The AI Fueled Product Manager – The Best Version of You
Fear not, product managers. AI isn’t going to take your job. Quite the opposite. It’s going to make you a better product manager than you ever imagined. The AI fueled product manager also gives product management leaders and executives their long-awaited wish of having a team with stronger market savvy that consistently operates more strategically and does it with a high degree of consistency.
Taking You Out of Your Comfort Zone
Get ready, product managers because AI is definitely going to change your job if it hasn’t already, but you’re going to love it! Imagine directing your product more than managing it. It’s the difference between playing offense (directing) versus defense (managing). Get ready to be pushed out of your comfort zone.
The pace of product management has accelerated exponentially in recent years because of agile development and the relentless focus on metrics. Agile is a great software development methodology but it has consumed product managers to the point where they have almost no capacity to do product management. Most product managers have become slaves to feeding the backlog and driving sprints.
That’s all about to change, and for the better. Here’s the thing. If you have a product manager title (technical product manager excluded) and you love creating wireframes and functional specs, AI is going to push you way out of your comfort zone in a hurry. Get ready to get out of the weeds and direct the business of your product.
Don’t get me wrong. The software world is starved for talent to create more usable products. It’s just not the responsibility of a product manager. Leave it to the design and UX specialists to create usable products. Your job as a product manager is to make sure designers and engineers have crystal clear targets for customer value they can easily hit.
Staples of the Product Manager Job Description
Most product management job descriptions still list responsibilities for vision, strategy, customer discovery, growth mindset, thought leadership, etc., only to be followed by things like writing detailed product specifications, orchestrating sprints, and so on.
Here’s the honest truth. Once you start writing functional specs and working with engineering to orchestrate sprints, put a fork in yourself. You’re done! You have no capacity to do product management. You’re doing product design and development. If you want to get out of that rut, AI just might be your savior.
The AI Fueled Product Manager
I’ve never been a fan of the Product CEO label, but the AI fueled product manager is much closer to the general manager of a product, as it should be. Here’s what you can look forward to that will put you in a stronger position to play offense and direct your product versus managing it where you’re constantly playing defense.
The best part about using AI is, it will take you a fraction of the time it would take otherwise to acquire the necessary knowledge to direct your product and run it like a business.
Here’s what you can look forward to.
AI and Deeper Knowledge of Markets and Customers
It’s the most foundational skill product managers need for success but it’s also the one that’s the most time consuming, until now. Complete with sources, your AI engine will give you the quantitative picture on market size, growth potential and competitive landscape.
Then it’ll give you deeper insights on your target customers than you’ve ever had. From their market dynamics and strategic priorities all the way down to the (user) jobs in the trenches and everything in between, you’ll be more knowledgeable than everyone else about how to create real measurable customer value. Every product decision you make will be completely defensible because it sits on a strong foundation of market and customer value.
Bottom line: you’ll have the most well rounded view of the market you’ve ever had and you’ll have it no time flat. Be sure to verify sources!
With a strong foundation of market knowledge as your jumping point for every product decision, you’re poised to start leading and directing your products from a pure unbiased value/market perspective.
AI and Value Based Opportunity Analysis + Decision Making
Now that you’re clear on what the market is doing, it’ll be much easier to determine your most lucrative opportunities for delivering maximum value to both customers and to your own organization.
Here’s what AI will do for you. It’ll give you a simple and logical way to quantifiably compare your various product investment opportunities with the best choices that simultaneously optimize value to both the market/customers and to your own organization.
Product management is about to be seen in a whole different light.
AI and Strategic Planning
Your strategic plan is little more than the collective information from the markets and your value-based opportunity analysis assembled into a document with your investment decisions, plus the execution tactics from other disciplines required to make it happen.
You don’t even have to create the document. Ask AI to assemble everything into a simple presentation that energizes stakeholders. A little tweaking here and there and you’re ready to blow people away with your market savvy, value analysis and resulting strategic decisions.
AI and Day-to-Day Execution
As a product manager that’s now directing, your job is to keep a pulse on all the moving parts of your strategy to make sure the execution can overcome any unforeseen speed bumps.
Where AI can be most beneficial with detailed planning and execution is by distilling down your product priorities into sprints. Feed it a good baseline of past productivity from your design and development teams and you’ll be amazed at how accurately it can plan your sprints.
Again, you’re the oversight committee. Tweak when and where necessary and orchestrate the execution.
AI and Rollout Artifacts
The vast majority of your rollout artifacts are subsets of all the content created up to and through the execution phase.
For example, your release notes are a list of user stories that explain the user job task, the outcome, the obstacles standing in the way of that outcome and the features you’ve added to remove those obstacles.
Your product briefs include those same user stories headlined by the market dynamics, the subsequent business priorities of your target customers, and how your products will help them execute those priorities by eliminating a series of obstacles at the job level.
AI will create these artifacts much faster than any product manager and the communication of the content will be superior in most cases. You won’t need creative writing skills!
The Bottom Line on the AI Fueled Product Manager
If AI can do all of these things so well, why do we need product managers?
The answer is simple.
Who’s going to tell AI what to do?
Who’s going to verify everything AI gives you is legit?
Who’s going to make decisions with all the info AI has given you.
Who’s going to call a meeting of stakeholders and get them on board?
Who’s going to answer questions from stakeholders?
I can give you 100 more of these, but I won’t! Just a few.
Who’s going to do discovery with customers and prospects?
Who’s going to make decisions if you change priorities to win a sales deal?
Who’s going to resolve escalated customer issues with the product?
Who’s going to resolve unforeseen design and development issues?
Who’s going to make critical scope, timing and tradeoff decisions?
Who’s going to be the face of the product?
It’s not AI.
It’s the product manager, back to doing the job exactly the way it was intended, and now with a support system that makes it more possible than it has ever been.
If you want to evolve your team into a group of AI fueled product managers, contact us about a personalized workshop and you’ll know exactly what good looks like for you.
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