At our latest Product Anonymous session, Maxy Lotherington – who heads up Product and Design at InvestorHub, a FinTech scale-up – walked us through what “product sense” actually is, how to build it, and how she uses AI to sharpen it. Here are the highlights.

What is product sense?

Maxy’s simple definition: product sense is knowing something will work before you build it. It’s not magic – it’s pattern matching, backed by research (she pointed to The Intuition Toolkit for the science behind gut instinct).

At its core, product management is about figuring out what customer problem to solve, which Maxy frames as connecting the dots – pulling together customer quotes, sales notes, strategy, support tickets, and analytics into a coherent picture of the problem. If you’ve ever written a PRD with an “evidence” section, you’ve already been doing this.

Product sense is what happens when that dot-connecting becomes constant and automatic – updating in the background every time you hear something new, rather than only when you sit down to plan. It’s why strong PMs can react to an idea instantly and just know something’s off.

The other key piece: don’t just connect internal dots (customer feedback, analytics, company data). The richest, most accurate picture comes from also weaving in external dots – the wider world, other products, other industries.

Building your dot collection

Product sense is a long-term, deliberate practice, not a one-off skill you pick up. Maxy shared three ways to keep collecting dots:

1. Consume product content – newsletters and teardown resources like Growth.Design, Lenny’s podcast and the SVPG blog. Following the right people on LinkedIn helps too.
2. Use lots of products – including bad ones. Maxy’s opened Product Hunt every morning for a decade. Using more products (and noticing when something feels off) builds intuition for what works.
3. Talk and share – communities like Product Anonymous and ProductCamp are exactly this. Swapping stories about what worked and what didn’t extends your pattern library beyond your own experience.

Her bonus tip: if you’re not naturally great at remembering things you come across, write them down somewhere (she uses a tool called Mymind).

Evaluating your connected dots

Once you’ve connected dots into a hypothesis, Maxy’s framework is to stress-test it against five failure modes:

• Unanchored problems – you can’t say when or why a user would actually hit this problem.
• Fake problems – the “problem” only exists because of something you built or shipped.
• Obvious solutions – if it’s everyone’s first idea (or the customer’s own suggested fix), pressure-test it. Customers are right about their pain, rarely right about the solution.
• Shallow problems – using the “five whys,” can you get past the first layer? If not, you’re missing depth.
• Indefensible problems – if you can’t explain the problem clearly and people don’t follow, the dots you connected may not actually belong together.

The InvestorHub story: solving a problem no one asked for

Maxy shared a case study from her own company (an “end-to-end investor relations” platform). InvestorHub had built seven separate content tools – email, Twitter, LinkedIn, blog posts – each patched repeatedly based on direct feedback, with no one ever asking for them to be unified.

Drawing on external experience running a content team, Maxy recognized the pattern from a framework called COPE (Create Once, Publish Everywhere) and pushed for a single content engine that was published across all channels. No customer had asked for it, and the idea took real convincing internally – but it became InvestorHub’s most popular feature. The lesson: your richest solutions often come from dots outside your own company or industry, not just from customer requests.

Using AI to connect dots

Maxy closed with her Claude workflow. Her view: AI is excellent at connecting internal dots (company data, research, sales notes) – but that’s the easy, “average” part of the job. Where PMs add value is bringing in external context and judgment.

Her approach is to build a thorough, manually-written context library for Claude covering business context, cross-functional teams, customer segments, competitors, product/roadmap details, and team structure – updated regularly. Writing it by hand (rather than pulling from the codebase) forces her to actually understand the product deeply, and surfaces gaps in her own knowledge. With that context in place, Claude becomes a genuine thinking partner for higher-level strategic conversations, freeing her up from time spent on basic internal analysis.

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Thanks to Maxy for a brilliant, practical session – and to everyone who jumped into the workshop exercises. See you at the next Product Anonymous, and don’t forget ProductCamp is coming up on August 8th.

There’s a saying that good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. At our last event, Dave and Amir leaned into that idea – hard. Hosted as a game show loosely based on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, they spun a wheel, pulled audience members up as contestants, and used the chaos to share some of the most honest leadership stories we’ve heard on a Product Anonymous stage.

Here’s what came out of it.

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Earn the Right

Product people are opinionated. We’ll swim in anyone’s lane – engineering, leadership, customer experience – and we have thoughts we’d like to share. The problem isn’t the opinions. It’s the timing.

Both Dave and Amir had stories about arriving somewhere new with ideas, and learning the hard way that credibility isn’t assumed – it’s accumulated. The concept they came back to: idiosyncrasy credits. Deliver consistently, meet expectations, make the people around you look good – and you build up the right to eventually push back, deviate, and step outside your lane. Skip that step, and nobody’s listening anyway.

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Set Yourself Up

Dick Fosbury revolutionised the high jump by going over the bar backwards, head first, not seeing where he’d land. What made that possible wasn’t just the idea – it was that his school had just introduced foam landing mats.

Bold moves require crash mats. Amir had a vivid story about needing to challenge a major decision that had already been signed off at C-level – and the quiet, patient groundwork he had to lay before he could make that case without torching his credibility or his career.

The lesson: it’s not the boldness that works. It’s the preparation that makes the boldness survivable.

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Shoe Maintenance

If you’re walking down the street and step in dog shit, how do you react? Because as a leader, you’re going to be stepping in a lot of it.

Many product people treat dealing with mess as a distraction from the real job. Dave’s point was simple: dealing with mess is the job. We’re drawn to an idealised version of leadership – vision, strategy, craft. Most of the time it’s closer to garbage collection. The sooner you make peace with that, the better a leader you’ll be.

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Lead the Humans, Not the Projects

Products fail. Companies get acquired. Strategies get shelved. After 25-plus years, Amir’s conclusion is that almost everything you deliver is temporary – except the people you help grow.

Dave told a harder story about a redundancy round, and what happened in the hours after he’d delivered the news. The idea he landed on: leadership shadow. Everything you do and say casts a shadow across your team – your standards, your values, how you treat people on the way up and on the way out. It accumulates quietly, over dozens of interactions. And sometimes it comes back to you in ways you don’t expect.

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Play the Long Game

Dave got his Miro year-in-review: top 1% of users. He assumed the most-used feature would be Post-it notes or user flows.

It was tables.

He’d become what he’d sworn to destroy – and then made peace with it. Leadership runs on data, budgets, capacity planning, and the unglamorous work that keeps things moving. Stanford professor James G. March called it poetry and plumbing: most people who want to be leaders are drawn to the poetry, but most people who are leaders spend the majority of their time in the plumbing. The best ones aren’t too proud to do either.

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Thanks to Dave and Amir for bringing both the stories and the game show energy. And to our five brave participants – Lisa, Pranav, Jaden, Kate, and Malay – for being good sports.

Our Speakers:

Amir Ansari: With over 25 years’ of experience in the field of design and design leadership, Amir has worked across the private and public sectors, in-house and agency, managing design practitioners and leaders to build long-lasting and impactful products and services. Amir is passionate about democratising the craft of design and sharing his learnings – doing it with a smile and a hug.

David Bacon: After graduating from Monash with a Bachelor of Science, David worked as a penguin keeper in England which somehow led to a career spanning marketing, behaviour change, innovation and human-centred design. David has experience delivering digital products and services in financial services, healthcare, retail, government. He has the goal of weaving humanity into technology. He still dreams about penguins.

There’s a moment in almost every product career where you build something thoughtful, ship it carefully, and then watch people completely ignore it. Not because they don’t care – but because changing behaviour is genuinely, stubbornly hard.

That’s the problem Alex Waddell, behavioural and implementation science practitioner, researcher, and lecturer, has spent her career trying to solve. At our recent Product Anonymous session, she gave us a fast, hands-on tour of behavioural science and implementation science – and how product people can actually use both.

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First: What even are these sciences?

Behavioural science is an interdisciplinary field drawing on cognitive science, economics, psychology, sociology, and neuroscience to study human behaviour and design strategies to change it.

Implementation science – which was born out of healthcare, where it takes an average of 17 years for research to reach the patient bedside – asks a different but related question: how do you get something that works into an organisation or system with speed, fidelity, and quality?

One is more micro. The other is meso and macro. But both ultimately boil down to the same question:

“Who needs to do what differently?“

Alex said this was the one thing she wanted us to take away. It’s deceptively simple – and it cuts through a lot of the vagueness that plagues change initiatives.

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Step one: Get brutally specific about the behaviour

Before you can change a behaviour, you have to specify it. And this is harder than it sounds.

Alex asked the room: what behaviour am I doing right now? In about thirty seconds, the audience shouted out ten different answers – presenting, talking, staring, moving around the room. They were all correct. And that’s exactly the problem. If you can’t pin down the specific behaviour you’re targeting, you can’t measure it, and you can’t change it.

To get specific, Alex introduced the AACTT framework – a tool for mapping behaviour across five dimensions:

• Action – what can be observed and measured? If you can’t observe it, you can’t change it.
• Actor – who specifically is doing (or not doing) this behaviour?
• Context – the physical location, the social setting, and critically, the emotional context.
• Target – who is the behaviour being performed for or with?
• Time – when is it happening?

The emotional context piece generated a lot of discussion in the room. Participants reflected that we tend to design for the rational user, in a neutral state. Real behaviour happens in emotional contexts – rushed, distracted, anxious, under social pressure – and those contexts matter enormously.

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Step two: Stop going straight to solutions

Once a behaviour is specified, the instinct is to jump to solutions. Alex made the room do exactly this – using a photo of a woman examining apples in a supermarket, she asked how we’d increase apple sales to her.

The ideas came fast: discount signs, taste testers, better labelling, smaller bags for easier carrying, large-font labels, recipe cards. All reasonable. All based on assumptions.

Then she asked: what assumptions are we making about this woman?

The list was long. That she has grandkids. That she has poor eyesight. That she can afford apples. That the apple is even for her. That she buys apples at all.

“We need to be really, really careful about assumptions. People are not like us. They don’t have your lived experience, they’re not from where you’re from, they’re dealing with other things.”

The exercise was a pointed reminder that we design for ourselves more than we realise – and that good research with and for people is non-negotiable before you reach for solutions.

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The frameworks: COM-B and EAST

Alex introduced two frameworks worth keeping handy.

COM-B

Synthesised from 33 theories, models and frameworks by Susan Michie and colleagues at UCL, COM-B says that for any behaviour to happen, a person needs three things:

• Capability – psychological and physical ability to perform the action (knowledge, skills, stamina)
• Opportunity – external factors that make the behaviour possible (time, resources, location, cultural norms)
• Motivation – internal drivers, both reflective (conscious plans and beliefs) and automatic (impulses and habits)

One insight that landed particularly well: motivation includes beliefs about other people’s capabilities, not just your own. Alex drew on her PhD research into shared clinical decision-making – where some clinicians assumed certain patients didn’t want to be involved in decisions about their care, and so never offered it. A belief about someone else’s capability, cutting off behaviour before it started.

EAST

A more action-oriented framework from the UK’s Behavioural Insights Team, EAST gives you four levers:

• Easy – reduce friction, simplify messages, use defaults
• Attractive – make it stand out, use images, personalise, consider rewards
• Social – show what others do, use networks, make commitments visible
• Timely – prompt at the right moment, consider habits, plan for barriers

Alex walked through a famous cautionary example: a sign that read “Littering in our local area has increased” – intended to encourage people not to litter, but framed as a social norm that actually increased littering. When you tell people that something bad is happening a lot, you inadvertently signal that it’s normal.

The lesson: always test before you roll out. Behavioural interventions can backfire.

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There are 93 behaviour change techniques

One of the most eye-opening moments of the evening was learning there are 93 identified behaviour change techniques – and that the instinct most organisations reach for first (training, education, an online module) is just one of them.

“People most often say, ‘let’s just do some training and they’ll [the people whose behaviour you are trying to change] will do it.’ They probably won’t. Or they might, and probably not everyone.”

The richness of options is the point. If your current approach isn’t working, there are dozens of other levers to try – and a growing body of evidence about when each one works.

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The key takeaway

At the end of the session, Alex asked the room to spot how she’d used behavioural science in the workshop itself. The answers came quickly: prizes for participation (incentives), the active listening exercise at the start (priming for engagement), the Slido polls (social proof, visibility), the hands-on activities (behavioural practice) rather than passive listening.

It was a neat way to close – and a good reminder that these frameworks aren’t abstract. They’re design tools. Every product interaction, every onboarding flow, every survey you send is a behaviour change attempt. The question is whether you’re doing it intentionally or not.

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Want to go deeper? Alex has compiled a resource guide with links to the frameworks mentioned – including the behaviour change technique taxonomy, the Theoretical Domains Framework, and the EAST playbook. Grab it, then find Alex at coformed.com.au to see how she helps teams turn good ideas into lasting change – and get in touch. Connect with her on LinkedIn too.

Thanks to our hosts

Thanks Zendesk for being our wonderful host for the evening!

Editor note: citations for works quoted or referenced here are included as direct links to the source material.