NN/g says product sense needs a feedback loop, not empathy and vibes

Nielsen Norman Group's writer rejects Jules Walter's popular product-sense definition, the empathy-plus-creativity one from Lenny's Newsletter, as unmeasurable. The alternative offered here is a mechanism: pattern-matching current problems against past outcomes, built only by completing the full loop of deciding, shipping, measuring, and reflecting, not by consuming teardowns or critiques secondhand. The sharper contribution is naming failure modes, borrowing Hogarth's "wicked situations" where a problem looks familiar but the past solution is wrong, which explains overconfident feature launches better than "lacked empathy" ever could. It's a genuine argument for accountability over vibes, though it offers no way to measure product sense short of years of tracked decisions.