The Product Sense Myth: Why Your Best PMs Aren't Born, They're Built

We’ve all heard it. Someone in a hiring debrief leans back and says, “They just have great product sense.”

It sounds meaningful. Decisive, even. But what does it actually mean?

Usually, it’s a way of saying “I can’t quite explain why I like this person, but I do.” And that’s a problem. Because when we treat product sense as some kind of innate gift, we stop asking whether it can be taught. Spoiler: it can.

Why “Product Sense” Is a Confusing Term

Here’s the thing. Product sense does describe something real. When a seasoned PM looks at a prototype and immediately spots what’s wrong, that’s not luck. Their brain is doing something useful, pulling together years of experience into a quick judgement.

Christina Wodtke explains this well. She draws on Davenport and Prusak’s concept that intuition is “compressed experience”, and points out that when experienced PMs react quickly, “they’re not being mystical. Their brain is processing hundreds of micro-signals: user flow friction, business model misalignment, technical complexity, competitive dynamics. Years of experience get compressed into a split-second gut reaction.”

That’s genuinely valuable. But by calling it “sense”, we make it sound like something you’re born with. And that’s where we go wrong.

Jules Walter, who’s spent over a decade building products at YouTube, Slack, and Google, is direct about this: “Contrary to what a lot of PMs believe, product sense is not something you need to be born with. It’s a learned skill, just like any other PM skill.”

So why do we keep treating it like magic?

What Baseball Can Teach Us About Product Hiring

Bear with me here, because this analogy is worth it.

Before Moneyball came along, baseball scouts picked players based on gut feel. They watched how someone moved, how they looked, whether they had that indefinable “it factor”. They were experienced. They were confident. And they were often wrong.

Yahia Hassan makes this connection in his critique of how we think about product sense. He asks: “Could a baseball team win by constructing a roster based solely on their scouts’ ‘sharp eye for talent’? What would that look like? Selecting players based on their physical appearance? Or perceived skill?” His point is that product management is making the same mistake baseball made before the data revolution.

Now, I’m not saying intuition is useless. Far from it. But when we hire PMs based on whether they “seem” to have good product sense, we’re doing something similar to those old baseball scouts. We’re mistaking confidence for competence and experience for ability.

Hassan’s takeaway is pointed: “The key takeaway here is, like a baseball GM, product managers need to use their product sense as a complement to being data-informed. This is why I think the ability to understand what metrics are important and measure them is what separates great PMs from the pack. More so than product sense.”

So What Actually Is Product Sense?

If we’re going to develop something, we need to define it properly. And vague definitions don’t help anyone.

Jules Walter offers the clearest one I’ve come across:

Product sense is the skill of consistently being able to craft products (or make changes to existing products) that have the intended impact on their users.

Notice what’s useful here. It’s measurable. You can actually track whether your product bets are paying off more often than they used to. If you started out being right two times in ten and now you’re right eight times in ten, your product sense has improved. Simple as that.

Walter breaks it down into two parts:

(1) empathy to discover meaningful user needs and

(2) creativity to come up with solutions that effectively address those needs.

Neither of those is mystical. Both can be worked on.

Austin Yang takes a slightly different angle. He finds the usual definition, “the ability to understand what makes a product great”, to be “a bit self-repeating and ambiguous.” Instead, he argues that “product sense should be equated to a person’s ability to do certain things when limited information is given. The ability to outline all potential paths and obstacles will take a product closer to its destination, even in extreme ambiguity.”

I like this framing because it’s practical. It’s not about having the right answer. It’s about navigating uncertainty well. And that’s something you can get better at.

As Yang puts it: “Product sense is a skill you refine through practice, not a talent you are born with.”

How Meta Thinks About It

Say what you will about Meta, but they’ve thought hard about what makes a good PM.

Mihika Kapoor who led products at Meta before joining Figma, explains their approach: “Meta basically distilled the product role into two core capabilities: product sense and execution.”

What’s interesting is how she defines product sense in practice. It’s not some innate gift. It’s “just like having good intuition. And so there’s kind of this question about like, okay, how do you build up intuition? And I think that it’s just by like, having this insatiable curiosity and talking to users at every chance you get.”

That’s the key insight. Intuition isn’t magic. It’s pattern recognition built through exposure. And exposure is something you can deliberately seek out.

Stewart Butterfield, the co-founder of Slack, uses a cooking analogy that I find helpful. He compares developing product taste to becoming a chef. No one’s born knowing how to balance flavours or time multiple dishes. You learn by doing it over and over again.

He also makes a sharp observation: “Most people don’t have good taste and don’t invest” in developing it. Which means if you do invest, you’ve got an edge.

How to Actually Get Better at This

Alright, so product sense is learnable. How do you learn it?

Wodtke argues that most people go about it wrong. They read articles and books about product thinking, which she compares to trying to learn tennis by studying physics. You need reps.

Here’s what actually works:

Use products deliberately. Every app on your phone is a case study. Someone made decisions about every button, every flow, every piece of copy. Start asking why. What problem is this solving? Why did they make this trade-off instead of another one?
Spend time with users. Not reading summaries. Not watching highlight reels. Actually sitting with people, watching them use your product, listening to how they describe their problems. Kapoor’s advice about “talking to users at every chance you get” is spot on.
Pay attention to trends. Walter recommends tracking both big shifts, like new platforms or regulations, and smaller patterns in your specific area. The PMs who seem to predict the future usually aren’t psychic. They’ve just been paying attention longer.
Reflect on your bets. When you make a product decision, write down what you expect to happen. Then check back later. This turns vague intuition into something testable.

Data vs. Intuition Is a False Choice

One of the most common misunderstandings is that you have to pick a side. Either you’re a “data-driven” PM or you trust your gut. But that’s a false choice.

Marcy Farrell, writing for Harvard Business Publishing puts it well:

“Intuition is often seen as the opposite of reason, and when cast in this binary way, intuition is often defined as having no place in the age of science and data.” But that framing misses the point. ”… many decisions are too complex to rely on metrics or gut feelings alone. The best leaders and decision makers use both data and intuition to their advantage.”

Laura Huang’s research at Harvard Business School shows that gut feelings work best “in highly uncertain circumstances where further data gathering won’t sway the decision maker one way or the other.”

But there’s a catch. The same piece warns that “at its best, intuition is a powerful form of pattern recognition, something human brains are wired to do. But when not managed well, pattern recognition and trusting one’s gut may lead to bias and incomplete or overly simplistic thinking.”

The best PMs use data to sharpen their intuition, and intuition to know what data to look for.

What This Means for Hiring

If product sense is learnable, we need to rethink how we hire.

Right now, most companies treat product sense interviews as a test of natural ability. Give someone an ambiguous prompt and see if they “get it.”

But as Yang points out, junior PMs often haven’t had enough experience to develop meaningful intuition yet. Evaluating them on product sense isn’t identifying talent. It’s identifying people who’ve been lucky enough to get relevant experience somewhere else.

This creates a cycle that rewards the usual backgrounds and filters out everyone else. Then we congratulate ourselves on finding “natural talent”, when really we’ve just found people who started with more advantages.

A better approach? Hire for curiosity and learning ability. Invest in the experiences that build product judgement over time. Stop treating product sense as something people either have or don’t.

The Bottom Line

Scott Belsky, Adobe’s Chief Product Officer, captures what good product thinking actually looks like:

“Empathy > passion when building a new product. Empathy for those suffering from a problem outperforms passion for a potential solution.”

When products fail despite hard work, he says, “usually, it’s due to a lack of empathy for the customer.” The answer is to go “shoulder to shoulder with them to identify this problem first before crafting your vision. You must talk to customers, watch them go about their day, and ask why they’re struggling.”

That’s not magic. That’s craft. And craft can be learned.

Product sense isn’t a gift some people are born with. It’s the result of caring about users, spending time with them, thinking hard about problems, and building feedback loops that make your judgement sharper over time.

Anyone can do that. The question is whether we’re willing to put in the work, and whether our industry is ready to stop pretending otherwise.