Product sense case study exercise for product managers

What is the challenge scenario?

Strong product people are defined by the calls they make when the answer is not obvious: incomplete data, misleading metrics, stakeholders who disagree. The bootcamp is explicit that product sense is not a gut feeling, it is a repeatable way to frame problems and reason toward a decision you can defend.

The exercise asks you to bring one real, ambiguous product situation, a feature request, a metric that dropped, a trade off between two teams, and work it the way a strong product manager does: separate the request from the actual problem, define what success looks like before choosing a solution, reason through the weak or misleading signals available, and commit to a call you are willing to defend.

Builders Camp rates this challenge intermediate difficulty and lists it at 60 minutes, which is short for the amount of judgment it demands. Most of that time is spent thinking, not writing, since the exercise deliberately withholds a clean answer and asks you to reason your way to one instead.

What are you asked to do?

Pick an ambiguous situation where the right answer is not clear, and describe it in a few sentences. State what was asked for, then the underlying problem behind it, since the two are rarely the same. Write the outcome that would make this a clear win for both the user and the business, and name the one or two signals you would watch, including which data might be misleading. Lay out your two strongest options against user value, business value, risk or cost, and whether the choice is reversible. Close by making the call: commit to a decision and defend it in a short memo covering what you are doing, why, what you are betting on, and how you would know within a few weeks if you were wrong.

What does a strong answer cover?

This bootcamp does not publish a rubric for its practical challenge, so check your own draft against the curriculum's own questions instead of a worked solution:

• Does the answer separate what was requested from the real problem underneath it, rather than treating the request as the problem itself?
• Does it define success before proposing a solution, with a stated signal to watch rather than a vague sense of progress?
• Does the trade off table name a real cost for each option, including how reversible it is, rather than defaulting to it depends?
• Does the decision memo say specifically how the product manager would know within weeks if the call was wrong?

Skills this exercise practises

Reframing a stated request into the real underlying problem, defining success criteria before choosing a solution, weighing two options on value, risk and reversibility, and writing a decision memo that names its own failure condition.

Which bootcamp does this challenge come from?

This is the practical challenge from Product Sense, Builders Camp's two week bootcamp on strengthening how product people reason, decide and communicate under uncertainty, led by Mihaela Draghici across three 90 minute live sessions. Completing it counts toward that bootcamp's certificate. The RICE prioritization framework and North Star metric examples guides both support the trade off and success definition steps in this exercise, and how to get promoted to senior PM covers the judgment calls this bootcamp practises in a longer career context. The negotiation case study exercise elsewhere in this series practises a related skill: defending a call under pressure from stakeholders who disagree.

Builders Camp runs live and self paced bootcamps in product management and AI product building. See the Product Sense bootcamp for current cohort dates and the full self paced curriculum.