By Stacey Weber
When I took my first position in product management, I thought the most important thing that development and the organization wanted from me was to be deeply intertwined with development, helping to dictate features and drive the schedule. After experiencing strong resistance to my first requirement document, which included screenshots, I had to accept that I was not a designer and my development team already knew how to build product.
I got lucky when a teammate found Pragmatic Marketing, and a small group of us went through their training program. There, I learned that I was better off distancing myself a bit from development — instead focusing on bringing them the market information they needed to do their job. This shift allowed me to become a respected, market-focused product manager.
However, today, being market-focused is not enough. I find myself moving back toward technology, but in a different way. Now, I can talk to my computer and have it help me put documents together. I can conduct numerous interviews and drop them into an AI tool to help me analyze the data. Product management has, in some ways, come full circle, and in other ways, evolved far beyond what I had ever pictured for it.
As we move forward into the era of AI, it’s important to recognize that no one can avoid the advent of it. For product management and product marketing professionals, AI can be like a personal assistant who is always available. The product management professionals of tomorrow will need to embrace the capabilities of AI in order to make themselves more efficient and more effective. Tools like ChatGPT can help us do analysis more quickly. Copilot in the Office suite can help us put documents together more quickly. The standout product professionals of tomorrow will understand the capabilities and the limitations of AI and they will harness the power of AI to make themselves achieve more than they could before.
In addition to understanding our markets, product management professionals must now embrace AI.
There is one aspect of our jobs, however, that hasn’t changed. Ultimately, every single thing we are seeking to achieve forces us to rely on other human beings. The world has evolved to becoming more and more digital and virtual, and yet product professionals still have to figure out how to authentically connect with all of the people around them. There is a wide variety of people we have to connect with: sales and marketing, customer service, our buyers and users, engineering and design, project management, and quality assurance. We rely on a wide variety of human beings!
Despite the advancements in technology, one aspect remains unchanged: AI is not going to change the human interactions involved in product management and product marketing. No AI tool in the world is going to inspire your teams to work hard to solve the problems you’ve discovered in your market. No AI tool is going to get all of your executives to see what they can get out of your project so that they support it even when you’re not in the room. And while AI tools might assist you in finding market trends, there is no way that you can truly understand those trends without interacting with real human beings in your market.
To truly succeed, product professionals must dive back into the technology and learn how to use AI to make ourselves more effective. But those AI tools are not going to help us if we don’t understand how to authentically connect with other human beings.
CI2 Advisors provides coaching and workshops around our Dynamic Relationship Model. This model provides a repeatable approach to enable us to authentically connect with human beings — even in a very virtual and digital world. Check out our workshop at https://ci2advisors.com/workshop/ .
