It was 2 am on a cold January night.
I woke up abruptly, all sweaty and confused.
I just had one of the chilliest nightmares.
I’d dreamed that a dizzying number of roles and professions would disappear in the not-so-distant future, disintegrated by an ever-growing robotic intelligence.
It was like in that visionary Stanley Kubrik’s 1968 science fiction movie “2001: A Space Odyssey“. HAL, the computer with a human personality, refuses to obey the astronaut’s commands. It’s ready to let him die in outer space.
In my nightmare, product management faced a similar fate to the Space Odyssey’s astronaut. I could see many of my PM friends lose their grip and turn irrelevant into career dead-ends. They’d eventually quit it all.
I couldn’t get back to sleep that night. Instead, I kept thinking about what could make such a grim prediction on artificial intelligence untrue. Here’s what surfaced:
First things first, call me an optimist. Still, I doubt AI will eliminate the need for product managers – or similar knowledge-working roles – any time soon.
AI can assist with various tasks: data analysis, identifying patterns, building scenarios, or predicting future behaviors.
But the scope of product management is inherently broader, identifying and distilling customer needs, establishing product strategy, and collaborating across various functions. If you need a refresher, you can look at my 2021 article on “Good or bad product managers.”
What makes product management sticky and so “human” is that permanent need for critical thinking coupled with creative problem-solving and constant collaboration.
So, yes, AI is already becoming a formidable assistant to product managers. It can augment their role and enable them to focus on what truly matters—not replacing them.
And while the AI story is in the making and its capabilities keep growing fast, product managers can leverage it today in several ways.
Here are a few scenarios I experienced and found tremendously helpful.
Please note that the tools I used were either chatGPT, the much-talked-about AI chatbot by OpenAI, or some of its many alternatives. Nothing fancier.
Turning large amounts of data from research into insights faster.
There’s nothing better than face-to-face conversations with your customers to understand their goals, challenges, or frustrations. But synthesizing dozens – or hundreds – of these conversations can quickly become time and resource-intensive.
I poured my verbatim notes from customer visits into AI prompts. I worked around current word count limits and asked for a summary of the key takeaways. After a few seconds, I had a solid view of these customers’ major common issues.
Completing views on market trends and predictions
While AI tools available to the public are still rather generic, they can provide substantial assistance for closing in on key trends or opportunities in many industries. It doesn’t replace the deep knowledge a product manager should have of their market.
Still, it will bring some solid alternative avenues to help you leave no stone unturned. I tried it with prompts on the future of the headsets and computer accessory categories. I got surprisingly solid arrays of predictions to play with and create scenarios from.
Describing benefits descriptions personalized for specific customer segments
While it might not be product management’s role to write the final customer-facing copy, it’s always helpful to provide the best possible illustration of your product’s benefits by the target audience to your marketing friends.
I regrouped into a series of prompts describing the profile of a specific customer group, the benefits of my products, and a desired tone for my copy. The instant result was impressive and “close” to the final copy quality I’d expect from professional writers.
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These are just a few of the many areas you can use today’s chat robots to assist you in your activities as a product manager. There are also many ways these and other AI tools can help automate some of your repetitive tasks and improve your productivity.
Yet, these are still tools. As sophisticated as AI is undoubtedly becoming, it will not replace high-value-add knowledge working roles like product managers soon.
But you’d better learn how to master and leverage AI to help you become a world-class expert in your field. Or else, you’ll soon be outpaced by the competition.
It’s time to embrace the many facets of AI and its tremendous productivity gains. Still, remember that AI is not always correct. So, keep using your judgment too!
Good luck!