areas in which the decision-maker is a novice. However, using the components of the recognition-primed model can help communicate your decision logic at times when you’re the expert, but need to justify that decision to others. By explaining the context of your experience, which allows you to judge how typical your situation is based on recognising patterns from your previous work, you can centre your position and justify your opinion. And by walking people through your mental simulation, you can help other people to benefit from your intuition, rather than asking them to rely on it without the same level of understanding.