Intuition is trained, not born

Part of our series on taste and shipping fast.

In Walter Isaacson's biography, Jobs describes coming back from seven months in India and seeing how much the people he met there relied on intuition rather than rational analysis, and calling intuition more powerful than intellect. It is easy to read that as mysticism. We read it as a description of expertise: judgment so practised that it no longer feels like reasoning.

The gap

The radio host Ira Glass has a well-known talk about what he calls the gap. When you start out, your taste is good enough to see that your own work is not. For years, what you make falls short of what you can recognise as good. Many people quit there. His advice is volume: do a lot of work, on a deadline, and the gap closes.

Product work is the same. Taste is not a talent you have or don't. It is pattern recognition built from many cycles of: decide, ship, watch what people actually do, and be honest about it.

How AI can help you train it

Here is the good news. The same tools that make shipping cheap make reps cheap. You can now run in a month the number of small experiments that used to take a year. That is a faster way to build intuition, if you treat each one as practice:

• Write down what you expect before you look at the result. Intuition improves only when it can be wrong.

• Watch people use what you built, live or in recordings with their consent. Their hesitations teach more than their answers.

• Keep a log of calls that turned out wrong, and why. Read it every quarter.

• Study products you admire and say precisely what they left out.

AI can give you a hundred variations. Your job is to know, faster each time, which one is right, and to be able to say why.