Harnessing the Power of AI in Product Development
As the world becomes increasingly digital, artificial intelligence (AI) is playing a more and more important role in product development. Product managers and designers who want to stay ahead of the curve need to understand how to leverage AI to be more effective in their roles.
How can AI empower you and the product development process?
AI can help product managers and designers be more efficient and effective in a number of ways. For example, AI can be used to:
Analyze product data: Product analytics data can be a gold mine, but it takes work to mine. Luckily, AI can be leveraged in this process to get you going. If you are lucky enough to have a good data or product analyst, then this will make them more efficient. Sometimes, this AI is built into existing tools, but sometimes, you might combine an existing data tool to leverage a third-party AI framework for these insights.
Classify customer feedback: Understanding qualitative feedback through text responses in surveys or through a customer feedback mechanism can benefit from leveraging AI. AI can easily categorize feedback into segments and assign positivity/negativity levels.
Draft and edit content: There is a lot of content product people develop, ranging from product documentation, marketing materials, strategy overviews, survey questions, etc. AI is great at providing a good first draft of many types of content when provided with good prompting. AI is also great at editing content when prompted with this mindset.
Create visuals: One impressive and fun area of AI is leveraging it to create visuals. Take any idea and create static images or even videos based on prompts. Images and videos are often helpful in communicating stories to capture internal and external customers’ input but are oftentimes not used as much as desired because of the cost or resources needed to have good visuals and video.
Improve decision-making: AI can be used to provide product managers with insights into customer behavior and trends. This information can help product managers make better decisions about product development and marketing.
Market research: AI can help streamline the market research process, whether through looking through secondary research and summarizing key findings or formulating surveys to leverage in primary research.
Be a second set of eyes: AI is a great second set of eyes, whether it is reviewing content you wrote, evaluating the quality of a presentation, identifying issues in a piece of software, and much more. There are many ways that AI can be a second set of eyes that can help product managers avoid costly mistakes.
Roadmapping assistance: Leveraging various customer inputs and market research and identifying resources can allow you to leverage AI to help create and update your roadmap. More and more traditional roadmapping tools are looking at embedding AI directly into their tools to help product managers here.
Generate new ideas: AI can be used to generate new ideas for products and features. This can help product managers stay ahead of the competition and deliver innovative products that meet the needs of their customers.
Improve product quality: AI can be used to test products and identify bugs. This can help ensure that products are high quality and meet the expectations of their customers.
Improve customer experience: AI can be used to personalize the customer experience by providing users with tailored recommendations and offers. This can help product managers build stronger relationships with their customers and increase customer satisfaction.
Generate prototypes: There are a variety of AI-powered prototyping tools. This allows for product managers and designers to quickly generate designs and prototypes to help get customer input.
AI-powered products: More and more products are leveraging AI as a core part of their product offering. Developments in AI have made this integration process faster and at a lower cost. Everything from classification, summarization, image and video generation, document decoding, and much more can now be done more rapidly, more cheaply, and more effectively than just a few years ago. Product managers and designers are looking for ways to leverage AI and its many uses to solve customer problems.
There are many other ways that product managers and designers are leveraging AI, but this list will help spur your thought process of how AI can be a useful tool for you. Be on the lookout for more in-depth articles in the coming months here, diving deeply into how AI can be used in these specific areas and diving into some specific use cases and how to go about leveraging AI for them.
How to get started with AI?
If you're a product manager or designer who is interested in leveraging AI, there are a few things you can do to get started. First, you need to learn about the different types of AI and how they can be used in product development. There are a number of resources available online that can help you with this. Here are a few of the resources I have personally leveraged:
Podcasts:
Online Courses (ordered in recommended progression):
ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers by Andrew Ng and Isa Fulford (DeepLearning.ai, OpenAI)
Prompt Engineering with ChatGPT for Jules White, PhD (Vanderbilt, Coursera.org)
There are many other courses, podcasts, websites, and more that I leverage to expand my knowledge of AI. My most meaningful learning has simply been getting my hands dirty through the use of different AI, which is oftentimes free or relatively low-cost. As of the time of this article, I have Bard, ChatGPT, Claude 2, and You.com all populate when my main browser is opened. Further, on my phone, I have a folder that holds ChatGPT, Bing, Microsoft Copilot, Poe, and You.com apps. Every day, I use different AI options to help me save time and perform better. Sometimes I will try the same activity leveraging different models to experiment.
Great product managers and designers are curious, and my guess if you are reading this is you might be above average in curiosity. Leverage this curiosity around learning by doing with AI, and you will be the beneficiary.
It's important to remember that AI is a tool, and like any tool, it can be used for good or for evil. It's important to use AI ethically and responsibly. When used correctly, AI can be a powerful tool that can help product managers be more efficient and effective.
Now, take the opportunity today to leverage AI in something you do. Remember to be on the lookout for more articles that will dive deeper into the topics identified above. Some of the upcoming articles will be about thinking strategically in leveraging AI in your product, possible ways to differentiate your product with AI, prompt engineering in product development, and more.
Happy experimenting!