Every designer I’ve managed who made the leap from good to great had one thing in common: they understood why things work, not just how to make them look right. They had product sense. And most of them didn’t learn it from a PM book.

Christina Wodtke, writing for Eleganthack, frames product sense as “compressed experience”:

Product sense works the same way. When a seasoned PM looks at a feature and immediately knows it’s wrong, they’re not being mystical. Their brain is processing hundreds of micro-signals: user flow friction, business model misalignment, technical complexity, competitive dynamics. Years of experience get compressed into a split-second gut reaction.

Swap “PM” for “designer” and this is exactly how design leadership works. The best design critiques I’ve been in aren’t about color choices or spacing—they’re about someone sensing that a flow is wrong before they can articulate why. That’s compressed experience doing its job.

Wodtke’s piece is aimed at product managers, but I think designers need it more. PMs at least have the business context baked into their role. Designers can spend years getting really good at craft without ever building the pattern recognition that tells them what to design, not just how.

This is the part that should be required reading for every designer:

Most people use apps passively — they open Spotify, play music, done. Product people need to use apps actively; not as a user but like a UX designer. They notice the three-tap onboarding flow. They see how the paywall appears after exactly the right amount of value demonstration. They understand why the search bar is positioned there, not there.

Wodtke literally says “like a UX designer.” That’s the standard she’s holding PMs to. So what’s our excuse?

She also nails why reading about product thinking isn’t enough:

Most people try to build product sense by reading about it. That’s like trying to learn tennis by studying physics. You need reps.

The designers on my team who do this—who actively pull apart flows, question trade-offs, study what real products actually ship—are the ones I can’t live without. They don’t need a spec to have an opinion. They already have the reps and consistently impress their PM counterparts.

Wodtke built a nine-week curriculum for her Stanford students that walks through onboarding, checkout, search, paywalls, error states, personalization, UGC, accessibility, and growth mechanics. Each week compares how three different products solve the same problem differently. It’s the kind of thing I wish I could assign to every junior designer on my team.

If you’re a designer and you’re only studying visual references on Dribbble, you’re doing half the work. Go do these exercises.