Tip
Christina Wodtke talks about product sense: “Product sense is intuition, intuition is compressed experience, compressed experience comes from having lots of experience. And if you’re young and you don’t have a lot of experience, the smartest thing you could do is learn. You’ve got to learn what models work and why they work, and just intuition is overvalued and under-exists.”
Turns out AI product launches work the same way.
Your AI team is launching a new RAG-based customer support feature. The PM (3 years experience, very smart, shipped products at Google) says, “I have a really good feeling about this. All the demos look great, early alpha users love it, and the metrics are trending well.” Your VP of Product wants to launch to 10,000 enterprise customers next week to hit quarterly targets.
Younger leaders trust their gut when their gut says “yes.” They call it product sense. They’ve seen a few products launch successfully and developed confidence. But they haven’t lived through enough disasters to know when their gut is based on pattern recognition versus when it’s based on hope.
You know better. Real product sense isn’t just having a feeling—it’s knowing when to trust the feeling versus when to rigorously test it. You’ve shipped enough products over decades to recognize this specific pattern: when something feels great in controlled demos with friendly alpha users but hasn’t been stress-tested with real customers in messy production environments, that’s not product sense, that’s wishful thinking.
You insist on a staged rollout: 100 customers for 2 weeks, measure everything, then 1,000 for 2 weeks, then 10,000. The PM thinks you’re being overly cautious. The VP thinks you’re slowing down momentum. You’re being experienced. Week 1 with real customers: edge cases emerge—customers asking questions in formats the model wasn’t trained on, AI giving confident wrong answers about complex products, unclear escalation paths when AI can’t help, customers gaming the system in unexpected ways. Issues you could never see in demos or friendly alpha tests.
This judgment—knowing the difference between intuition based on compressed experience versus intuition based on hope—comes from watching enough launches succeed and fail. Junior PMs think product sense means trusting your gut. You know product sense means having enough compressed experience to know when your gut is based on patterns you’ve seen play out 50 times versus when it’s based on seeing 3 successful demos. That calibration only comes from decades of launches.
Context
Christina Wodtke is author of “Radical Focus” (the definitive guide to OKRs), lecturer at Stanford teaching product management, and former product leader at Yahoo, LinkedIn, Zynga, and MySpace. Her insight about product sense as compressed experience directly challenges the myth that junior people can develop strong product intuition quickly.
For experienced executives evaluating AI product launch decisions, this is critical—you’ve launched enough products to know the difference between intuition based on real pattern recognition versus intuition based on limited positive signals. That calibration comes only from seeing both patterns repeatedly over decades.