Brett Firth | AI & Product Management

If you're a Product Mananger, you're an AI Product Manager!

I believe AI has the potential to revolutionise product management by enabling data-driven decision-making, enhancing personalisation and customer engagement, streamlining operations, and fostering innovation! However, it's essential for product managers to understand the capabilities and limitations of AI technologies and to integrate them thoughtfully into their product development processes.

I’m just putting it out there, we’re at a point where I don’t believe you can be a product manager without being an AI product manager, there I said it…

I’m coming at this from two angles, both from the perspective of a product manager using AI tools to better deliver their work, essentially as a customer of AI tools to improve workflow (we’ll go into more detail on this shortly) and secondly, all product managers should be asking the following; how do I incorporate, or build AI into my product/s to get to value faster, or to execute on strategy more rapidly?

I think it's a mistake to draw a dividing line between AI, data and your classic ‘digital’ product managers. Yes, the tech stack might differ, and members of the squad might have different skills, but ultimately, I would expect product managers to be customer-focused, problem-focused and value-focused (Value as defined in the given strategy).

Product managers play a crucial role in ensuring product-market fit, which means that a product satisfies a significant market need. Achieving product-market fit involves understanding customer needs, aligning product features with those needs, and continuously iterating based on feedback. Here are some key strategies that product managers use.

Customer Research, Define Target Customer Segments, Develop a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Iterative Development, Key Metrics and Analytics, Cross-Functional Collaboration, Pricing and Positioning, Feedback Loops, Customer Validation, Market Testing, Competitor Analysis. None of the above should come as a surprise. Shock, AI Product Managers also use these strategies and tools in their daily work flow. If anything AI enhances many of these strategies to find product market fit. Becoming truly data-driven in decision-making is the goal as it reduces risk and increases the likelihood of solving real customer problems.

I did say I’d come back to it… So what tools can help product managers with their daily tasks and workflow, ultimately enabling them to focus on more of the strategy creation and creative tasks? Here are a few interesting ones:

Notion - Stands out as an exceptional solution, seamlessly integrating AI capabilities to revolutionise project management, note summarisation, and action item creation.

Google Trends - In the ever-evolving business and consumer behaviour landscape, staying ahead of market trends is paramount

Mixpanel - Enables tracking user engagement and behaviour patterns in real-time, allowing businesses to make data-driven decisions. It provides insights into how users interact with products, helps identify patterns, and supports informed decisions about product development and marketing strategies.

Collato - Collato attends and transcribes your meetings. Later, you can connect your other tools, upload files and PDFs, add voice notes, photos of handwritten notes, and more to create custom and polished documents in seconds.

Zeda.io - For all things customer feedback. Zeda.io is a product discovery and strategy platform designed for customer-focused teams. It assists in identifying customer problems, determines the next steps in product development based on actionable product intelligence, and creates product strategies that drive desirable business outcomes.

Adobe Target - An AI-powered personalisation platform that can help businesses deliver personalised experiences across channels. It, like the others, uses machine learning algorithms to analyse customer behaviour and provide personalised recommendations, messages, and offers.

And hey, why not… Chat GPT, Co-Pilot, Gemini (other generative AI tools are available). These tools don’t change what you do as a product manager, but they should help you do it better, with more accuracy and at a faster pace. They’re generally centred around market research and predictive analysis, data trend analysis, documentation, content creation and communication of the aforementioned.

Do you remember when Robotic Process Automation or RPA was the hot topic? I remember working in this field and we told our clients, because it was true, that RPA frees up your time, which in turn enables you, the human, to focus on higher value tasks that require strategic thinking, or creativity that certainly RPA and even AI has not yet mastered!

I don’t believe AI has killed off product management, but anyone who is ignoring the fact that it is changing how we do our jobs is going to get left behind. Embrace the change folks, I don’t think it is going to slow down any time soon!

That’s a great idea for another piece though, I’ll write my thoughts about this soon though