Product Sense - The Missing Link

Had a great chat with a friend today who's involved in a large university-based project, and he had some thoughts about how the project's public-facing goal could be supported with an app.

As the subject matter expert, he knows the higher level goals of what the project should accomplish. He also has, based on his experience with tech, some ideas about how an app could help with those goals. So it's tempting to think that all he needs is to get joined up with a purely technical dev shop: He provides a list of features, they punch through that list, everyone's happy.

But that's skipping over an entire level in the hierarchy. You don't go from goals to implementation in one step. You need to fill in the blanks, and that's where product sense comes in. Chatting about the idea, it was clear to me that, rather than building native apps for iOS and Android, a simple website (optimized for display on mobile, of course) would do the trick. That was just one of many examples where our conversation sharpened the picture.

The more I have conversations like this, the more I'm convinced that product sense - that link between what a product should achieve and how it should be built - is becoming more valuable than ever. The apparent ease of generating code with AI means the temptation is large to rush through that initial process: Who cares if we built the wrong thing if it's so cheap to build?

In short: If you're moving faster, getting the direction right is more important, not less.