I've caught myself doing something for years that I never quite had a name for - and for a long time, I felt vaguely guilty about it.
Someone brings me a problem. I sit with it for a bit, start pulling threads, and somewhere in the middle of what should still be the synthesis phase, I arrive at an answer. Not a finished answer - more like a strong pull toward a direction. A hunch with weight to it. And the honest response would be to say: I think it's this. Here's why. But the product world - the world I was trained in - has a name for that kind of thing, and it's not a flattering one. It's called skipping the process.
So instead of saying what I actually think, you learn to dress it differently. You run the room through the framework. You build the slide deck that leads to the conclusion you already hold. You perform the neutrality of someone who hasn't decided yet, even when you have.
There's a version of the product playbook that treats intuition as a failure state - the thing you fall back on when you haven't done the work properly. Clear problem statement first. User personas. Validated hypotheses. Evidence before direction. It's a real framework, and it serves a real purpose. But somewhere along the way, people started treating it as the only way, which is where it starts to break down.
Look at the actual founding stories of the companies we talk about when we talk about innovation. The honest version is usually messier than the framework allows for. A founder out building, chatting, building, chatting - accumulating a feel for something before they could fully articulate what the something was. Sometimes the solution came first. Sometimes the problem only got clear in retrospect. The kind of tight discovery loop that scaling teams run beautifully - that came later, once there was something worth scaling.
The playbook is what you bring in when you've got hundreds of people who need to move in the same direction without the luxury of deeply internalised context. It's a substitute for something - a way of getting alignment when you can't rely on everyone just knowing. Which is fine. But it's not the same as the thing it's substituting for, and it's worth being honest about that difference.
The interesting thing is that the product world has already found a way to talk about what I'm describing - it's just hidden under better packaging. Product taste. Product sense. These terms have a kind of currency that intuition doesn't, even though they're pointing at the same thing. Intuition got rebranded because the word felt too close to guessing, too unaccountable - whereas taste and sense carry a connotation of refinement, of something earned.
But whatever you call it: the mechanism is the same. Years of accumulated context, compressed into a fast decision. It's not the absence of thinking - it's thinking that's already happened, at pace, in the background, over a long time.
The version that goes wrong isn't intuition - it's the performance of intuition, where someone uses the word as a shield against doing any actual thinking. "My gut says." Used as a conversation-ender rather than a starting point. That's worth watching for in yourself and in others. The word can be borrowed by people who haven't built up the substrate that would make it mean anything.
What I've started to notice is that experienced people often hide their intuition rather than name it. They don't say I just know - they say from my past experience or I've seen this before. Same signal, different framing. Because naming it as intuition feels like admitting something you're not supposed to admit - like you've somehow skipped a step that should be visible and auditable.
I don't think that's honesty. I think it's a kind of self-censorship that costs something, because it makes the reasoning harder to interrogate. "From past experience" points backward and closes conversation. Naming the intuition - saying here's my hunch, and here's the accumulated logic I think it's resting on - actually opens it up. It becomes something you can challenge, refine, check.
That checking matters. Not because intuition needs to be replaced by frameworks, but because even good intuition can calcify. The question isn't whether to trust your pattern recognition - it's whether you're regularly exposing it to enough friction to stay calibrated. Not a fully instrumented experiment with metrics and statistical significance. Just honest evaluation: is what I thought would happen actually happening? Is this direction still pulling where I thought it would?
I've been sitting with this idea for a while now - partly because I'm thinking about how I'd describe what I actually bring to early-stage product work. It's not the playbook. The playbook I can run, but it's not the thing I'd lead with as a differentiator. What I'd lead with is this: years of compressing context into fast, directional decisions - and the discipline to question them before they harden into convictions I stop testing.
Maybe the honest name for that is intuition. I'm less apologetic about it than I used to be.