Look around and you’ll find as many takes on product sense as there are Product Managers. The term is being used to describe everything from the human factor AI can’t replace to an ineffable something, like “talent”, “intuition” or “gut feeling”. Most agree it’s what sets apart decent PMs from the excellent ones. We’ve been known to argue it’s a blind spot for data. But what is product sense really? Is it a skill you can build? And, maybe most importantly, how can you tell if you have it?
Over the past five years, as vibe coding has democratised prototyping, as the industry shifts towards automation and role compression, as product teams shrink and the profession’s middle vanishes, Google searches for product sense are up 450%. The majority of that happened just in the last year, when search volumes quadrupled.
Google Trends graph showing search volume for the keyword “product sense” over the past five years (mid-2021 - mid-2026)
On the job market, workers are seeing this first-hand: product sense interviews, think pieces, courses, and skill-building guides meant to stave off replacement by AI. Many of these are based on the assumption that product sense, being an amalgamation of deeply human qualities and thus hard to quantify, is one of the last things AI can’t do.
Here is how we, at Mind the Product, see product sense.
Is it just vibes?
Product sense doesn't have a single agreed-upon definition, with some voices discrediting it as a buzzword and many others treating it as a learnable skill. The most rigorous framing, however, comes from practitioners and researchers converging on the same idea.
In a nutshell, product sense is the ability to consistently ship products and features today that solve users’ problems tomorrow. It involves identifying a consistent set of users, understanding their biggest needs, and having a logical rationale for the problems you prioritise. It sits at the intersection of expertise, emotional intelligence, systems thinking, and creative problem solving.
A PM with an abundance of the sense will be able to empathise with users’ pain points while understanding the interdependencies involved in shipping a solution. They’ll use their accumulated experience to intuit the problem space and where to start solving.
There are a lot of interpretations branching off of this.
First off, there’s Mind the Product’s understanding of product sense as a two-part skill: knowledge and application or abstract and practical. Intuitive know-how explains the first part, but not how it translates into practice. The likely missing puzzle piece is a framework for sustained, goal-directed work, aka the muscle memory powering the knowledge: user interviews, prototyping, data deep-dives.
A cognitive science approach attributes product sense to tacit knowledge, the type of expertise that’s hard to fully articulate. Tacit knowledge encompasses informal, personal skills that we usually call “know-how”: situational awareness, nuanced interpretative skills, intuitions, hunches, and insights derived from experience. Basically, you know more than you can probably articulate, and that knowledge is of a “squishy” kind that’s difficult to measure, explain or reproduce through explicit rules.
Meanwhile, Productside’s definition breaks things down into two distinct capabilities: product sense, or a clear grasp on problems and outcomes, and product taste, or user empathy that allows you insight into what a quality experience means for them.
What product sense looks like in practice is someone who’s talked to enough users to understand what they need before it’s obvious. They know enough about their organisation to aptly translate product-speak into business and finance. They’re able to empathically connect with stakeholders and users alike. And they rely on their product sense to know which corners they can creatively cut from time to time.
CPO Shannon Vettes explains it like this: “I know the JTBD and the pain points so well that I know what is a pain killer and what is a vitamin before I even go do the research in most cases.” She caveats this isn’t an excuse to skip the validation process. “Good PMs use the sense like a compass to direct them toward a space to validate.”
Why is product sense trending now?
There are a couple of reasons and both have to do with AI (sorry!).
Product sense isn’t anything new; it’s been around for as long as the industry itself, under different names: expertise, know-how, gut feeling, talent. But pressure to automate knowledge processes have brought it to the forefront as the skill PMs must perfect in order to become irreplaceable.
AI layoffs instilled a special kind of anxiety into the product community, which shows up as the need to gatekeep and consolidate the skills that can’t be automated. By its very definition—it’s intuitive, hard to measure, document, and encode into text instructions—product sense is uniquely human, and that’s the whole point.
On the other hand, pressure to use AI in products requires heightened product sense. Will the product or feature be valuable to existing users? Will it attract new ones? Is there a market fit here at all? These questions are already hard to answer, but they get even more difficult when a new, not-fully-understood technology is involved.
A 2025 paper from the MIT NANDA initiative found that 95% of generative AI pilots fail to produce meaningful ROI. Meanwhile, the Pragmatic Institute, which specialises in training for Product Managers, reports that 64% of teams have integrated AI into their products. This discrepancy between enthusiastic adoption and user impact is, in our view, a product sense gap.
How to know if you have it
There's no standardised test, but the interview process at major tech companies has become the main assessment tool. Product sense interviews assess your ability to identify user needs, articulate problems, and craft compelling solutions while demonstrating empathy, creativity, and structured thinking.
Often, this boils down to demonstrating domain specificity, an understanding of user data, along with a few of the other skills we mentioned in part one (tacit knowledge, applied expertise, emotional intelligence, user empathy, strategic know-how). But based on this, you might make some false assumptions about who should have good product sense—and who shouldn’t.
For example, you might think that Researchers are bound to be at the top. After all, they spend so much time talking to users that they must be able to anticipate pain points from a mile away. In their sleep. While a Researcher with acute sense is an invaluable asset to a product team, they’re often pretty rare. That’s because, while they have the insight, they don’t get to apply it.
Most Researchers don’t own the execution part of the process. They acquire and deeply understand the data, but once it’s been handed over, their part is done. If we want Researchers with well-developed product sense, more teams should invite them to participate in scoping a workshop or helping to design the product.
Another example: best practices don’t always equal product sense. The former can be learned from books and articles, but the latter is only developed with time and experience.
Product Leader Jens-Fabian Goetzmann, who has run countless product sense interviews, explains how he can tell which candidates have it and which ones don’t. For example, if someone is struggling to come up with solutions or can only produce complex and costly ideas that are unlikely to make an impact; or if they don’t take ownership of the test and move to the next steps by themselves—that points to low product sense.
This can be because they don’t really understand their user and can’t relate to their pain points. It’s also an indication that maybe the candidate doesn’t have enough experience to own all the steps yet and needs more mentoring or hands-on engagement.
Another tell is being unsure or unrealistic when it comes to prioritisation; or worse, if the candidate skips that step altogether. Product intuition is not an excuse to skip important steps, nor does it show up that way.
Goetzmann also looks out for how candidates understand validation and post-launch evaluation. For example, suggesting expensive and time-consuming methods (like building out and A/B testing before making a decision) or abstract success metrics points to an underdeveloped product sense and usually disqualifies the candidate.
Crucially, product sense does not equal instinct. From a research perspective, large-scale experimentation at Microsoft shows just how often instincts are wrong: roughly a third of ideas improve metrics, a third are neutral, and a third make things worse. Product sense is like a good nose for wine: it can guide you on what to try next, but it’s not infallible.
If you’re self-assessing, lean towards measurable outcomes and real-world interactions. Here’s a useful self-diagnostic framing: user-centric hypotheses + disciplined learning loops = product sense.
How to start building product sense
The science is pretty clear about how this and it starts with breaking th down into its basic ingredients.
Intuition, which underlies product sense, relies on powers of pattern-matching, as the mind combs experience stored in long-term memory for similar situations. Strengthening it requires making use of feedback, comparing the real-life outcomes of situations with the intuitive decisions you made.
User empathy goes hand in hand with emotional intelligence; enhancing the latter will make interviews and research a lot easier and more intuitive. We have an entire podcast episode on this, but if you’d like the main takeaways, here’s what to look out for:
- Notice what gets you defensive; emotional reactivity is a sign you need to focus on that area with introspection and empathy. Avoid lashing out by instead getting curious about what this emotion is trying to tell you.
- People who lack emotional intelligence often don't know it. So the first step is recognising the gap, then moving toward conscious practice.
- Apply the same curiosity you have for users to peers and stakeholders; this reduces friction all-round and is a sign of solid product sense.
- Abstract values like "curiosity" become measurable when you define what they look like in practice, and what their opposites look like. Focus on observing and reflecting on those behaviours rather than trying to quantify something inherently internal.
Of course, with learning what makes for a seamless user experience, nothing beats using the product yourself and talking to your intended customers.
When it comes to intuitive knowledge, there are a couple of scientific frameworks that come in handy. According to psychologist K. Anders Ericsson’s Deliberate Practice model, it takes highly structured, individualised training to achieve expert performance in any field. Having innate talent or simply logging years of “naive” (unstructured) experience won’t cut it; it’s only deliberate practice that counts.
For Product Managers, this means you’ll need more than exposure (using lots of products, sitting in many meetings). What builds product sense is structured practice with feedback loops—observing users, forming a hypothesis about what they need, building something, then closing the loop on whether you were right and why. At each stage of the product development lifecycle there is an opportunity to increase product sense, and acquiring it takes time and is never complete.
The best you can do is consciously work towards your goal with a narrow focus on improving the necessary skills and overcoming your specific weaknesses. This is definitely a good way to achieve domain specificity, but defeat the point of tacit knowledge. Is it still unconscious expertise if you’re very deliberate about acquiring it?
There’s also the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition, which maps out the different stages of learning, from beginner to expert. As you progress, you go from observing strict, context-free rules to spotting patterns, creating your own frameworks, holistic systems thinking, and, finally, an intuitive understanding of what “works”, based on all the previous steps, stacked together.
For PMs, this means that product sense is to be expected at expert level and arises from the sum of your experiences up to that point. Every product tear-down, post-mortem, tense boardroom discussion, and baffling user datapoint adds to the pattern library. Some call it know-how or talent or intuition. These days, it’s known as product sense, and it’s at a premium.
