Product sense is noticing when something feels easy or hard to use, and being able to explain why. It is a habit you can practise. Working in product management, I now see almost everything through a product lens, and I use three questions:
- Is the goal clear? You can tell what it’s for and what to do first.
- Is it intuitive to use? You can use it without help or instructions.
- Are the words that guide you clear? Labels, buttons and messages say what will happen.
When things work as intended, you don’t notice them. A highway exit sign passes all three questions in a few words you can read at speed.
What a rental car taught me
My own car is a Subaru BRZ. When it first came out, I watched the development videos, and the message was that it was built for driver engagement and fun. You can see that goal in how the car is built. The climate controls are all physical dials and buttons, so you can change the fan or temperature without taking your eyes off the road. It passes the second question easily.
I recently rented a car with a complex infotainment system. Here is how it did on the three questions:
- Goal: clear. It was clear the screen was meant to run everything in the car.
- Intuitive: no. It took several steps to get CarPlay working, and changing the fan speed took two or three taps at the bottom of the screen, where a dial takes one turn.
- Guiding words: no. Nothing on the home screen said where the fan controls were, so I had to hunt for them.
I can see why carmakers went this way: screens are cheaper to build and easier to update than buttons. But the driver pays for it, hunting for the fan controls while driving. No wonder so many people give up on the built-in system and use their phone. If I designed it, I would either bring back a physical control for the fan or make it obvious on the screen how the fan controls work.
How I use the three questions at work
Before product management, I spent years implementing software for customers. One of them wanted to change their workflow for due-diligence report requests. They kept pushing for more mandatory fields and two or three extra approval steps, with more reviewers and approvers. Some of the new fields asked for details they already had on file.
I asked them to picture filling in every one of those fields themselves, and then to think about the person still waiting for the report.
The customer agreed. I designed and configured the workflow with them. We trimmed it to a short list of steps, with fewer fields that still captured what they needed, and email notifications so everyone knew where a request stood. The checks themselves didn’t change, only the steps around them. People filled in the form faster, and it saved the time we used to spend on email chains and tracking in Excel. Nobody had to chase for updates. When we tested it with the customer in a smaller pilot, adoption picked up, and we were able to move that whole division onto the new system.
When I want to know if something is intuitive, I watch someone new try it without help and note where they stop. The places they stop are usually where one of the three questions fails.
I used the same questions when I wrote a full PRD for a page I built for myself.
Sometimes the new user is me. I logged into my banking app and was asked to reset my password. The reset failed, and the message didn’t say what went wrong, so it failed the third question. I called the bank and reached an AI voice assistant that kept sending me back to the same reset page, until I finally got a person on the line. Nobody had thought through the whole journey, from the failed reset to the phone call.
Plain questions work outside products too. I use the same habit for big personal choices in 6 risk questions I use for big life decisions.
How can you grow your own product sense?
Start with the products you use every day, from the coffee machine to the websites and apps you open each morning. Is it easy to use? Is it clear what you are being asked to do?
Next time something you already use gets changed or updated, ask yourself: did they make it easier or harder to do the same thing? If your coffee machine gets a new screen tomorrow, notice whether your morning coffee got easier or harder to make.
Try it on one product today: which question does it fail, and what one change would fix it?
I’m still practising this every day.