Feelings in product management

The push to remove feelings from product management is misguided. We've somehow convinced ourselves that good product decisions must be purely rational, backed by data, stripped of intuition. This is mad.

Feelings are fast and useful

Gut reactions form in milliseconds. When you open an app and something feels off, you know it instantly. You might not be able to articulate why for another few minutes, but the feeling arrived first.

This isn't a bug in human cognition. It's a feature. Feelings are compressed wisdom, pattern-matching systems honed over years of experience. They're doing the work before your conscious mind catches up.

When a PM dismisses their own discomfort with a feature as "just a feeling," they're throwing away valuable signal. Yes, interrogate the feeling. Yes, seek evidence. But don't pretend the feeling isn't data.

Your users have feelings too

Here's the thing we forget: your users aren't making purely rational decisions either. They're not reading your product specs or poring over your metrics dashboards. They're forming impressions in seconds.

If you've trained yourself to ignore your own emotional responses to products, you've handicapped your ability to predict how users will respond. You've severed the connection between your experience and theirs.

The best product people I know have preserved this sensitivity. They notice when something feels clunky, delightful, confusing, or elegant. They trust that response as a starting point.

Taste is a feeling worth fostering

Taste isn't just aesthetic preference. It's a refined sensitivity to what works and what doesn't. It's knowing when something is good enough versus when it needs more polish.

You can't develop taste purely through frameworks and metrics. You develop it by paying attention to your responses, by noticing what makes some products feel inevitable and others feel forced.

This is why exposure matters. Why using great products matters. Why caring about craft matters. You're training your intuition.

The spirituality of work

There's something almost spiritual about caring deeply about what you build. About believing that the details matter, that users deserve thoughtfulness, that your work can be meaningful.

Stripping this out of product management leaves you with what? Optimisation of metrics. Feature factories. Products that technically work but don't resonate.

The best products come from people who feel something about what they're building. Call it passion, call it craft, call it spirituality. Whatever you call it, don't mistake it for unprofessionalism.

Feeling deeply about your work isn't the opposite of rigour. It's the reason you bother being rigorous in the first place.