In a world where AI handles the obvious
On ADHD, product intuition, and why messy thinking might be an advantage
“Product intuition” or “product sense” sound like something mystical, as if just a few people have better instincts as a gift.
Maybe they do, but most of the time, it’s more explainable than that.
Product intuition is pattern recognition. It’s seeing something and thinking, “this won’t work” or “this could be big”, without being able to fully explain it yet.
Don’t confuse it with a lucky guess.
Your “gut feeling” works because you’ve seen enough adjacent things, become very fast at analogies that aren’t easily seen by others, and your brain is connecting dots faster than you can articulate.
And sorry, but those dots don’t really come from a neat, linear process.
They come from messy thinking. You say half-finished ideas, I say noticing things that seem unrelated until they aren’t.
For a long time, I assumed this was an “area to improve”.
As someone with pretty severe ADHD, as you can imagine, my default mode isn’t structured focus. It’s more curiosity powered by motivation I don’t fully understand, and it’s mostly scattered.
I’ll read something unrelated, it’ll remind me of a feature I’ve seen before, then I’ll get pulled into a different problem, and connect it back to a product decision hours later.
It doesn’t look efficient or even relevant when I try to explain it. It definitely doesn’t look like how we are “supposed” to think. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard “But how is this relevant?” (in ruder or kinder ways) when I try to explain my thinking.
But over time, I realized that a lot of what we call “intuition” or “gut feeling” is just the output of that mess.
And now, with AI and how accessible LLM-based assistants have become, this matters more than it used to.
AI is incredibly good at structured thinking. Give it a defined problem, clean inputs, and it will generate solid, often better-than-average answers. It follows patterns extremely well.
But it’s still downstream of the patterns it’s trained on, and highly dependent on the questions you ask.
It doesn’t wander the same way. It doesn’t get distracted into something irrelevant that later becomes the insight. It doesn’t sit in that uncomfortable space where nothing quite makes sense yet, but something feels off.
That’s still a very human loop (and often a neurodivergent one).
More and more, I hear the question: “What about AI and product managers, will it take over that too?” Who knows. But I can share my take, at least for now.
If your edge is execution, you’re operating in a space that’s becoming easier to replicate. Defining problems, organizing work, moving things forward… These are valuable, but increasingly standardized. Over time, they’re less of a differentiator.
If your edge is pattern recognition built from messy, nonlinear thinking, and sometimes rapid associative thinking, you’re probably playing a different game.
I’m not saying structure doesn’t matter, or that being messy alone is a gift. No.
But if your default is unstructured, scattered thinking, your edge might come from embracing how your brain already works, rather than fighting it.
Maybe it’s time to stop over-correcting that. To allow a bit more mess in the process, see if it leads to better outputs in the end, and recognize that in an AI-shaped world, that mess might actually be the differentiator.