A few weeks ago I wrote about what makes AI Product Managers different, examining the AI product management specialisation. My main takeaway was the AI PM will still conduct key product management activities, from identifying customer problems to shipping solutions. The same applies to product managers not specialised in AI: even with the advent of ChatGpT and other AI based tools, a good PM will still need a solid product mindset, ask the right questions and utilise the right data to answer those questions. However, there’s no doubt in my mind that AI tools will change the nature of a PM’s daily activities. In this post I’ll dive into some of the AI tools and prompts that PMs can use throughout the product development lifecycle (from ‘why’ to ‘how’ and back again), using AI to work through specific tasks or questions more efficiently.

Why

Starting with the ‘why’, the PM needs to understand the customer problem to solve. Specifically, they need to:

• Identify users goals, user Jobs To Be Done
• Identify users pain points and assess their impact
• Understand existing alternatives to solving the problem
• Outline the business case behind the problem to solve

Task	How AI can help the PM	Sample tools
Identify user goals	List and predict user goals based on historical data	Pecan Azure Machine Learning
Discover user problems	Analyse user interviews, reviews, tickets, usage metrics and social media posts to identify user problems	Maze Dovetail MonkeyLearn ChatGpT Claude Gemini
Do market research	Map and track competitors automatically, generate competitive insights and trends	Crayon Kompyte ChatGpT

Sample prompts to use to get help with figuring out the ‘why’:

• My target persona is [brief persona description]. What are their main pain points with respect to [problem or need].
• What assumptions can you give about why a [persona] would not pay for a [solution].
• I am building [product or feature]. Tell me 5 reasons why this feature will work for my users. Tell me 5 reasons why this feature won’t work for my users.
• I am building a [product or feature]. Can you give a me list of the top 5 competitors in this space, their strengths and weaknesses. Please put the data in a table format.
• Using the historical financial data provided for [business or product], generate a financial forecast for next year. Include revenue, fixed and variable cost, and profit margins.

Who

PMs can use AI based tools and specific prompts to identify and understand their target persona(s):

• Who has the problem that we’re looking to solve?
• What are the main characteristics and demographics of our target persona?

Task	How AI can help the PM	Sample tools
Identify personas or create customer segments	Analyse customer data to find patterns in existing customer data or identify potential customers	IBM Watson Analytics Helixa Audiense
Create a persona or ideal customer profile	Automate template creation	Hubspot Make My Persona UXPressia Delve AI
Granular understanding of customer behaviours and needs	Process and analyse large customer data sets and create customer segments	RapidMiner BigQueryML  IBM Watson

Sample prompts to use to get help with figuring out the ‘who’:

• Describe a typical user of a [product or feature].
• What are the common demographics of a [target persona].
• Develop a detailed user persona for a [product or feature].

What

Whether it’s coming up with a strategy or writing a product requirements spec, AI can help PMs provide great input into the ‘what’. PMs will need to make sure they use they feed the right data and prompts to:

• Create a product vision and strategy
• Identify strategic opportunities
• Set product goals and KPIs
• Draft a product roadmap
• Gather product requirements

Task	How AI can help the PM	Sample tools
Create a product vision and strategy	Analyse user data, markets, competitors to identify trends and new opportunities	ChatGpT Claude Gemini Perplexity
Identify strategic opportunities	Analyse text data from reports, news articles or social media. Simulate market scenarios and predict business impact	ChatGpT Claude Gemini Perplexity
Set product goals and KPIs	Collect and analyse data to inform or suggest goals and KPIs	Tableau AI Workday Adaptive Planning ChatGpT Claude Gemini Perplexity
Draft a product roadmap	Generate roadmap items, making sure they align with the product vision, strategy and goals	ProdPad ChatGpT Claude Gemini Productroadmap.ai
Gather product requirements	Generate a Product Requirements Document (PRD) from scratch or iterate on an existing one	ChatPRD WriteMyPRD Notion AI Jasper AI

Sample prompts to use to get help with figuring out the ‘what’:

• I am building a [product or feature]. What are the main functional and non-functional requirements to include in the Product Requirements Document?
• My product is a [product or feature]. Help me brainstorm new features for a multi-year roadmap for this product.
• This is the existing PRD for [product or feature]. Help me improve the existing PRD.
• Can you discuss potential solutions to overcome [specific user problems or challenges].
• I am building a [solution] for [persona]. Can you help with 10 important user stories.

How

The ‘how’ of designing, building and delivering a product is a broad one. We already see how AI tools can help PMs, designers and engineers in their jobs, and here are some good sample tools to consider:

Task	How can AI help the PM	Sample tools
Designing and prototyping	Generate prototypes based on requirements as well as suggest design patterns	Figma AI Adobe Firefly Uizard Replit Vercel vO
Writing code	Generate code and assist with refactoring code	Devin Microsoft Copilot Github Copilot
Testing & QA	Writing and conducting tests independently	Katalon Codium Diffblue Code Climate
Continuous integration and deployment	Predicting potential failures in continuous integration / development pipelines	Jenkins X AWS CodePipeline Seldon

Sample prompts to use to get help with figuring out the ‘how’:

• Develop a QA test case scenario to test [product or feature].
• Design a comprehensive bug testing protocol to anticipate potential issues with our upcoming software release
• I am building a [product or feature]. Draft a delivery plan that outlines the delivery milestones, dependencies and risks
• I am building a [product or feature]. Carry out a pre-mortem analysis to anticipate potential risks for our software project

Main learning point: The role of the PM is already being impacted by AI, but in a good way. AI tools and prompts that I’ve looked at in this post help reduce the ‘cold start’ problem many PMs face: getting started with the problem to solve or the plan to achieve the desired outcome. With the right inputs and data, ChatGpT and specialised AI tools can help PMs get started with the ‘why, who, what and how’, providing them with a solid starting point to manage the product throughout its lifecycle.

Related links for further learning:

1. https://medium.com/@treycwong/prompt-engineering-a-user-persona-with-chatgpt-and-character-ai-cd36c554fa25
2. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/125-useful-chatgpt-prompt-ideas-product-management-hall-mba-cspo–ikdme/
3. https://medium.com/@workboxtech/ai-tools-for-smarter-continuous-integration-and-deployment-f66f1a73e4f7
4. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-use-chatgpt-financial-forecasting-christian-martinez-bygne/
5. https://marcabraham.com/2023/11/17/how-can-established-disciplines-benefit-from-generative-ai/
6. https://userpilot.com/blog/chatgpt-for-product-managers/
7. https://www.uxdesigninstitute.com/blog/top-ai-tools-for-user-research/
8. https://medium.com/the-simulacrum/product-management-will-be-taken-over-by-ai-in-5-years-780d1302fefc