Some people seem to have an instinct for products.

They recognise what customers will value. They notice when an experience feels awkward. They can look at an early idea and sense whether it deserves more attention—or whether it solves a problem that nobody considers important.

We often describe this ability as product sense. Because it can look effortless from the outside, we are tempted to treat it as a natural gift: something a fortunate few possess from birth.

That explanation is appealing. It is also unhelpful.

Product sense is not magic. It is a form of judgement developed through sustained attention. It grows when we observe people closely, test our assumptions and remain curious about the distance between what people say and what they actually do.

It is earned one encounter at a time.

The Customer Rarely Experiences the Product You Designed

A business may describe its product in terms of features, specifications and intended benefits. The customer meets something different.

The customer meets a decision.

Is this worth my money? Can I understand it? Will it work in my circumstances? What might go wrong? Do I trust the people behind it? Will using it make my day easier—or introduce another burden?

This is why technically impressive products can fail to connect with the people they were created to serve. The business concentrates on what it has made. The customer evaluates what the product means in the context of an already complicated life.

Product sense begins with recognising this difference.

A person with strong product sense can move between the view from inside the business and the view from outside it. They understand the commercial and technical realities of making something, but they do not confuse those realities with the customer’s experience.

They keep asking a simple question:

What is this like for the person on the other side?

Attention Is More Valuable Than Certainty

Poor product decisions often begin with certainty.

We know what customers want.

We know why they are not buying.

We know which feature will change their minds.

Once a team becomes certain, evidence is easily bent to support its existing view. A positive comment becomes proof. A complaint is dismissed as an isolated case. Silence is interpreted as satisfaction.

Product sense requires a different posture: confidence in the process, but modesty about the conclusion.

It means paying attention to small points of friction. Where do customers hesitate? Which questions appear repeatedly? What do people need explained before they feel comfortable? What workaround have they invented because the product does not quite fit their lives?

These details can look insignificant when considered separately. Together, they reveal how a product is truly being received.

The person with the loudest opinion may not have the strongest product sense. It may belong to the person who has listened longest and noticed most.

Customers Describe Symptoms, Not Always Solutions

Listening to customers does not mean following every suggestion literally.

A customer may request a new feature when the deeper problem is that an existing one is difficult to find. They may ask for a lower price when what they really lack is confidence in the value. They may say they want more choice while repeatedly selecting the simplest option.

The task is not merely to record what people ask for. It is to understand what sits underneath the request.

That requires interpretation.

What was the customer trying to accomplish? What interrupted them? What trade-off were they unwilling to make? What emotion—uncertainty, frustration, embarrassment or distrust—shaped the experience?

Good product judgement lives between passive obedience and arrogant dismissal. It respects what customers report while investigating what their behaviour may reveal.

People are experts in their own difficulties. They are not responsible for designing the business response.

Proximity Sharpens Judgement

The further decision-makers move from customers, the easier it becomes to replace real people with categories.

Users become segments. Complaints become percentages. Lost sales become entries in a report.

Data matters, but distance changes what we notice.

A dashboard can show that customers abandoned a process. It cannot always show the expression on someone’s face when the instructions stopped making sense. A survey can identify dissatisfaction. It may not reveal the small humiliation of needing help with something that was advertised as simple.

Direct contact restores texture.

This does not mean every senior leader must answer every customer query. It means the organisation should not allow status to become insulation. People who shape the product need regular, unfiltered exposure to those who use it, reject it, struggle with it and leave it behind.

Watch someone try the product without assistance. Sit with the customer-service team. Read support messages in the customer’s own words. Visit the places where purchasing decisions are made. Speak with people who chose a competitor—and resist the urge to defend your work.

Closeness does not guarantee wisdom. But distance makes self-deception much easier.

Taste Needs Evidence

Product sense is sometimes confused with taste.

Taste matters. It helps us recognise clarity, coherence and quality. It allows a business to make choices rather than simply adding everything customers request.

But taste without evidence can become vanity.

A founder may love a refined interface that customers find confusing. A team may remove a familiar feature in pursuit of elegance. A business may invest in premium packaging while neglecting the unreliable service inside it.

Strong product sense combines conviction with correction.

You need enough conviction to create something distinctive. You also need enough humility to notice when your preferences are not serving the customer.

The goal is not to surrender judgement to the market. It is to train judgement through contact with reality.

Repetition Turns Observations Into Intuition

Experienced people sometimes reach good conclusions quickly. This can make intuition appear mysterious.

Usually, it is compressed experience.

They have seen customers hesitate in similar circumstances. They recognise the warning signs of a product that requires too much explanation. They know that enthusiastic feedback from a small group does not necessarily translate into purchasing behaviour. They have watched apparently minor inconveniences become decisive reasons to leave.

Over time, separate observations become patterns.

This is why product sense cannot be acquired only through books, frameworks or presentations. Those tools can improve how we think, but they cannot replace repeated exposure to actual decisions and their consequences.

To develop product sense, you need to make judgements while the answer is still uncertain. Then you need to return later and compare your expectations with what happened.

What did you predict?

What did customers do?

Where were you wrong?

What did you overlook?

Without this feedback, experience can simply reinforce bad habits. With it, experience becomes learning.

Build an Organisation That Notices

Product sense should not belong to one gifted founder or product leader. A business becomes more intelligent when observation is distributed.

The person answering the telephone may notice a recurring confusion before the strategy team does. A salesperson may hear a hesitation that never appears in the customer database. A delivery driver may understand how people actually handle the product once it reaches their homes. A junior employee may question an assumption that everyone else has stopped seeing.

The challenge is not only to gather these observations. It is to give them somewhere to go.

Teams need simple ways to record patterns, share customer language and connect small signals across different parts of the organisation. They also need a culture in which uncomfortable evidence can travel upwards without being softened.

When employees learn that inconvenient information will be ignored—or punished—they stop offering it. The business loses contact with reality long before the figures reveal what has happened.

A company with strong product sense is not one in which everybody agrees. It is one in which people are encouraged to notice carefully, speak honestly and revise their views.

The Discipline Behind the Instinct

Product sense may eventually feel instinctive, but it is built through discipline.

Stay close to the people you serve.

Observe behaviour as well as listening to explanations.

Treat friction as information.

Test important assumptions.

Compare predictions with outcomes.

Let evidence challenge personal taste.

Make room for observations from every level of the business.

None of this is glamorous. Much of it is slow.

Yet this is how better judgement develops. Not through a sudden flash of inspiration, but through repeated encounters with reality.

The business leader with product sense is not the person who always knows what customers will want. It is the person who has learned how to pay attention before deciding—and how to keep learning after the decision has been made.

Genius, in this case, is not seeing what nobody else could see.

It is noticing what was there all along.

This is Article Six in the Cultural Intelligence Studio series The Practice of Business Genius, created to accompany the video collection Where Business Genius Hides and the podcast collection How Exceptional Businesses Think.