Hey everyone! This April, we turned our focus on product management and invited a few product managers from different industries to share their thoughts on how AI is changing their domain! So, how did the interactions start and where did the eve of a fine Friday evening take us?! Is AI changing product management and making every product manager’s role and life easy and creative at work? Or what if reality offers a different picture than the one we have in mind? Let’s answer these questions in this blog post and enjoy revisiting some of the best moments of our April meet up!
Cheers to the first welcome drink of the evening, and let the product managers talk!
It all started with the welcome drink served to everyone assembled at one of the finest restaurants in Chennai! When all our participants started showing up at Savya Rasa with their own questions to get answered in the meeting and got greeted by the welcome drink from the Savya Rasa team, that’s where our adventures for the evening began! From introducing each other to sharing their take on how AI will change the product roadmap and their roles too, not to mention the delicious menu we explored together, everything took us towards understanding how AI is becoming an integral part of product management! And here is what they told us!
Areas in product management where AI is making a difference
- Data Analysis
- Customer Research
- Writing Product Requirement Doc
- User engagement
Product managers use AI to analyse data, do customer research, save time while writing product requirement docs and run trials by introducing AI features into their product to see if it could increase user engagement and enhance the product on the whole. While these are the most common areas where they use AI, adding AI features into their product totally depends on several factors and calls for careful validation before experimenting with it in action/ for real!
Reasons why companies add AI features into their product!
The advent of new AI technologies has been a ground-breaking change to harness and embrace for professionals from all walks of business, and product management is no exception to this! And the decision to add AI features into a product depends on the business use case and the problem in hand to be solved.
However, some of the reasons that influence the addition of AI features into a product and sway product management teams to forcefit AI features are market pressure, investors’ take on AI, client needs, current market and tech trends, increase user-traction, etc.,
Validating AI features: How to figure out when to stop?
Now, adding AI features into a product is a time-consuming and expensive process for product managers to follow.From training to deployment, it involves a lot of delicate steps and calls for a budget-friendly approach to make things happen. So, how do project managers validate any idea that propels them towards adding AI into their product?
Some of the factors they take into account includes:
- The cost involved in training and deployment and ensuring data security
- Questioning whether adding an AI feature will help them solve the real-problem they have promised to solve and ends up adding an incremental value to their product
- Evaluating the needs of their customers and figuring out if they will pay extra for the AI feature built for them, etc.,
Challenges in implementing AI features in a product
Even though AI has managed to escape the clutches of being a sci-fi concept and have proven to be one of the most fascinating tech for everyone to tinker with, it’s no wonder that even product managers find it to have limitations in product management.
When it comes to solving a real problem for their customers, even though AI has the potential to show a different approach, product managers believe that it’s not the solution for every problem! And implementing AI into a product definitely needs validation and must be experimented on the grounds that it solves the real problem and doesn’t involve massive cost to train and deploy!
However, since there is a growing traction for solving everything with AI, they believe people fail to take a reality check sometimes, making things challenging in product management.
That said, these are the most valuable insights we gained from our April meetup dinner with product managers!
