Deep Product Sense Practice Builds
A client shared with me in a session that they are worth at least $100K more in their salary. They weren't just venting.
They had just sat through a presentation from a team of Accenture consultants.
Multiple consultants. A $100K+ engagement. Months of research.
The consultants were presenting their findings on where their company should position its product, ICP segmentation, where not to invest, which markets to prioritize, where the real growth opportunity was.
Slide after slide, the consultants were saying exactly what they had already figured out.
Not approximately. Not in the same ballpark.
The same conclusions. The same reasoning. The same recommendations.
The only difference was that my client had arrived at them through their product sense interview practice.
Not robotically applying frameworks and memorizing structures.
Actually thinking deeply through positioning problems. Segmenting markets from first principles. Asking where a product truly has an advantage and why.
The kind of thinking most people treat as separate from their real job.
Something you do on the side, in stolen hours, as parallel prep track.
But here's what this moment revealed:
When you practice product sense the right way, not running through frameworks, but actually developing your judgment, you don't just get better at interviews.
You get better at your job.
You start seeing your own product differently.
You catch things in leadership meetings that others miss.
You stop waiting for a $100K consulting engagement to validate conclusions you've already reached on your own.
The interview is not a performance you put on for a hiring manager.
It's a proof point of how you actually think.
And how you think at work and how you think in an interview, it's the same muscle.
The candidates who walk into L7+ interviews feeling most confident aren't the ones who practiced the most.
They're the ones whose thinking got sharp enough that the interview stopped feeling like a test.
It started feeling like a conversation they'd already been having at work, without fully realizing it.
That's what deep product sense practice actually builds.
Not just interview readiness, but clearer and deeper thinking all around.
That is also why cramming for an interview is almost never effective for L7–L9 roles.
The deep thinking muscle has to be built over time.
---
I share shifts like this regularly, here’s the link to follow along.