[vanillacupcake]

In customer focused companies and at most places I've worked, many team members are indispensable product thinkers (from the CEO to the most junior developer). Simply put, you don't need to be a product manager to be a great product asset or excel at any one of these traits listed in the article. On high functioning teams, product is democratized and many contribute to the roadmap. When product is described as a role, such as product manager, the individual is responsible for bringing teams together through a collaborative process and rallying the team to go all in on a initiative/roadmap to achieve a goal for the business or company. There's other traits involved such as collaboration, practical management of deliverables and timelines, people management, and relentless focus on quality. Last but not least, the article's focus on intuition as a trait didn't seem like the right fit, since many ppl think of intuition as inherent and not learned. Intuition is a combination of experience and continued learning. Anyone who talks with customer, studies an industry, or listens deeply to their coworkers is building intuition around the problem. In practice, I think by saying Data and Intuition, the author intended something more akin to pattern recognition - which again is something available to all of us!