Product and the Lost Art of Intuition

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:

• Product resources to help you level up

• Unexpected books to help PMs hone a multidisciplinary approach

• Resourcefulness in product

• Indecision in product

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. 

Quit Killing Your Team

Most people recognize the importance of hiring. Building something from nothing requires a core team of smart creatives with a deep well of curiosity. These are the innovators who are able to connect ideas between multiple disciplines and offer new ways of looking at the world.

But what’s valued in the hiring process–freethinking, curiosity, creativity–is often forgotten in the day-to-day. And it’s your job to preserve this, for both yourself and your team.

If you want to drive results, you need a better strategy than tightening your grip.

Not everything needs to be about efficiency, productivity, and deliverables. Breathing room helps nurture creativity and curiosity. Those who fail to grasp this nuance end up stuck in a one-track managerial mindset, unable to effectively lead.

Progress comes from having the autonomy to stray into the expanse of your mind and connect ideas in new and interesting ways. Focus on getting the conditions right so everyone has the opportunity to create these connections and find fulfillment in their work.

Without this, you’ll face a barrage of apathy, burnout, and unrealized potential. And once you lose engagement, meaningful progress becomes impossible or short lived.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t set deadlines or establish goals. You need this, too. But if you want to sustain engagement and encourage innovation, allow the people you invested the time to hire to do what set them apart in the first place. Let curiosity and creativity lead the way. This puts your team in a far better position to create something worthwhile.

Leaders fight for a balance between deadlines and exploration.

Designers need freedom to explore creative directions.
Developers need freedom to explore new technologies.
Product managers need freedom to explore different visions.

There’s a sense of artistic expression to each. Creating this space helps build morale by pushing each person to find a deeper sense of satisfaction and meaning in their daily work. It also lays the groundwork for innovation by encouraging people to bridge disciplines, offer new ideas, and test different angles.

This mindset is foundational to every high-performing, rewarding team that I’ve been on. Most recently at Asurion, during a recent year-long effort to drive messaging volume, my team reached a place where we were slowing down and struggling to sustain engagement. To rebuild momentum, we created space to explore how we might leverage a few of our ideas in the smart home–a new space we were all interested in.

We balanced this with our primary initiative, as it wasn’t immediately evident how it would fit in or what was technically feasible. But a few weeks later, we finished building out an Alexa skill which allowed customers to speak with our messaging experts asynchronously via text to speech.

We were able to create something entirely new with the capacity to change how our customers interacted with us. But even if we failed and came out with nothing to show for it, the change of pace held value of its own. It allowed us to reenergize and refocus.

What mattered most was that we gave ourselves space to explore.

There won't always be a one-to-one translation between what you’re exploring and the objective you’re working towards. Sometimes pursuing an idea out of a sense of wonder, is reason enough.

Engaging your curiosity and creativity will help expand your perspective and build momentum. Allow yourself to be distracted from time to time and follow the random ideas that strike your interest, regardless of where they lead.

The most brilliant minds throughout history infused their work with a wandering sense of curiosity.

Leonardo da Vinci embodied this better than anyone else. His entire life followed a series of digressions from his career as an artist.

Leonardo allowed himself to be distracted and seek knowledge for its own sake. This led him to study human anatomy, conduct dozens of dissections, create schemes to divert rivers, choreograph pageants, investigate the flight of birds, and create diagrams of technical innovations such as human flight machines.

Some consider this to be a lack of discipline, which only served to pull him away from more important work. But when you study his life in its entirety, you begin to see how these detours helped shape and inform his art. His obsession with human anatomy, for instance, helped him breathe life into the finest details of his paintings, as he worked from the inside out.

As for the more fantastical detours, such as schematics for flying machines or giant crossbows, I doubt Leonardo would consider this wasted time. It was a channel for his relentless curiosity and creativity–the very things that made him who he was, and a source of pure fulfillment.

Creativity and curiosity are the building blocks of engagement.

Everyone needs space to wander, much like Leonardo, and explore new technology, ideas, and interests. Otherwise, you’ll miss the opportunity to piece together your own insights.

Do you want a team of lemmings going through the motions? Or would you rather have a team that’s imaginative, engaged, and curious?

That’s the difference between driving your team into the ground with a relentless focus on productivity and allowing them breathing room to channel their own creativity.

Your first responsibility is to the people immediately surrounding you–not the product, goals, or traditional measures of productivity. You’ll achieve more in the long run when you have morale, engagement, and innovation on your side.

The Essential Question for Every Entrepreneur

Sometimes the best question you can ask yourself is, "Am I building something I would want?"

As an entrepreneur, this should precede every other question. If the answer is no, there's a fundamental disconnect. You're going to have a difficult time sustaining the necessary effort over the long run. Momentum comes from engagement.

The real secret to product development is creating something that you would want to use.

I evaluate every new product, opportunity, and startup that I consider pursuing with this filter. Success demands years of hard work. If I'm not engaged or I don't find purpose in the work, it's a nonstarter. Otherwise, I know I'll be at a disadvantage facing off against someone solving for their own point of need.

I use the same filter when considering partnerships or investments. I look for founders and teams who are building things they've demonstrated a deep interest in for years.

Consider those who have sustained success over decades–Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, J.K. Rowling, Oprah Winfrey, Bob Dylan, Walt Disney, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin. Each person created things they wanted in the world around them. They pursued fields of work they found engaging and compelled to contribute to. That's what kept them going.

And that's the difference between people who burn out or get lucky once and people who sustain success–regardless of industry.

But despite this simple truth, many entrepreneurs insist on building things or addressing problems that they have no real interest in themselves. Most often this is due to inexperience or a lack of integrity.

Inexperience reveals itself in early entrepreneurs who believe that their first decent idea is their only shot at making it. Instead of practicing patience, they force the issue.

But the real currency of successful startups is in execution. You can have the best idea in the world, but if it doesn't resonate with you as an individual, it's going to be difficult to get through the necessary struggles. Creating something from nothing is hard work.

The notion that ideas are a multiplier of execution is empowering. It frees you to be more selective about the startups and projects you get involved with. Instead of looking for a single brilliant idea, look for a strong idea that resonates with you and that you are uniquely suited to bring to life.

There’s no shortage of ideas out there. You might as well take on something you're aligned with and invested in so you feel like you're working towards something worthwhile.

Entrepreneurs with integrity don't involve themselves in projects that aren't aligned with their values and interests. They don't allow themselves to be distracted–even by the allure of easy money. And they don't allow envy to dictate their direction in life.

If you're building something you wouldn't actually want and that you're not proud of, you're sacrificing integrity. And integrity is far harder to come by than money, recognition, or an inflated sense of self-importance. Never mind the ensuing search for lost time.

“Your goal in life is to find out the people who need you the most, to find out the business that needs you the most, to find the project and the art that needs you the most. There is something out there just for you. What you don’t want to do is be building checklists and decision frameworks built on what other people are doing. You’re never going to be that. You’ll never be good at being somebody else.”

— Naval Ravikant

The world needs more people creating real value–building things that resonate with them and pursuing work that reflects their deepest interests and principles. That's what it takes to build something great and sustain the effort that it takes to overcome inevitable obstacles.

For most hard-working, talented people it’s just a matter of time. Years of consistently showing up, learning, and dedicating time to your craft pays dividends. The power of small, calculated decisions, habits, and behaviors grows exponentially over time.

But first, you must find alignment.

Are you building something because you think someone else might want it?

Or are you creating something that you would actually want to use? This reflects a deeper interest and resilience. It's an immediate advantage that puts you in a far better position to succeed. This is where you want to be.