The why and how of Product Intuition!

Product intuition is nothing but ability to reach a meaningful conclusion without the need for a deep cognitive analysis. This comes in handy when you are in the product discovery phase or looking to create an MVP for your product without hard data to draw insights or the liberty of time. Product Managers with strong product intuition can easily fill gaps in the data and research to quickly understand the context and the needs of the end customers and users.

Another reason for developing a product intuition is to allow product managers to retain their roles as the gatekeepers for experience and design decisions. Without a strong intuition you run the risk of creating sub-par experiences.

Here are a few ways to develop your product intuition:

Never stop learning!

As a product manager, you tend to build diverse products across domains. So, you need to be naturally curious to learn the needs and problems of the market. To ensure a continual learning you need to immerse yourself in the context of the users and track business trends to help you identify key consumption patterns across your target audience.

Observe, adapt, overcome.

Be the user you want to serve! Observe each app you personally use and try to find experiences that you find intuitive, the visual designs that you like and icons that you find easy to use. When you try to problem solve experiences in your product, avoid the flows that caused you pain and get inspired by the ones that made your life easy. Surround yourself with people who talk product, listen to their conversations, and learn from their experiences. Read through articles that give insights into prioritization, decision making, and problem solving to understand what works and what does not.

Write down your ideas.

It is of great merit to write down your ideas and problems. It forces you get clarity on what you want to communicate. Writing often helps you to identify gaps in your ideas, pushes you to research to fill those gaps, and find relevant insights to share with your teams.

Take chances and make things happen!

All your learning is rendered useless if you do not execute on them. No matter how much you learn, observe, or write, the best learnings come from getting things done on your own. You might make a few incorrect decisions, or you might create a lot of value, either way, you will have a great learning experience!