Product management is built on a contradiction. We’re supposed to be data-driven, yet our most important decisions happen in the absence of clear data. We’re meant to be customer-focused, yet customers can’t tell us what they’ll want tomorrow. Navigating this requires two underappreciated skills: sensing and sensemaking.

These aren’t the skills we talk about at product conferences or test for in interviews. You won’t find them in job descriptions or performance reviews. They’re rarely taught in product courses or covered in certification exams. Most PMs develop them accidentally, if at all.

Yet they might be the difference between PMs who shape markets and PMs who chase them. Between those who see disruption coming and those who get disrupted. Between building products that customers didn’t know they needed and building features that customers thought they wanted.

The PMs who excel at sensing and sensemaking operate differently. They make bold bets that seem obvious in hindsight. They kill promising features before they fail. They pivot before the metrics scream crisis. Not because they’re psychic, but because they’ve developed capabilities most of us don’t even recognize as skills.

The Information Problem

We’ve built an entire industry around helping PMs make “data-driven decisions.” Analytics platforms, user research tools, feedback systems, competitive intelligence. Billions invested in giving us more information. Yet ask any PM about their confidence in their roadmap, and you’ll get nervous laughter. Something’s broken in how we process what we know.

More data hasn’t led to better decisions. If anything, PMs today seem less certain than their predecessors who worked with spreadsheets and gut instinct. We’ve created a gap between information and insight that grows wider with every new dashboard. This gap exists because we’ve confused measurement with understanding. We track what’s easy to track, not what’s important to know. We optimize for metrics that move, not outcomes that matter.

This is where sensing and sensemaking come in. They’re the human capabilities that turn noise into signal, and signal into strategy. They’re what separate PMs who react from PMs who anticipate.

Sensing: The Art of Noticing

Sensing is about detection. It’s your ability to pick up weak signals before they become strong trends. The customer who mentions a workflow problem in passing. The competitor who quietly hires ten engineers in a specific domain. The support ticket that represents a new category of user frustration.

Good sensing requires two things: broad awareness and selective attention. You need exposed surface area to catch diverse signals, but also filters to avoid drowning in noise. It’s like having excellent peripheral vision while maintaining focus on what’s ahead.

The best sensors build systems, not just skills. They don’t rely on remembering to check in with customers or hoping to catch important signals. Instead, they create workflows that make good sensing automatic.

They position themselves at information crossroads. A weekly sync with customer success. Coffee with the engineer who always knows what’s really broken. Regular calls with power users who aren’t shy about complaints. These touchpoints surface weak signals before they become obvious problems.

They cultivate sources who tell uncomfortable truths. The sales rep who will admit why deals are really losing. The customer who will explain why they’re considering competitors. The designer who will push back when user research contradicts the roadmap. Trust takes time to build, but it pays off in honest insight.

Good sensing is surprisingly simple: Listen more than you talk. Notice patterns, not just events. Question what’s missing from the data. But the best PMs don’t leave it to chance. They build infrastructure that brings diverse signals to them consistently. When sensing becomes systematic rather than sporadic, you naturally start seeing what others miss.

Sensemaking: The Art of Understanding

If sensing is about what, sensemaking is about why and what’s next. It’s the cognitive work of turning observations into understanding, and understanding into foresight.

Sensemaking is fundamentally about building mental models that explain what you’re seeing. Why are enterprise customers suddenly churning? Why did that feature we were sure about fall flat? Why is the sales team building shadow tools?

This is messy mental work. You’re not breaking things down like traditional analysis. You’re building them up. Taking scattered observations and actively constructing meaning from them. When you’re sensemaking, you’re doing three things at once: recognizing patterns across disparate signals, building explanations for why these patterns exist, and forming predictions about what happens next.

The questions guide the process: What story connects these dots? Why now? What comes next? Through this questioning, you build mental models that explain today’s reality and tomorrow’s possibilities. Living frameworks that guide real decisions.

Karl Weick, who pioneered research in organizational sensemaking, described it as “the ongoing retrospective development of plausible images that rationalize what people are doing.” In product terms: we’re constantly updating our understanding of user needs, market dynamics, and organizational capabilities based on new signals.

The best PMs treat this as an ongoing practice. They constantly refine their models as new signals arrive, treating each new piece of information as a chance to sharpen their understanding.

Why Both Matter

Sensing without sensemaking is just collection. You end up with lots of interesting observations but no coherent strategy. It’s the PM who knows every metric but can’t explain what to do next.

Sensemaking without sensing is fantasizing. You build elaborate theories on thin evidence. It’s the PM who has strong opinions about user needs but hasn’t talked to a user in months.

The magic happens when both work together. Good sensing feeds rich sensemaking by providing diverse, quality signals to interpret. Clear sensemaking directs better sensing by revealing which signals matter most and where to look next. Each capability strengthens the other.

This creates a virtuous cycle that compounds over time. The PM who senses well develops better mental models. Better mental models reveal which signals to track. Richer signals refine the models further. Six months in, you’re not just making marginally better decisions. You’re operating with fundamentally superior market understanding.

The Challenge for Product Managers

Product management uniquely demands both skills. We sit at the intersection of user needs, business constraints, and technical possibilities. Signals come from every direction, and making sense of them requires integrating perspectives that often conflict.

Unlike other roles that might optimize for one type of sensing or sensemaking, we need range. Engineers focus on technical signals about system performance. Sales tracks business signals about market opportunity. Designers study human signals about user behavior. Product managers? We synthesize all of this into decisions about what to build next.

This integration challenge exposes a gap in our traditional toolkit. We have plenty of methods for prioritization once we know what matters. We have processes for validation once we have hypotheses. But the upstream work that generates that knowledge and those hypotheses? The actual sensing and sensemaking? That’s largely left to intuition and experience.

No framework teaches you how to spot weak signals before they become trends. No process guide explains how to reconcile conflicting data from different departments. We’ve systematized the downstream work of product management while leaving the upstream work to chance.

Developing These Capabilities

Sensing improves when you diversify your sources and create systems for signal collection. Build habits that expose you to weak signals before they become obvious trends. Schedule regular customer conversations. Set up competitive intelligence alerts. Cultivate relationships across departments. The goal isn’t omniscience. It’s early warning systems for what matters.

Sensemaking improves through disciplined reflection. Block time weekly to step back and ask: What patterns am I seeing? What mental models explain these patterns? What would have to be true for my interpretation to be correct? Then test those interpretations against reality. Each cycle of hypothesis and validation sharpens your sensemaking ability.

Start small. Pick one sensing practice and one sensemaking ritual. Do them consistently for a month. Then layer in more sophisticated approaches as these become second nature.

The Competitive Advantage

In a world where everyone has access to the same tools and data, sensing and sensemaking become key differentiators.

The PM who spots shifting user expectations three months before competitors. The PM who correctly interprets conflicting signals from sales and support. The PM who sees how emerging technology enables previously impossible solutions. These PMs aren’t lucky. They’ve developed superior sensing and sensemaking capabilities.

Product management is as much about perception and interpretation as execution and delivery. The frameworks will only take you so far. Eventually, you need the fundamental human capabilities of noticing what others miss and understanding what it means.

In an ambiguous world, these might be your most valuable skills. They compound over time. They transfer across domains. They’re the difference between reacting to change and anticipating it. Between following the market and shaping it.

The best time to build these capabilities was when you started. The second best time is now.