Product Intuition Newsletter

• Summer 2018

The Product Intuition Newsletter (PIN) was created as a way for me (Aram) to personally hone my product intuition skills. The value hypothesis was that others out there wanted a digestible yet occasional way to sharpen their product intuition.

LinkedIn has a mentoring service that connected Aram with many other product managers. Through these, I was able to interview eight product managers about their product intuition skills. I found that many did not see product intuition as a skill that they were keen on developing; they were more focused on other skills such as team building and user research. Two PMs did think product intuition was an important skill, however, meaning this could be a niche product. Most said it was a nice idea, but this should be disregarded since people don't know what they want and will always say something is a good idea to make you feel nice.

I spun up a simple early access landing page to see if people desired a way to sharpen their product intuition. I could have surveyed them, but actually entering their email is a much stronger indicator. But sometimes people just sign up because they're curious, so I emailed all the people who signed up asking them to rate this product intuition development problem on a scale from 1-5. The median response was a 2, so I saw that as a sign that this may not provide much value and would likely lead to many people unsubscribing after a week or two.

I saved hours of producing product intuition content for a crowd that would likely lose interest quickly and did not have a big enough problem.

I think the strategy of emailing landing page signups asking them to rate the problem is an effective method to determine if people are just curious or actually struggling with a problem. It's also important to realize that all products are not situated to help all people, even within a product category. For example, if I had launched this product, it may have been very helpful to a niche of product managers. So you can still provide significant value to a small amount of people in a niche, the question is whether it is worth your time to do that.