The longer I’ve been in product, the more I realize that intuition doesn’t just come from data. It comes from living life with your eyes open.
We often think of intuition as that voice that tells you to pause: “Something feels off,” “Not yet,” “Let’s wait.” And sometimes, that’s exactly what it is. It’s restraint. The sense that even though everyone’s ready to move, something about the timing or the approach isn’t right. You can’t explain it in metrics, but you can feel it in your gut, like background static you can’t ignore.
But intuition also has another side. And that’s curiosity. The quiet urge to do something that hasn’t been validated yet, that doesn’t fit into your roadmap or a customer request, but feels right. It’s that voice that says, “I know this isn’t on the priority list, but it matters,” even when you can’t point to a dashboard to back it up.
That’s what makes intuition hard to defend in product conversations. Because when something hasn’t been proven in your industry yet, or there’s no best practice to cite, it starts sounding risky. The irony is, those instincts often come from a much wider field of observation — from outside your job, product, or even your domain.
I’ve realized that my sense of intuition isn’t shaped just by SaaS. It comes from everyday observations of how things are built and how they work in the real world.
Like the time I spent way too long watching how a robot vacuum mapped a room, how it sensed walls, recalibrated after bumping into furniture, and quietly learned patterns from the environment. It wasn’t perfect, but it was thoughtful. You could see that someone had designed it to adapt, not just execute.
That kind of observation stays with you. It teaches you what good systems have in common — awareness, responsiveness, and restraint. They don’t force their way through complexity; they adjust, observe, and keep improving quietly in the background.
And it’s not just machines that teach you that. People do too.
There’s this small South Indian restaurant near my home that I’ve been going to for years. The waiters there never miss a beat. Someone always refills the chutney just in time, brings an extra bowl of sambar without being asked, or cheerfully asks if we’d like to pamper ourselves with some of the chef’s special sweets, in that effortless, charming way that makes you smile and say yes. Even on the busiest mornings or evenings, no one looks rushed. They just move with quiet awareness.
Watching that, you can’t help but think, this is what great product intuition looks like too. The ability to sense friction before it becomes pain. To serve in a way that feels effortless to the user, even when it’s complex underneath.
And yet, this kind of intuition rarely gets the same respect as data. Because you can’t put it in a report or call it an OKR. It’s borrowed from different worlds — from restaurants, movies, traditional businesses, hardware products, etc., so it doesn’t sound “relevant enough.” But relevance isn’t what builds intuition. Observation does.
Over time, you realize that intuition isn’t just experience, it’s exposure. The more you observe how people think, decide, and behave in different contexts, the sharper your instinct gets.
Maybe intuition isn’t louder than data. It’s just earlier.
Akkshaya Varkhedi 