I’ve got good news and bad news for you.

The good news is that improving your product intuition is really easy to do:

1. When you use a product, think about what you’d do to make them better. Get yourself in the habit of walking through life noticing the products you use (tech products or real-world things) and thinking about how you’d *realistically* improve them. The realistic part is important—wishing your Honda was really a Bugatti Veyron isn’t helpful. Instead, if there’s a feature in your Honda that really annoys you, think specifically about what you’d do to improve it, within the constraints that you expect Honda to be struggling with: cost, safety/regulatory, etc. IMPORTANT: don’t start applying this “how would I improve this?” thinking to the humans in your life, because they will not like it!
2. Ask people about problems in their lives that could conceivably be solved with a product. This is the second-person version of the first-person practice in #1 above. Almost all the time, as a PM you’re not making a product for people like yourself. Instead, you’re making them for other people, usually people who are less technically proficient, less educated, less wealthy, and (really important!) less passionate about making products better. So it’s really important to be able to efficiently learn about how those other non-PM people do their work (for B2B products) or live their lives (for B2C products) and what you might be able to build for them that improves things for them. Although part of this practice is to figure out possible solutions, don’t immediately jump to a solution. Instead, spend a lot of time asking questions and really trying to understand the quirks and challenges to the other person’s daily activities. For example, if you want to get better at building products for teachers, volunteer in a classroom to see it first-hand. If you want to make a better POS system for bars, pull up a stool and start ordering. And so on.
3. Dig deeper to find non-obvious solutions, to expose problems, and to make the right tradeoffs; don’t settle for your first solution. Real-world solutions are never as easy as they seem as a first impression. Figuring out a better way to do something is hard. Doing it in a way that users love is harder. Doing it in a profitable way is even harder. So when you’re doing #1 and #2 above, push yourself to go deeper into the problem to identify solutions that are non-obvious and to also to identify problems with any solution you come up with. One good way to do this is to come up with 10+ potential solutions and then try to evaluate them critically.

OK that’s the good news: building better product sense is really about spending time thinking about solutions (#1) , thinking about other peoples’ needs (#2), and going the extra mile to both find non-obvious solutions and to avoid naive answers (#3). These activities don’t take a lot of costly training and are things you can do every day as part of your daily life.

The bad news is that people with the best product sense do those three things naturally, like breathing. It’s a core part of their personality to relentlessly optimize the world in a creative way and with stubborn precision to get the best solution. In my experience, great “product sense” develops in some people not because they tried to develop it but because their personality compels them. They can’t help it, can’t stop it, and certainly didn’t try to become that way. Who wants to be that annoyingly picky person who’s never satisfied?

So while those three activities to improve product sense, it may be tough for someone to stay motivated to do them constantly, every day, for many years unless they’re temperamentally wired for dissatisfaction, empathy, creativity, and detail-orientation.