On the difference between trusting your gut and earning a yes.
For most of my career, my gut was enough.
I could look at a problem, understand the work underneath it, and see the shape of the fix. Not because I'm special, but because I'd sat in enough of those seats to recognize the pattern. Teacher, district leader, solutions engineer. Different rooms, same muscle. Someone would describe a mess and I'd already know where it was headed and what it needed. Most of the time I was right, and being right was usually the end of it. I'd build the thing, it would work, and the working thing was the whole argument.
Then I moved into product, and the gut came with me. It still fires the same way. I still walk into a problem and feel the solution before I can fully explain it. What changed is that the feeling stopped being enough. Now I have to turn it into something other people can see, weigh, and agree to. That turn, from knowing to convincing, has been the hardest part of the whole move, and it took me a while to understand why.
Here's what I've come around to. My gut was never magic. It was pattern recognition, built up over years of a very particular kind of feedback.
Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein spent their careers on opposite sides of whether expert intuition can be trusted, and they eventually wrote a paper together about where they agreed. Their answer has stuck with me. Expert intuition is real, and it's basically recognition, but it only becomes reliable under two conditions. The environment has to be regular enough to hold learnable patterns, and you have to have had enough practice with fast, clear feedback to actually learn them. Chess players and firefighters have that. Long-range forecasters and stock pickers don't, and their confidence tends to outrun their accuracy.
Solutions engineering, it turns out, was a nearly perfect place to grow a trustworthy gut. The loop was tight. I'd see a problem, propose a fix, build it, and find out quickly whether it held. Right and wrong came back to me fast and clean, over and over, for years. Of course the instinct got sharp. The room was built for it.
Product is a different room. The feedback is slower and noisier, tangled up with the market and the roadmap and a dozen people's priorities and a timeline that won't resolve for months. The same instinct is still valuable, but the signal it's reading is thinner. That reframed something I'd been taking personally. When people asked me to prove it, they weren't doubting my judgment. They were responding, correctly, to a room where nobody's gut should get the last word on its own.
None of this means the gut stopped mattering. If anything, product needs it more than people let on. In Inspired, Marty Cagan makes the case that great product work comes from judgment and product sense, not from a template you can follow to the right answer, and that the strongest teams pair data with instinct instead of letting either run alone. There's a phrase that floats around product circles that says it more bluntly. Data-informed, not data-driven. A team that only follows the data is building to the feedback, reacting to what everyone can already see. Instinct is what lets you take a real risk, to point at something the numbers haven't caught up to yet and say we should go here. Take that away and you're not managing product, you're transcribing it.
So the answer was never to trust my gut less. It was to give the gut and the evidence each a job. The instinct proposes the bet. The validation tells me which bets are worth taking, and how hard I need to work to earn a yes.
I've described myself as a calculated risk taker, and I still think that fits. But I've had to get honest about the word calculated. A risk isn't calculated because I ran the numbers in my head and landed on a good feeling. It's calculated when I can lay the work out where someone else can check it. Some risks are cheap and easy to undo, and those I'll still take on instinct alone, because the cost of being wrong is small. Others are expensive, and those have to be earned with more than my confidence.
A calculated risk you can't explain is just a risk you're asking other people to take on your say-so.
The place this has bitten me is that gap. I've walked into a room sure I was right, with research that had convinced me and convinced no one else, and felt that specific frustration of watching a good idea sit still. For a while I read it as other people being too cautious. What I've slowly accepted is that the gap was mine to close. My conviction wasn't evidence. The concern coming back at me was usually fair, and the honest response wasn't to hold my ground harder. It was to go do the work I'd skipped.
That's the part I'm still learning. The gut that got me here is a real asset, and I'm not interested in trading it for a spreadsheet. But being right was never actually the job. The job is helping a room full of people reach a good decision together, and my instinct is one input to that, not the verdict. Some days it's the input that sees around the corner first. Other days it's the input that needs to sit down and listen. Learning to tell those apart, and to be honest with myself about which day I'm having, feels less like losing the gut and more like finally learning how to use it.