Product sense is one of the skill that we has been hearing until today for the Project Manager when he/she is wanting to improve the management skill better and better. On this note, I will summarize with my understanding after reading the documentation from the internet, the full link to the document will be including from the reference section.
What is the product sense?
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
So, basically, it is the skill for getting the Project Manager to bring up with more ideas, opinions to improve the product for the customer usage satisfaction. And, actually, there is 1 example that is very realistic from the document that I read: "The original iPhone was built on the insight that people value aesthetics, and not just functionality, in their products. It was designed around the idea that consumers needed a smartphone that felt personal."
For the example above, it's actually very good to demonstrating the term Product Sense and the purpose of it.
How to improve product sense?
Observe people interacting with products:
When creating a product for the user, what we are trying to achieve is how to solve the user's problem in their daily life, how to make thing becomes more convenient for them in their works, studies, etc. So, basically, we need to understand what is the feeling of our customer to our product, how they are using our product in their works, etc. From that, we can develop our sense for the product much better since we are understanding user's feelings, user experience on the product.
There are several type of questions we can ask our user from the reference documentation:
- What do you think the purpose of this product is? Who do you think it's for?
- What actions do you want to take?
- What are you thinking right now? How does that make you feel?
Deconstruct everyday products
Beside everyone observation, actually we can develop our product sense by ourselves. Like, spending some time to use the product and related ones will help us to improve our UI/UX knowledges, so we can based on that knowledges to improve our product better and better.
Learn from greate product thinkers
One of the way to improve your product sense is, spending time with people whose already has it. Likely, for those people, they already has an experience on their product observation, have a lot of great ideas to develop. We can actually learn from their experience to gain for ourselves as well.
Be curious abouth changes in technology and your domain
This one can be the most difficult way from my point of view. But, it's still very necessary since everything we have from our product is using the technologies to build it up. So, basically, we need to learn the basic domain for the trend technologies. From that, we can use our knowledge to apply and improve our product much better for user experience.
