2. Teaching and Measuring Product Sense

Product Sense is a vital skill for anyone working in product management, and as a leader, it's important to not only develop this skill for yourself but also help your team acquire it. In this document, we will explore how to teach Product Sense, focusing on structured techniques and practical exercises, as well as how to effectively measure this capability in your team.

Teaching Product Sense

The journey of teaching Product Sense begins with breaking it down into core components. We can look at Product Sense through four main pillars: problem structuring, contextualization, creativity, and synthesis. Let’s explore how to effectively teach each of these components.

1. Problem Structuring

Frameworks and Mental Models: To teach problem structuring, it helps to use frameworks and mental models. Frameworks are tools that help structure responses, while mental models guide how we think about challenges.

• Frameworks: Encourage your team to research Product Sense case studies. There are many great examples and videos that highlight the fundamental building blocks of product creation. Introduce frameworks like Hypothesis Structuring, Opportunity Trees, Jobs to be Done, Value Proposition Canvas, and Journey Maps. These tools can help the team structure problems related to user needs, business, design, and marketing.

• Mental Models: Mental models are less rigid than frameworks but can be powerful shortcuts for thinking clearly. Examples include:

  • Double Diamond: Helps divide the response into understanding the problem and generating solutions, while emphasizing the importance of expanding and narrowing each phase.
  • Inversion: Encourages thinking in the opposite direction to gain new insights. For example, if you want to increase engagement, think about reducing churn to better understand factors that influence engagement.
  • Root Cause Analysis: Encourages always digging deeper to understand the “why” behind each problem, decision, or need, which helps build a more comprehensive Product Sense.

2. Contextualization

Contextualization is about understanding the environment around a product—the company, market, users, and competitors.

• Company Context: Teach your team to understand the company’s overall strategy by asking questions such as: Are we in a growth phase or focusing on achieving profitability? What is our differentiation strategy? Are we fast-followers or market leaders?

• Economics of the Product: Make sure your team understands the unit economics of the product. Knowing the sources of revenue and key financial metrics helps balance customer needs with business requirements.

• Competitor Analysis: Studying competitors is another important source of context. Teach your team to ask questions like: Who are our major competitors? What differentiates them? Why did our product choose a particular direction compared to competitors?

• User Understanding: It’s critical to understand the users and segments we serve. Teach your team to identify and map out interesting user segments to explore in-depth.

• Basic Company Operations: For junior team members, help them understand how the company works—from product features and metrics to the design and technology stack. Understanding these basics will help them better contextualize their decisions.

3. Teaching Creativity

Creativity in Product Sense can be nurtured through team exercises that encourage expansive thinking.

• Brainstorming and Exercises: Teach your team to use brainstorming techniques like Crazy Eights and Opportunity Trees to open the funnel of ideas. Opportunity Trees start with an expected outcome, map out big opportunities, and narrow them down to solutions.

• Forcing Constraints: To foster creativity, it can be helpful to add constraints. For example, consider a scenario where you are not allowed to target new customers. This forces your team to think about how to expand existing customer value, which can lead to creative solutions.

• Vision Without Limits: Encourage the team to forget about immediate constraints and imagine solutions if resources were unlimited. How would they make a product ten times better? This helps shift thinking away from incremental improvements to potentially transformative ideas.

4. Teaching Synthesis

Synthesis is the ability to distill complex ideas into their essence. The best way to practice synthesis is by introducing constraints that force simplification.

• Adding Time Constraints: Ask your team to explain a complex problem in one minute instead of ten. Challenge them to describe their work in simple terms that even their grandmother could understand. By limiting time, they must prioritize the most important messages.

• Documentation and Summarization: Ask your team to document their work, focusing on learnings and proposed solutions. Then, challenge them to summarize a long document into just a few pages. This exercise reinforces the ability to identify key points and communicate them clearly.

• Audience-Centric Synthesis: Emphasize that synthesis isn’t just about reducing content but also ordering it for the audience. Sometimes, a good summary at the beginning of a document is more effective than reducing the document's length. Storytelling techniques can also be a powerful tool for synthesis.

Measuring Product Sense

Evaluating Product Sense can be complex and sometimes subjective, but turning subjective evaluation into a qualitative analysis can help.

1. Define Relevant Parameters

Start by defining what parameters are relevant for evaluating Product Sense. For instance, you can base the evaluation on the four pillars: problem structuring, contextualization, creativity, and synthesis.

2. Break Down Parameters into Skills

Each parameter should be broken down into smaller, measurable skills. For example:

• Problem Structuring: Assess knowledge of frameworks and whether the team uses them effectively.
• Creativity: Evaluate the variety and originality of ideas generated in brainstorming sessions.
• Contextualization: Look at their ability to understand company strategy and user needs.
• Synthesis: Assess how well they can summarize complex ideas or structure their communication for different audiences.

3. Assign Weights and Expectations

Not all skills are equally important at every career level. Assign weights to different skills depending on the seniority of the team member. For example, understanding product strategy might be less important for an associate product manager (APM) than for a group product manager (GPM).

4. Set Evaluation Criteria

Define what a top score looks like for each skill. For instance, what does a “10” look like in terms of proficiency with frameworks for an APM? What does a “2” look like? Use examples from the team's work to align expectations and provide clarity.
Instead use numbers, use: "under", "perform" and "over".

5. Ongoing Evaluation

The final step in evaluation is to assign a score, but effective leaders don’t just show up at the end of a cycle—they conduct ongoing evaluations. Set monthly checkpoints to monitor progress. Regular, informal feedback helps avoid surprises during formal evaluations.

Conclusion

Product Sense is a multifaceted skill that product leaders need to teach and evaluate in their teams. By focusing on structured problem-solving, understanding context, fostering creativity, and honing synthesis, you can help your team grow this important ability. Measuring Product Sense requires a thoughtful approach, breaking down the skill into parameters, assigning weights, and setting expectations. With consistent practice and feedback, you can ensure your team develops a strong Product Sense to create impactful products.