Last week, I took Shreyas Doshi's week-long Improving your Product Sense course. I could go on and on, but I'll just give you a tl;dr:

Check out the link. If you do product and it sounds even remotely interesting, apply. It will be the best bang for your buck and time (thwap for your time?) of anything that you do this year.

Shreyas broke down the elements of product sense

(Narrator: He's about to go on and on...)

I can't share specific details about what is special about the course (I couldn't it it all in this post and I wouldn't do it justice anyway), but I think I can identify what makes this course stand out from the rest.

When it comes to any skill (and product sense is a skill), the best strategy is to be born gifted at it. If this is you, congratulations! If it's not you, that's ok. Most people aren't born naturally gifted at things. The world would be a pretty boring place if we were.

The next strategy is to develop it yourself. The good news is there are no barriers to improving (other than your own motivation and your baseline skill). And with the internet, it costs basically nothing to educate yourself on anything, anywhere you are, at any time. Of course, the bad news is it will tend to take a long time and lots of effort. There are so many wrong turns and dead ends you have to go down and your main feedback mechanism is your own experience. it will feel like you're walking around, constantly banging into walls, but it does work. And if you remain open-minded, curious, and persistent, you can improve whatever skill you want to.

Finally, you can find someone to teach you the skill. Presumably they've taken some insight and packaged it in a way that let's you improve your skills more efficiently than if you were walking around banging into walls. But there's another conundrum. Which teacher(s) do I pick to learn from? If you've made it this far, bear with me for a second, because I'll (hopefully) explain what differentiates this course from the rest.

Shreyas has often talked about frameworks as "packaged intuition." As with skill, it's best to just have the intuition, but you lack that, a framework is a good middle ground between having intuition and not having it. The trick is to recognize that as with anything packaged (like a compressed file) the process is "lossy." Some amount of value is lost in the packaging process. We hope not too much.

can i haz less compression?

So with a framework you want to evaluate 2 things. 

And we can do something similar with teachers

So you can have a teacher who is strong in 1, but weak in 2. The expert who is clearly skilled, but is unable to translate why and how they do what they do. It's a mystery, even to them.

You can also have the expert communicator. Someone who has studied the work of others, read everything there is to read, and sorted out the compelling from the BS. They can also hold students' attention and understand how to efficiently communicate complex ideas. But their baseline is lower. Often they're working from the repackaged frameworks (already lossy) of others and if they've been teaching a long time (how do you think they got so good at teaching in the first place?), they'll have little knowledge gleaned from their own experience.

I think you can see where I'm going with this.

In this course, Shreyas does both. 

He manages to combine a tremendous amount of baseline insight, experience, and skill (that he was born with and that he developed) with an incredible ability to break down and communicate complex concepts and put them to work in practice (lots of practical exercises).

Plus the other students are all rockstars. The exercises and chats with everyone in the course was icing on an already amazing cake.

Like I said, check out the course, you won't regret it: https://maven.com/shreyas-doshi/product-sense