What Product Intuition Actually Is
Product intuition is not a feeling. It is a form of pattern recognition built from hundreds of hours of direct contact with users, their frustrations, their workarounds, and the gap between what they say and what they do.
That kind of knowledge does not transfer cleanly into a summary. When an AI tool synthesises fifty user interviews into five themes, something real is lost. The edge cases, the hesitations, the user who said one thing and clearly meant another.
The synthesis is faster. It is also a different thing to what you would have noticed yourself.
The Metric That Is Going Up for the Wrong Reason
The best product decisions are often made against the data. Not because the data is wrong, but because someone with enough independent context recognizes that the data is measuring the wrong thing.
That capacity is built through practice. It requires forming views before you see the summary, sitting with ambiguous signals, and being wrong in ways you can learn from. AI tools that do the synthesis work are efficient. They are also doing the practice work.
A team that outsources its synthesis long enough will find, at some point, that no one is quite sure what they actually think about the product.
What Steve Works On With Product Teams
Steve works with product managers and product teams on keeping the user instinct alive while still using AI tools to move quickly. That means building habits around direct contact with feedback before the AI version of it arrives.
He also works on product culture: the shared norms that determine whether data tools support the team's thinking or replace it. A team can use every tool available and still maintain the independent judgement that makes those tools mean something.
The goal is not to use AI less. It is to remain the person who knows what to do with what it produces.
Read the first chapter free
Steve's book, Cognitive Sovereignty, covers this in full. The first chapter takes about 20 minutes to read and is free.
Work with Steve
Steve speaks and consults with organizations working through exactly these challenges. See the Work with Me page for details.