The Moment of Truth.

The air in the room was thick with scepticism. It was the 1997 Worldwide Developers Conference. Steve Jobs, recently returned to the floundering Apple he co-founded, was in the hot seat. The crowd of developers was restless to hear what he had to say.

Then, a man stood up and levelled a direct, personal attack.

"Yes, Mr. Jobs, you're a bright and influential man," he began, his tone laced with condescension.

"It's clear that on several accounts you don't know what you're talking about."

In that moment, you could hear a pin drop. The auditorium fell silent. He demanded technical specifics, challenging Jobs' knowledge and his relevance during his years away from Apple.

It was a test of power balance and direct scrutiny of his vision and competence to lead.

But Job went quiet for a moment, took a sip of water and narrowed his brow before delivering a masterclass in the very principles that would save Apple:

"You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology."

So, how do you respond when your knowledge and leadership are challenged?

Most product managers will never face a public dressing-down on stage. But we face versions of this confrontation daily.

It’s the stakeholder who insists their pet feature is the top priority, the engineer who questions the ambiguity of requirements or the dataset that contradicts your hypothesis.

In these moments, words like empathy, product sense, and soft skills are stress tested. They are either exposed as empty platitudes or useful tools that can make a difference.

Part 1: The Cohesive Vision

Faced with a challenging question, Steve Jobs could have detailed the technical specs of Java. He could have tried to prove his intelligence by breaking down each point. But he did not.

His response was a great example of product sense. He elevated the conversation from technical nit-pickings to a strategic principle.

"How does that fit in to a cohesive larger vision?" he asked.

This is what product sense looks like. It is a way to cut through the noise of infinite possibilities and focus on the bigger picture.

Most descriptions of product sense make it sound like a mystical gift, a "gut feeling", an innate prowess that some people are born with. But this is further from the truth.

In practice, a product sense is a skill, a way of synthesising information with your vision. Like connecting dots across interviews and raw data while not ignoring conflicting inputs.

So let's break down what Jobs showed us into three practical disciplines.

First, Product Sense is Working Backwards.

As Steve Jobs famously stated "You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it."

This seems obvious to many tech teams but it is the most common failure. You see it in the engineer who wants to use a cool new database for everything, or the stakeholder who sees a slick demo and insists on embedding it in their product.

Product sense is the discipline that resists this urge. It forces you to begin with the user's problem and the desired outcome.

Jobs illustrated this with the story of the LaserWriter, the world's first small laser printer. Apple had packed it with ground-breaking technology, a Canon printing engine, a custom controller, Adobe's PostScript, AppleTalk.

But the sales pitch was not about the tech. It was about the experience.

"I remember seeing the first printout... we can sell this 'cuz you don't have to know anything about what's in that box. All we have to do is hold this up and go, 'do you want this?'"

Product sense is the ability to hold that printout in your mind, the crisp, magical result, and let it dictate every technological choice that leads to it.

Second, Product Sense Requires Making Hard Trade-offs.

A manager with a checklist of features might have tried to cram every technology into Apple's roadmap. A product leader with a strong sense of vision kills bad projects.

"I'm sorry that OpenDoc's a casualty along the way," Jobs said.

He acknowledged its merits but subordinated them to a higher goal, a "cohesive larger vision."

Product sense is about choosing what to stop building or what to never start. It is the judgment with scar tissues.

And this judgment in decision making could be the difference between £50k feature and seeing the £500k in opportunity cost, maintenance, and complexity it would introduce. They are rooted in a vision that starts with the customer, not a trail of isolated feature requests.

Finally, Product Sense is Synthesis in Action.

This is "connecting the dots" using a blend of "curiosity, creativity, and research. It is listening to ten customer interviews and hearing the same unarticulated frustration in nine of them.

It is seeing a gradual percentage dip in a key metric and connecting it to a subtle UI change everyone else had forgotten about.

It is looking at conflicting data, where quantitative data says a feature is popular but qualitative feedback says users find it confusing, and investigating until you find the underlying truth. 'Perhaps they use it because they have to, not because they want to.'

Part 2: The Empathetic

If the product sense provides the destination (cohesive larger vision) then empathy is the fundamental tool for navigation.

It is what ensures that you build the right thing for the people who needs it. But we must strip away another layer of misperception.

Empathy in product management is not about simply feeling someone's pain. It is something far more active and rigorous. It is probing, conducting extensive forensics behind the pain.

Let's look again at Jobs' response to the subtle insult. His first move was not to counter attack the developer but validate some of the developer's belief and those who felt the same way.

"People like this gentleman are right in some areas," he conceded.

He showed he was listening, defusing the hostility by acknowledging the truth, since recognition is the first step and the foundation of all productive product work.

By reading people and making them feel seen and heard they'll eventually become collaborators, not adversaries.

This moves us to the core of product empathy, getting to the 'Why'.

A customer does not ask for a specific database. They say, "I need a report that loads faster." As a product Manager, your job is to dig through the forensics to understand why having a slow report is a problem. Is it causing deals to be lost? Is it forcing your team to work late?

Each answer reveals a deeper layer of the core problem, until the underlying need is exposed. It is the only way to escape the trap of building a solution to support the wrong problem.

The Dumb Question Approach

This is the most underrated and courageous act in product management. It is the lack of ego to admit, "I don't understand how this process works."

I personally spent seven years mastering this approach.

In my early career as an analyst, I remember sitting at a negotiation table at an insurance firm, watching a veteran solution architect navigate a delicate client situation.

He masterfully set the stage by saying, "Please forgive me for the silly question I'm about to ask. For now, treat me as the new guy in the office on day one!"

This intellectual confidence changed my perspective on how to handle conversations and extract valuable information from clients.

It shows that you are so secure in your mission to find the truth that you are unafraid of looking momentarily ignorant.

Jobs himself modelled this grace on stage when he responded with, "I readily admit there are many things in life that I don't have the faintest idea what I'm talking about."

You would be shocked how often the "dumb" question, "But why do we do it that way? I don't understand the purpose of this step," reveals a broken process followed blindly for years.

Part 3: Soft Skills Are Not Optional

You can have the product sense of a visionary and the empathetic depth of a therapist. But without translating that insight into action and alignment, you will build nothing.

This is the most underestimated pillar of product leadership: soft skills. And to call them soft is a misnomer as they are the essential for diplomacy and win over sceptics.

Return one last time to the WWDC stage. Jobs's entire response was a masterclass in this discipline. In defending his point, he ended up controlling the atmosphere in the room in under 2 minutes.

Here's how he did it:

De-escalation: He neutralised the hostility by acknowledging the critic was "right in some areas."
Vision: He pivoted to a foundational principle ("start with the customer experience").
Storytelling: He used the vivid, relatable LaserWriter anecdote to make his vision tangible.
Managing Expectations: He was transparent about the hard trade-offs, admitting OpenDoc was a "casualty."
Rallying: He concluded by championing his team, praising their dedication and asking for support.

For product managers, this happens every day. Here are the two most important skills you need

First, Storytelling as Strategy.

Your job is to communicate a clear path forward. The best way to do that is through storytelling. It is the story of where you are taking your customers and why.

When you tell a story, people understand, remember, and care. You connect a customer's problem to your solution in a way that inspires engineers, convinces executives, and aligns sales. You stop assigning tasks and start building a shared mission.

Second, Win People Over

This is the daily practice of building trust and navigating friction. It is how you tell a stakeholder "not yet" without damaging the relationship. It is how you help designers and engineers understand each other to find a better solution.

Always remember that products are built by people and people need trust and clear communication to do their best work. Without this skill, even the best ideas will fail because the team couldn't work together.

Part 4: The Trifecta in Practice. Why You Need All Three.

Each of these skills is essential. But their true power is unlocked when they work together. They are a connected system. A weakness in one part weakens everything.

Look at what happens when one skill is missing.

Empathy without Product Sense

Empathy without Product Sense means you collect every user request but have no clear direction. You just take orders, building a jumble of features that pleases no one in the end. You have all the pieces but cannot see the whole picture

Product Sense without Empathy

Product Sense without Empathy creates a smart plan that ignores real people. This is the product manager in an ivory tower, designing perfect solutions that users do not want or understand. They have a map, but it leads nowhere useful.

Soft Skills Alone

Soft Skills without the other two is the most dangerous. It creates a convincing leader who is expertly building the wrong thing. They can smoothly guide a team to failure, with everyone agreeing it is the right path.

When combined, they create a powerful cycle.

Empathy finds the real human problems.
Product Sense designs the ideal solution to those problems.
Soft Skills bring people together to build that solution.

This is what turns a feature manager into a great product leader. This combination makes you the core that holds everything together. You take in chaos from users, turn it into a simple plan, and inspire your team to make it happen.

Samuel Cudjoe

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