I caught myself making a call recently - product direction, something about users - and realising my team couldn't fully see why. Not because I hadn't thought it through. Because I'd been doing the thinking in my head, in the background, for months. And they hadn't.
Product intuition builds slowly. Every user conversation, every failed experiment, every launch that went sideways adds something - a layer of context that becomes a kind of sixth sense over time. It's genuinely useful, especially when you need to move fast. But it has a failure mode, and the failure mode is scale.
What works when you're close to every decision - when the context lives in your head because it also lives in everyone else's - stops working when the team grows. The newer people don't have the same substrate. They haven't been in the same rooms, seen the same edge cases, watched the same assumptions get proven wrong. And if the reasoning behind your calls stays locked in your head, "good enough" decisions stop being good enough.
The fix I've been working on isn't complicated. It's mostly about showing the work more deliberately - not just what I think, but why I think it. The weird edge cases. The past experiments. The user feedback that quietly shaped a decision three quarters ago. This is the kind of context that takes time to share, and always falls to the bottom of the priority list, but it's exactly what younger team members need to start building their own pattern recognition rather than just deferring to yours.
The other piece is validation - not as a bureaucratic gate, but as a habit of intellectual honesty. Intuition is built from experience, but experience has blind spots. The instinct to make a call quickly and move on is usually right. The instinct to never check whether the call was right is what compounds into drift. Knowing you'll evaluate a decision later - that you've made it explicit enough that it can be evaluated - changes how you make it in the first place.
None of this is about discarding intuition. It's about making it transferable. As a team grows, the ceiling shifts from how good any one person's judgment is to how well that judgment becomes shared.
The scarce resource isn't the intuition. It's the context underneath it.
