Kevin Yien: How decision logs build product sense fast

Yien frames product management as turning the potential energy of engineers, designers, and others into real customer value with minimal loss. Many early-stage or self-referential teams (e.g. building for engineers/designers) can function well without PMs, as long as someone performs the PM activities.

Rather than jumping directly into PM, Yien recommends starting where you’d otherwise “delegate” PM work—from shipping code, designing experiences, or selling/supporting customers—to gain firsthand understanding of building and serving products, then layering PM responsibilities on top.

Writing sharp PRDs, user messaging, and internal docs clarifies thinking and aligns teams and customers. Yien suggests reading compelling, action-driving writing (not just PM docs), varying sentence cadence, and practicing internal “silent doc reads” to refine and stress-test written thinking.

PMs should define constraints like target user, jobs-to-be-done, platforms, and key principles (e.g. speed over perfect consistency) so eng and design can explore freely within a clear box. At the same time, PMs must care about final details—Yien spent a week tuning a POS animation because it meaningfully affected adoption.

Yien defines product sense as making good decisions with insufficient data. He keeps a daily log and tags decisions with rationale, then revisits them after outcomes are known. He also “simulates” other teams’ and companies’ choices (e.g. Shopify’s Shop app) to get many more decision reps than his job alone provides.