In many design, product management, engineering, or even venture capital interviews and pitches, you may be evaluated on a dimension known as “product thinking,” sometimes also referred to as “product sense.” If you’re a builder hoping to make something new and useful (or someone who funds such builders), strong product thinking can help you — and the products you create — distinguish yourselves from the pack.
But how do you really define product thinking? There is so much noise around this question that finding the signal can be difficult, so I wanted to explain what it is, what it is not … and how people become good at it. Because product thinking by itself is not enough; you also need to be able to use product thinking to design and build toward stronger outcomes. And although strong product thinking often sits at the beginning of many company, analyst, and investment theses, product thinking shapes every stage of technology development beyond that too, from launching new product lines to helping an established product respond to new market trends.
Building and refining product thinking is therefore relevant to anyone who covers trends or builds great products. And in an era when technology companies emphasize product-led innovation more than, say, financial engineering, it is not only an academic or technologist exercise — it is one that directly adds to market value, too.
What product thinking is (and isn’t)
The easiest way to describe product thinking is as the ability to understand what makes a product useful — and beloved — to people. Like any skill, it can be cultivated and improved; it is not merely an instinct you either have or do not have (and even instincts, after all, are trained).
Product thinkers, naturally, enjoy talking about their favorite products, but not just what they personally enjoyed or disliked; instead, they try to grasp the larger question of why a product might succeed or fail for a wider group of people. The very best product thinkers are hungry to understand why things work. A product thinking mindset might lead someone to examine what makes TikTok so widely adopted, or what drives Figma’s growth inside an organization, or what traits popular marketplaces share.
They treat it like a riddle: Why has App X surged so quickly in popularity? Which product choices made some of my colleagues prefer productivity Product W, while others push back against it? What is Service Y doing that keeps Aunt Laura using it for years; was it feature Z or W that helped it move beyond early adopters like her? What drew cousin Elias and his friends to test this new app? Were those push notifications persuasive, or irritating? And from those lessons, how can we learn to make better products, or help others on our team do so?
Product thinking is a habit, an eye, a mindset.
If you are trying to figure out whether you already have some product thinking instincts, or are evaluating someone else on this dimension, these kinds of questions reveal the product thinking mindset:
- Critique Product X — which decisions seem most responsible for its success? Why? How would you help Product X win over Audience Y if you were leading it? Take Problem Z … What would you design to solve it?
And because there can be confusion about product thinking — after all, doesn’t some of this apply to nearly anything? — these are not product thinking mindset questions:
- What’s your favorite product? How should Product X decide how much money to charge for Service Y? How would you explain Product Z to a five-year-old?
Another common misunderstanding is the confusion around product thinking vs. design thinking vs. product vision. In general, product thinking tends to come before and direct how design thinking is applied or how a product vision develops.
Design thinking is a methodology — the process of imagining solutions that includes research, prototyping, and testing — while product thinking is the skill of understanding and being good at forecasting what people want. Design thinking tends to be an outward-in and iterative way of addressing a specific problem, while product thinking is more holistic and intuitive about the connection between people and products. Of course, researching (through various methodologies) to deeply understand a problem and testing early assumptions through prototypes are useful tools in any builder’s toolkit; at the same time, they are not practical for the thousands of product decisions, large and small, that go into making something. At some point, you depend on your instincts about what you believe will work best for your audience.
A product vision, furthermore, sets out an idealized end state for how a product will create value in the world, but it does not necessarily explain why or how. It may be a story to hold onto, or a vivid picture of a possible future that shows what success looks like, but it is not enough for creating a resilient and detailed product roadmap that can guide product design and business decisions through the stages of a product’s life cycle.
While many designers, product managers, and startup CEOs have built product thinking over time through training and practice, it is not an exclusive skill that can only be developed within the walls of a tech company. In fact, it does not require insider knowledge at all. So, how do you grow your product thinking skills? The two most important habits are observation and inquiry.
Developing observation
Observation means noticing people’s reactions when they come across products or services in everyday life. The easiest place to begin is by observing yourself. When do you feel delighted by a product? When do you feel irritated?
One example for me was my experience with the Jabra 75t Elite headset. With three young kids at home and an open office, I was having trouble blocking out noise during Zoom meetings, and people would tell me they were hearing background noise. A friend recommended the Jabra to me as “the headset you could wear with a toddler tantruming next to you, and your colleagues on the line would be none the wiser.” She was right. And I have praised it and recommended it to many others. But it is not perfect. Sadly, it grips the ears a bit too tightly, pressing hoop earrings against my neck. (I wonder: was this tested with users who wear earrings?) And the black mouthpiece is noticeable on video calls. I imagine there are others who would also want a larger over-ear design and a more subtle mic color.
Once you are used to continually noticing your own reactions, also notice the reactions of people around you. When do your friends rave about a new discovery? When do they complain? What feedback do they give about the products you suggest?
Finally, notice the world’s reactions. What do the reviews say? What opinions on the Internet are people absorbing and repeating? What sets this product apart from its competitors? Most importantly, why are people saying the things they are saying?
As you build the habit of observing your own relationship with products and then extending that to your friends and the broader world, it will generate more questions that help you develop an even deeper understanding.
Developing inquiry
Asking the “why” behind what you observe leads to the other practice needed to develop a product thinking mindset (and to be able to apply observations): inquiry.
Inquiry starts with real curiosity about people and how they act, and it can look different depending on the way you learn most effectively. The important thing is grasping the “why” behind reactions. A few ways to do that include:
- Reading books on human thought and behavior Examining cultural trends through articles, conversations, and blogs Gathering customer feedback while building products Asking others why they react the way they do
Of course, to reach a genuine understanding, you’ll need to go deeper than just accepting what people say when they describe what they like and want. That is where data — from user research and customer discovery to market data, clicks, views, and more — becomes useful.
Data’s role is to help you uncover the ground truth of what is happening with products, user behavior, and the market. Let’s look at an example of how Facebook created Reactions to bring all of these ideas together. Before that, the only options on a post were to like it, comment on it, or share it. Many people found those choices unsatisfying. “Please give us a ‘dislike’ button!” was among the top feature requests for years. And the reasons were understandable: not everything on Facebook was “like”-able. People often posted sad updates, devastating news, or just talked about a terrible day they were having.
But after years working on social products, the team and I pushed back against simply shipping a “dislike” button. The issue was that “dislike” was too unclear. If you post a photo of my local sports team with the caption “Boo!” and I dislike it, how should you read my action? Do I dislike the sports team? Dislike your opinion? Or maybe you assume I dislike you? Our product instincts told us a “dislike” button could easily create more negativity and confusion on the platform.
At the same time, our aim was for people to feel they had a more expressive set of ways to respond to the stories they saw. We chose to go beyond “like” and offer a broader set of emotions, from love to anger to sadness. Our product instincts pointed to two major choices: using animated faces to communicate the feeling, which we thought would seem more emotional, and launching with seven initial emotions. That is how Facebook Reactions came to be. We built and released the feature in a few markets first to confirm that people found it delightful and used it often. The data from those early tests helped us narrow the final set of reactions to the five most distinct and popular ones, which were then launched broadly.
Still, you do not need to spend years building a particular type of product to sharpen these instincts. If you want a quick rule of thumb for deliberately improving your product thinking, try this:
- Each week, try at least one new product, feature, or service. Each week, have at least one conversation or reflection about how a specific product decision affects its intended audience.
In time, you’ll begin to notice more non-obvious explanations for why some products tend to catch on and others do not. If you build products yourself, you’ll see a richer range of inspiration for how you might reach a desired outcome based on what you have learned. The simplest test is prediction: are you becoming better at spotting which products or features will succeed? Are you improving at creating them?
Being good at product thinking is not something you are born with; it develops through practice. Designers tend to be fairly strong in this area because of the hours they spend each week in design critique or hearing customer feedback. Everyone has an opinion about design, for better or worse, which means designers are constantly exposed to product reactions.
Researchers, data analysts, and venture capitalists usually build product thinking by pattern-matching across large sets of data. If you examine enough examples of successful social media companies, for instance, you begin to draw conclusions about the value of engagement notifications or about connecting new users with strong content during onboarding.
Product managers, engineers, and marketers also develop product thinking in the trenches of repeated shipping and iteration. Guided by previous wins and failures, they are more likely to come up with convincing pitches or original ideas. A classic example is Steve Jobs betting that the world wanted an iPhone — a full-screen phone without a physical keyboard.
In startups, confident product thinking is the tinder for zero-to-one product development.
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Of course, practiced product thinking alone does not ensure that we will build successful products — our instincts often miss because we reach the wrong conclusions when separating inputs from outcomes. It can be impossible to know for certain which product decisions mattered most in making something useful and loved.
The best we can do is form hypotheses. But with a mindset of observation and inquiry, builders do not have to depend only on guesses. They can collect feedback — both qualitative and quantitative — to help them understand how customers feel. It is the repeated cycle of learning, feedback, and iteration that both improves the product and sharpens the builder’s sense of what makes a better product.
If you build or work with builders, it is worth developing your product thinking.