Intuition — The Magic of Creating New Products
In 2012, we founded ThoughtSpot — an enterprise software company that brought a radically new approach to business intelligence (BI) and analytics. We pioneered “search- and AI-driven BI” which, over the years, has become a new category in the space. The product has had great success with a huge number of deployments across some of the world’s largest enterprises. By mid-2018 we were a “unicorn” and one of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley.
I’ve often been asked how some of the innovative product ideas of ThoughtSpot came about. Did they magically pop into someone’s head one day? Did they emerge from rigorous market analysis and customer interviews? Were they born out of analyzing competitive product offerings and their gaps? Was it all data-driven?
I’ve come to believe that innovative, successful ideas are born in the minds of people who have deep product intuition. This intuition is almost a magical sense of knowing what customers would want and like, and what would actually work in real life. It is the ability to imagine a bold future while remaining grounded in the practical realities of the present. These people imagine amazing, innovative possibilities, but they also have an inexplicable sense of what is likely to be successfully implemented and adopted.
What is this magical intuition? Where does it come from? How does one develop it?
In his dialogues Meno and Phaedo, the Greek philosopher Plato describes intuition as a subconscious awareness of pre-existing knowledge residing in the depths of one’s soul. The knowledge already exists. Intuition is gaining awareness of it. So, how does knowledge come to pre-exist? Even if we discounted Plato’s anamnesis theory of this knowledge existing even before birth, there is truth to the notion of pre-existing knowledge. Pre-existing knowledge is gained through years of life experiences — experiences that may seemingly be unrelated to the thing about which someone has a natural intuition.
Let’s look at one of the greatest product geniuses of our time — Apple’s Steve Jobs. His rich and varied life experiences famously guided his decision making in bringing to market a wealth of incredibly innovative products. Steve Jobs was very interested in Zen Buddhism, which de-emphasizes knowledge of doctrines over directly understanding the nature of existence through meditation. In his youth, he traveled the countryside in India and remarked that “The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do. They use their intuition instead … Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work.”¹ Very early in his life, he was inspired by one of his heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, to position himself at the intersection of humanities and sciences in his career. Calligraphy classes at Reed College instilled in him the sense of beauty that we saw in the typography of Apple computers and the immaculate fit and finish of the iPod and iPhone.
Albert Einstein, one of the greatest human minds, is said to have remarked “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. All great achievements of science must start from intuitive knowledge”.² Certainly, Einstein was not calling for blind leaps of faith, but rather emphasizing the oft-overlooked expert knowledge of the well-informed subconscious.
What do we learn from geniuses like Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein?
One thing to learn is the importance of varied and creative life experiences. Look for experiences that you feel will enrich your soul. Some experiences may seem to have nothing to do with the products you build, but that’s alright. Let these experiences sink in and soak over time. They are the flint from which come the sparks of creative intuition, ready to set the world ablaze.
The most important thing we should learn, however, is to recognize and acknowledge the power of intuition. Do not dismiss intuition, gut feelings, or your sixth sense as unscientific. We have all been told that we need to be data-driven in our decision-making process; data has to be the basis for rational decision making. I would argue, however, that intuition must come before rational decisions. Often times, when creating something radically new, there is no data. Henry Ford’s famous “faster horses” comment was not about ignoring data; it was about the reality of building revolutionary new products that people had never thought possible.
The next time you have that feeling of intuition about something, embrace it. Nurture it for a while and, if it still feels right, then look to the data to see if it can support it. Intuition backed by data — this is what brilliant innovations are born out of. Creation is magical. Creativity comes from intuition somewhere deep within. Reach in, and let it flow.
¹ Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
² Psychology Today
