AI is fantastic at synthesizing data. It can process vast amounts of information, surface trends, and summarize research in seconds. It’s tempting to let it do all that work for you—why spend hours digging through data when AI can hand you the answer?
But here’s the catch: when AI does the synthesis, you skip an essential part of the process. You don’t inhabit the data.
Inhabiting the data isn’t just about getting insights. It’s about how the act of wrestling with raw information rewires your brain. When you sort, categorize, and manipulate data yourself, you don’t just understand the problem—you internalize it. And that’s where deep intuition comes from.
Want Better Product Intuition? Get Your Hands Dirty.
Product people are always asking, “How do I build product intuition?” The answer isn’t reading AI-generated reports. It’s doing the work.
- Watch people interact with products.
- Notice the small details—where do they hesitate? Where do they smile?
- Take notes. Draw diagrams. Move ideas around.
This is why Post-its are still one of the best thinking tools. Moving ideas around with your hands engages your brain in a different way. Research on embodied cognition suggests that physically interacting with information helps you process it more deeply (Roosen, 2020).
A study on sticky notes in design work found that writing, moving, and grouping ideas externally helped teams think better and faster (ResearchGate, 2021). It’s not just about organizing thoughts—it’s about making them tangible so your brain can really work on them.
AI is a Tool—Not a Shortcut to Understanding
AI can speed up tedious work, but if you let it do all your thinking, you’ll miss out on the deep learning that makes great product decisions possible. AI-generated insights look right, but without the struggle, without the synthesis, you won’t feel them in your gut. And gut instinct—true product intuition—only comes from experience.
So, if you want to build real product sense, don’t just read the summary. Live in the data. Move it around. Let it change how you think.
That’s how you go from knowing something to understanding it. And that’s where the best ideas come from.
What do you think? Have you ever felt the difference between seeing the insight and feeling it?