Using AI to supercharge your PM powers

The rise of AI is reshaping every role, and product mgmt is no exception. Rather than being worried that AI will take your job, you need to leverage AI tools to supercharge your impact as a PM.

The rise of AI is reshaping every industry and every role type, and product management is no exception. Rather than being worried that AI will take our jobs, the PMs that thrive in this new world will be those that embrace AI and leverage it to supercharge their productivity and maximise their impact.

If you’re thinking about professional development goals for 2025, perhaps this can serve as inspiration, as I explore 3 practical ways you can integrate AI into your daily workflow from tomorrow.

"AI will collapse the Talent Stack”

At Lenny’s Summit last October, Claire Vo, CPO at LaunchDarkly, presented a potentially controversial view that product management as we know it is dying and that we’ll see a rise of AI-powered ‘triple threats” who can handle product, design and engineering – and in some cases achieve more than a traditional cross-functional team (you can watch her talk back here on Lenny’s YouTube).

She goes on to say that "AI will collapse the talent stack", meaning that traditional skill hierarchies will become less relevant in favour of leveraging AI to streamline processes and drive results. So, for example, we might see an engineer write their own user stories (as a PM would) and create high fidelity wireframes (as a designer would) all using AI tools. This will allow for a leaner team shape and move us towards having more ‘generalist specialists’, as she calls them.

However, as PMs she urges that our responsibility is not to be surprised, but to ensure that as product people and product teams we’re evolving and adapting to take advantage of this. The traditional PM skills remain essential (prioritisation, communication, etc), but we should all be automating common tasks to allow us to speed up delivery so that we can use the time we save for more high-value, strategic work and learning new skills.

This change doesn’t have to break us, or our teams; we just need to be mindful and craft our team topologies accordingly. As PMs, our commodity will always be our experience, our ability to think creatively and strategically, and ultimately in our ability to build and scale these AI-powered teams.

3 easy ways to start using AI everyday as a PM

With that in mind, you might be wondering where to start from if you wanted to incorporate AI tools to speed up your tasks as a product manager. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but here are some easy, low effort ways that can deliver maximum impact.

Tip 1: Automate repetitive tasks

Repetitive admin tasks can take up a significant portion of our day as a PM, so getting AI to automate these is a no brainer in my opinion! Now, the specific tasks to automate and the best AI tool to use in each scenario will depend on where you work, but hopefully these examples can serve as some inspiration!

• Use Miro’s AI feature to summarise key insights and actions from your next workshop or meeting. It has a clustering feature to group sticky notes by sentiment or keyword so you can categorise ideas and uncover patterns quickly. You can even use it to analyse your next team retro, and pull-out action items.

• You can use Notion’s AI to streamline preparing status reports and updates for various stakeholders group. It has features to help you re-write your docs in a different style or tone of voice (perhaps a snappier, more formal update for your C-suite stakeholders, and a slightly longer, informal version for adjacent teams like sales and marketing)

• Many tools will natively integrate with Slack (or whatever your company uses for collaboration and communication) allowing you to automate and speed up a whole bunch of things. You can set up a bot to collect standup updates if you do this async, or integrate with Jira, Trello or Asana to send reminders about upcoming sprints and tasks due. You can integrate it with Amplitude to post key performance metrics in your slack channel regularly (versus manual data pulling) or even connect with GitHub to post release notifications and improve visibility for relevant stakeholders. And where you might not already have a native integration, you can use connector tools like Zapier to enable this (and it’s no code as well!).

How can you start? Identify 1 or 2 weekly recurring tasks in your workflow where you can test an AI tool to see how it handles it. Record how much time you’re saving each week to measure how valuable it is (we are PMs afterall, gotta measure everything!)

Tip 2: Analyse user research in half the time

Many user research tools like Maze and LookBack have embedded AI in their offerings allowing you to ask better questions, quickly spot patterns and trends in large volumes of data, automatically create transcripts and summaries, and help you draw actionable insights.

In many cases you can do this with just a few clicks, and suddenly you’ve saved yourself hours of transcribing interviews or sifting through survey data, and instead focus on translating the insights into strategic decisions.

How can you start? Have a look at whatever user research tools you already have an existing license for and see if they have an AI offering you can experiment with. You can even experiment with using good old ChatGPT to draft personas and user journey maps based on data you have.

Tip 3: Curate information to enhance decision-making

I like this tip especially as it can apply to you whether you’re an individual contributor (IC) or a product leader.

I’ve been experimenting with using ChatGPT to quickly identify trends and emerging opportunities in my industry to help me evaluate what the future landscape could look like. I asked it to look at my competitors, review historical trends and macroeconomic data to paint a fuller picture. Based on those responses, I’ve prompted deeper questions into specific areas and scenarios. It’s not perfect by any means, but I feel like it’s given me a good 70% as a starting point to inform our product strategy. My next step will be discussing this with the rest of the leadership team to validate and refine, but it’s saved me from feeling as though I had to start from scratch.

I’ve also been reading about how, with the right prompting, you can use AI to do some predictive modeling, for example to predict the impact of a new feature, or entering a new market, or adjusting your pricing strategy. It can simulate these scenarios and help you weigh the risks and benefits of the potential decision more effectively.

How can you start? Ask ChatGPT to summarise the landscape in <insert your chosen industry here> for 2025. Ask it for predictions based on historical trends and any existing current data. And then take it from there!

Using AI without deteriorating your ‘gut feel’ or creativity

I got into an interesting conversation with an elderly family member as we sat and digested our Christmas dinner (you know those ones where you have to loosen your pants because you ate too much apple crumble and custard...?) about how AI was transforming the workplace. He was concerned that our generation, compared to his, was overly dependent on AI tools and he felt this didn’t give space for creativity or using our own judgement to make the best decisions.

It’s a fair point, and one that you might also be concerned about, and could be the reason why you haven’t yet embraced AI tools. My view here is that you have to treat AI as a complement to your expertise – not instead of. Validate the outputs (be it insights or actions) with your domain knowledge and your own common sense, rather than just blindly following its steer.

Conclusion

The PM role is changing, and AI is at the center of this transformation. Although it’s true that AI might collapse the talent stack as we know it, I think it provides a great opportunity for us as PMs to leverage AI to reduce the amount of time we spend doing ‘busy work’, allowing us to focus on more high value work and outcomes – and that can never be a bad thing!

As you’re setting professional development goals, or looking to learn new skills in 2025, why not embrace the opportunities that AI provides to redefine your role, supercharge your powers, and be even more indispensable to your team and to your organisation? It’s ok to start small too – pick one tool, test it and integrate it into your workflow, and see what difference it makes to your productivity.

I’d love to hear from you in the comments too! What are your favourite AI tools and how are you using them?