Why Product Sense Interviews Still Matter in the Age of AI Agents
There’s a question worth sitting with before your next PM interview: if AI agents can now scan a GitHub repo, write bug fixes, and close the feedback loop on their own, does product sense still matter? The short answer is yes — and understanding why tells you a lot about what it actually means to build great products.
What Product Sense Is Really Testing
Product sense interviews aren’t about your ability to generate feature ideas. They’re testing something more fundamental: can you tell the difference between a bad idea, a good one, and a great one?
As a PM, your days are packed — customer calls, engineering syncs, writing user stories, reviewing go-to-market plans. But underneath all of that activity, there’s a single throughline: are you making good decisions? The job, stripped to its core, is building features that deliver real value for both the business and the customer.
Product sense interviews put that skill under a microscope.
The Customer Perspective Is the Whole Game
Here’s the thing: ideas are cheap. As a PM, you’re constantly swimming in them — from your team, your customers, your competitors, your own intuition. What’s rare, and what companies are actually hiring for, is the judgment to know which ideas are worth pursuing.
That judgment comes from one place: a genuine, practiced ability to think from the customer’s perspective. Not just describing what a customer wants in theory, but getting inside their shoes well enough to make trade-offs, prioritize ruthlessly, and design something that actually solves a real problem.
That’s what product sense interviews are designed to surface. They’re a structured way to answer the question: does this person think like a customer when the pressure is on?
Why AI Doesn’t Make This Obsolete
AI agents are remarkable — they can execute, automate, and iterate at speeds no human team can match. But they don’t replace the judgment call that precedes the work. Deciding what to build, for whom, and why it matters is still a distinctly human responsibility.
If anything, the rise of AI makes product sense more important. When your team can ship ten times faster, bad decisions get compounded ten times faster too. The cost of building the wrong thing doesn’t go down with AI — it goes up.
What This Means for Founders and Early-Stage Teams
If you’re an early-stage founder wearing the PM hat, this framing should feel familiar. You don’t have the luxury of building features based on gut instinct alone. Every prioritization decision is a bet, and the founders who win are the ones who’ve trained themselves to see the world through their customers’ eyes before they write a single line of code.
Whether you’re preparing for a PM interview or making your next product roadmap call, the skill is the same: develop a genuine, customer-first point of view — and make it second nature.
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