Why AI Initiatives Break Normal Product Manager Instincts - Follow Up Story

What happened after writing a recent Product Management IRL article? These insights are for paid subscribers to Product Management IRL.

This week’s backstory is about adding AI to your product workflows:

It was an initiative from above: prioritize product manager workflows for AI agents. I’m one of four product managers picked for this.

We had a single slide with typical product manager activities. Writing PRDs, developing business cases, generating marketing material. It missed a few key activities like supporting sales and defining offers.

We ranked about 20 activities for AI agents. Activities that needed judgment or human trust were ranked low. Tedious work was ranked high for AI agents.

Writing PRDs seemed like a good candidate for an AI agent.

I started thinking about the requirements for an AI agent that writes a PRD.

I quickly found things that an AI agent could do:

• market research and summarize TAM and SAM

• PRD overview that summarizes the initiative

• Pricing sensitivity

• competitive analysis

• use cases

Then I found the AI agent needed much more to go farther:

• business case ownership

• product business decisions

• process adaptations

• governance and approvals

When I’m faced with a product initiative with this many problems, I park it.

On the other hand, every day I read about a product manager who did something amazing with an AI agent. Including using agents to write PRDs.

What are product managers doing differently?

I found that product managers don’t follow their usual approach to AI initiatives. This is what is different:

Product managers doing an AI initiative focus on learning and controlled experiments. They don’t worry about operational stability.

Its a different approach to product management when AI touches your product. It is more akin to transformation leadership.

This means my AI transformation is one workflow and not a whole PRD.

I was curious if I could ditch my product manager instincts and think like a transformation leader.