Discovery is a useful tool for Product Managers to get pointed in the right direction. But it only extends so far. It is not a neatly detailed map that charts the terrain and reveals every step you should make.

That’s where most people get it wrong. Try as you might, discovery cannot be used to eliminate all uncertainty. Once you’ve used it to establish a deeper understanding of the problem, your users, and test high-level concepts, you must act.

And when you do act, speed and correctness matter. The PM who gets it right in two iterations rather than six will run laps around the field, drive faster results, and unlock months of resourcing to focus on the next meaningful problem.

The wasteland of mediocre PMs is littered with glorified project managers who build exclusively to customer requests, as well as those at the opposite end of the spectrum who have jumped off the deep end with the cult of discovery. The latter making up those who are content with never shipping anything of substance, instead creating the illusion of progress through a perpetual cycle of prototypes, personas, user testing, and exhaustive analysis. In other words, those better at talking than doing.

Discovery, within reason, remains a critical aspect of building exceptional products. It’s a tool to validate your largest and riskiest assumptions. To help get you started, Teresa Torres offers a helpful framework in her book Continuous Discovery Habits that features four quadrants where you map assumptions based on supporting evidence and level of importance. This provides a clear visualization of which assumptions to prioritize during discovery.

But what we’ve overlooked is that intuition in product is just as valuable.

PMs who are able to make better decisions, faster, win. PMs who fumble through months of discovery and analysis before moving, will lose. Just as those who only know how to build by taking orders from customers or stakeholders without any sort of research and refinement will also lose. There exists a golden mean.

As it relates to intuition in product, this can take as many forms as the discipline of product itself. Once you’ve identified a meaningful objective to pursue, selected a direction, and validated or invalidated your riskiest assumptions, there are still hundreds of variations in how you might get to your desired end state. If you’re able to successfully anticipate second-order consequences, what’s going to drive the bulk of the value (80/20), how it advances the vision, and where your product has the highest likelihood of going off the rails, you’ll be able to deliver results in weeks instead of months, or months instead of years.

At the heart of strong intuition is correctness and speed. In product, this will give a better idea of where to start, which iterations are worth pursuing, how to launch, when to scrap, and how to scale.

The same logic applies to bigger swings and moonshots. These have an inherently higher likelihood of failure. PMs with strong intuition might only have a success rate of 25%. But a 25% success rate is worth exponentially more than 10% success rate. And as it relates to the 75% they miss on, they don’t drag out failures over multiple years, blinded by sunk costs in the name of discovery.

The next obvious question becomes how do you hone intuition? Mainly through reflection, reading across disciplines, and experience. Get your reps in, ship often, and outlearn everyone around you. The best PMs codify each lesson the first time around—rather than having to relearn it dozens of times—and in doing so, cement that as intuition.

PMs with strong intuition focus on building a latticework of mental models. Product demands a multidisciplinary approach. The more flexible and wide-ranging your mental models, the stronger your decision-making and the less rigid your thinking. In product, this allows you to evaluate things from multiple perspectives and gain the right vantage point to find the best path forward.

Charlie Munger coined the term “latticework” of mental models—which is exactly what you’re aiming for. The models you pick up should be intertwined with one another, as well as with your personal and vicarious experience. The more connections, the faster you’ll be able to navigate the latticework of your mind and the stronger your product intuition.

If you want a more actionable plan to hone these skills, here’s a list of deep-dive articles that I’ve written to get you started:

The last piece—and perhaps the most important—in developing strong product intuition is that you must love product management or it’s going to be an uphill battle you’ll likely never win. Improving your intuition and judgment takes a lifetime of sustained effort. Endurance matters. Results happen over the course of years, not months or days. The motivation has to be there to stick it out.

If product isn’t your thing and you’re not uniquely suited for a career in this space, it will be a struggle. As Naval Ravikant points out, “If you’re not 100 percent into it, somebody else who is 100 percent into it will outperform you. And they won’t just outperform you by a little bit—they’ll outperform you by a lot.” This mindset applies equally to both your career and intuition in your field.

In the world of product, there’s a tendency to overanalyze on one side and shoot from the hip on the other. You want to position yourself near the golden mean. Proper discovery matters, so you can refine your ideas and validate your riskiest assumptions to ensure the problem is worth solving. But intuition matters just as much.

The speed and accuracy of your decision-making have a direct impact on the success of your product. If you’re able to make better decisions, faster, you improve your odds. You won’t always have months to complete an intensive discovery process, especially at startups where resources are limited and there’s nowhere to hide.

Strong product intuition can be the difference between driving business results and achieving product market fit before careening past the end of your runway or sacrificing your competitive advantage. If you want to realize the vision for your product, achieve meaningful impact, and set yourself apart in the process, hone your intuition.

The secret of discovery periods, stacking skills, and accelerating your growth curve

Early in my career, I was constantly worried about falling behind. I had this idea of a growth curve in my head, but in comparison to both my peers and my imagined potential, I felt like I was falling behind. There seemed to be a perpetual gap between where I was and where I thought I should be.

I would often tell myself, “I wish I wanted the same things as everyone else.” But what I’ve discovered is that when you provide yourself with a discovery period and allow yourself room to explore early in life, you always come out ahead. You just have to expand your perspective of time.

The trouble is that at the start of your career, you only have a tiny corner of the map for reference. But the older you get and the more experience you gain, the more obvious this becomes.

Those who start their careers without any level of introspection or sense of a discovery period might land a safe job, a decent signing bonus, and jump out to an early lead. But that type of growth follows a linear path which is incremental at best. Exponential growth is what you’re really after.

“Not all who wander are lost”

For me, the first six years out of college were a discovery period. And from the outside looking in, the first twelve months probably seemed like a train wreck.

I went from working on the set of major music videos, to considering medical school, signing up for pre-med undergraduate courses I missed the first time around, dropping out, waiting tables at a Tex-Mex restaurant, and taking a job in communications at a healthcare startup.

From there I worked my way into product management, as I discovered a gap between our sales team and our engineers. When I first assumed a product role, it was without knowing that product management was even a thing or potential career path. It just aligned with my natural interests – blending business, design, and technology. And the more I learned about product, the more I dug in.

A few years later, I furthered that skill set by launching my own startup to connect people with local farmers markets and food sources. Alongside a talented engineer from my first job, we built FarmScout from the ground up. A few years later, it was acquired by another entrepreneur based in Portland.

Out of all the early experiences I had, this was the most important in terms of a discovery period. If you want to accelerate your growth, determine what you’re good at and identify your gaps, try creating something from nothing.

Around this same time, I also found my way back to writing. The formulaic essays from school had turned me away from the craft. But at 25, I decided to spend a random Saturday evening putting some thoughts on paper at The Well, a local Nashville coffee shop. I ended up writing for three hours. Before I knew it, I was there five nights each week, rekindling my love for writing – something I find meaning, clarity, and a deep sense of fulfillment in. Months later, I launched an early iteration of this blog from that exact spot.

Growth is nonlinear

This period of six years was full of other ups and down – traveling internationally, exploring philosophy, building perspective. But around age 28 things finally came together.

By that point, I found my niche in product management, something I feel uniquely suited to do. I rediscovered writing and moved it back into a focal point of my life. I dedicated more of my time to the things and the people I cared about most. I began to stack the skills that made me, me.

While I didn’t know it at the time, looking back, this is when my dedication to a discovery period began to pay off. My trajectory completely shifted.

When setting off on a discovery period, you need to understand that input rarely matches results early on. Growth is nonlinear. You have to stick with something long enough to get through the plateau before you reach a breakthrough moment. It often takes months, if not years, to see the results. That’s why it’s so important to find the things you can sustain indefinitely and stick with those.

While I don’t presume to have it all figured out, I feel like I have a stronger sense of who I am and what’s important to me because of the discovery period I was able to carve out for myself. My hope in explaining the past decade of my life is that I’m able to provide you with a real example that you can pull from and relate to.

History is also full of similar examples. Every influential historical figure in my latest ebook, 7 Strategies to Navigate the Noise, faced similar challenges early in their life during their attempts to figure things out. From Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin to Queen Elizabeth and Caterina Sforza, each person faced a discovery period where they felt like they were falling behind as they searched for something different than the lives neatly prescribed to them. But as they came to understand, what matters most is the trajectory you’re setting yourself up for.

Those who follow a neat and orderly path might be a few steps ahead early on. But if you expand your perspective of time, it’s those who have explored and followed their natural inclinations that come out ahead. This is how you find real meaning and engagement. And both act as force multipliers.

In the early days, you just have to remain patient and allow yourself to sit in the gray area between the two growth curves.

Focus on getting the conditions right, seek opportunities that allow you room to explore, and it’s only a matter of time before you catch your break.

Stacking the right skills

During this discovery period, what you’re really after is determining what matters to you and how to stack the skills that set you apart. These will help move you closer to your guiding principle – what you find meaning in and your fundamental goals.

Stacking the right skills is what allows you to hit this exponential growth. If you attempt to specialize in a single skill, it might work out if you’re a prodigy or operating in a rare field that has a neatly defined set of rules.

But when facing the ambiguity inherent to the majority of life and work, this demands creativity and resourcefulness. If you’re only competing with a single skill at your disposal, it’s difficult to be creative and even more of a challenge to set yourself apart.

But when you stack skills, layering one on top of the other, you begin carving out your own niche. From here you can create your own playing field and accelerate your own trajectory.

I’m not in the top ten percent when it comes to design or technology. But when I stack those alongside business, communication, storytelling, strategy, and a fierce sense of focus, that’s when I’m able to set myself apart. By wielding each of these skills, I put myself in a position to be more creative and resourceful. And this is the path towards authenticity and creating work that matters.

Tech
Design
Business
Storytelling
Communication
Strategy
Focus

The same lesson holds true for something like machine learning (ML). It’s incredibly difficult to establish yourself at the top of that field in its purest form. But if you stack skills in music composition, programming, analytics, and ML, it’s a rare group of people whose natural interests align and are able to combine those skills. And suddenly instead of competing against 50,000 industry experts, there are only 20 people who even remotely overlap.

Learning which skills to stack is about coming into your own. What makes you unique? What are your natural inclinations? What comes easy to you that other people find difficult or impossible? What can you sustain indefinitely? A discovery period allows you to begin uncovering answers to these questions.

Law of the hammer

The added benefit of stacking skills is that you’re able to begin mastering a multidisciplinary approach. This is how you outthink and outmaneuver people. And it helps guard you from becoming trapped in a one-track mindset where you attempt to apply a single approach to every problem you face.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. A multidisciplinary approach is the antithesis of the law of the hammer. It helps you avoid the cognitive bias that is the over-reliance on a single model.

The more mental models you possess, the stronger your cognitive ability, and the greater your capacity to grow. Remember, when you only have a single model to work with, growth is often incremental at best.

If machine learning is the only interest and skill you’ve developed, chances are that every problem you face is going to look like an ML problem. But when you’ve armed yourself with a multidisciplinary approach and you’ve stacked the skills that set you apart, you can see problems and opportunities for what they are. From here, you’re able to determine a more effective course of action.

Be loyal to the best opportunities for growth

Early in your career, the most important thing you can look for is opportunities that allow you room to explore.

If you’re in technology, this could mean working somewhere that provides exposure to different programming languages, frameworks, technologies, and products. Or it might mean seeking out an opportunity on a diverse, cross-functional team that provides you with exposure to a range of disciplines and perspectives.

Whatever you do and wherever you are, remain loyal to the best opportunities for growth.

Don’t allow yourself to get locked into an isolated career early on. It might seem like a head start for the first few years, but you’ll pay dearly later on in your own growth and sense of engagement. Prioritizing short-term gratification over learning and growth is how you end up in a dead-end career with regrets.

Give yourself time to figure yourself out. Allow yourself room to explore. Prioritize the places and people who appreciate this need.

By creating space and pursuing opportunities that reward a discovery period, you can start figuring out how to stack the skills that set you apart. This is how you develop yourself, accelerate your own growth, and avoid the traps that most people find themselves lured into.

Channel what makes you, you. With this mindset and room to explore, you’ll run laps around your younger self and make it impossible for others to keep pace. By committing to the long game, you unlock the power of compound interest and exponential growth. And this is how you accelerate your trajectory and create real meaning.

Product and the Lost Art of Intuition

How to Overcome Your Fear of Falling Behind