Are AI products different to manage?
Should an experienced product manager or an entrepreneur with a strong innovative mindset feel any different in case of an AI product idea that should be brought to life? Here are a few observations from my recent experience!
Product management on steroids
I believe that fundamental principles rarely change, it’s more about how we apply them. If you have experience creating and launching software applications or founding business in general, you should definitely consider taking up an AI one. That said, have in mind that most of the rules we try to adhere to will need to be implemented with more intensity and discipline. That’s due to the simple fact of having extremely high competition and aiming at a market with extremely frequent change of players. So yes, you can do it, just make sure you charge all your backup batteries! And yes, you should do it, as this AI race is like a meteor shower – it doesn’t happen every night that we can watch this kind of spectacle on the sky, nor does a product fever like this one happen many times during one’s career.
Market research as a daily routine
Usually we start our journey with a market research, list the competitors and then go back to revise and update it a few months later. However, with the AI race heating up, the market research we did in the beginning of October 2022 was getting outdated almost on a daily basis. I’d wake up with a newsletter from ProductHunt listing all the new tools that popped up in the previous week and it was similar on other channels as well. We were constantly sharing in our Slack team about new apps we found that were attempting to solve similar problems as we were. No need to explain how this was affecting our backlog and sprint plans.
Lean & Agile more than ever
We were making major changes on our storyboard and backlog every few weeks. Like moving away from the plugin concept and proceeding as a stand alone app, removing 2 out of 3 functionalities we used to consider main etc. We were lucky with the feedback loop as the founders have been in the target audience for years (scratching their own itch), thus the internal network was there for quick feedback. In addition, we partnered with marketing agencies for wider insights.
Micro SaaS – more micro than ever
It’s been some years of Micro SaaS popularity among solo founders and lifestyle entrepreneurs ( Click to read How Micro SaaS is leading Mega Democratization of Digital Entrepreneurship), but the AI fever made it very clear that this year is about go-small-or-go-home. Unless you manage to strip off your product of all the features that are not absolutely necessary, you are very likely to be late for the party. Basically, you choose one feature, make sure it’s really wanted and then build it really well. And apart from saving the time, remember, as much as we as product managers are overwhelmed with the quantity of the new AI tools, so are the users. They can’t afford the time to review multiple all in one generators, they want a quick solution for their most burning itch. They want that little app that does exactly what it says in its tagline, nothing more needed. No complex menus, wizards, tutorials… Just open the web page and get results in a few mins.
More free than freemium
For similar reasons, users are not willing to sign up for each tool they want to try out. We opted for the input field right there on the landing page, with a Generate button next to it. You can do your thing without even creating an account. Once you run out of options and you still like it, you can sign up for a classical free version within freemium and only later consider the premium plan itself. This product marketing strategy is one of the best when dealing with the attention span shorter than ever. Remember, many users are coming to your app from one of those Top 10 AI tools for XYZ lists, by opening 10 tabs at once, and if they can play with some other tool without signup, they’ll just kill your tab in a sec.
Connecting the dots early on
I usually see product management as also a discipline that in a way connects the dots of the product. The marketing peeps might not be interested in what the devs are doing and vice versa, but we at product really want to know it all. We want to know how feasible a feature implementation is and how much effort it will require in order for us to prioritize and plan releases. On the other hand, we need to deliver the promises the marketing is putting out there. In addition, I usually do believe that waiting for the product to be finished in order to ping marketing & sales and ask them to start closing the deals is a little too late. In this case, with an AI product, we started talking to the marketing experts in the very first days of our product dev. AI race being a race, they already had a lot of data from their ongoing campaigns in terms of what converts, who buys and what kind of funnel is making sense. Thus we made sure that once they get a clickthrough, we are ready on the other side with the test drive that is worth that click.
UX for AI
AI made an appearance that left nobody indifferent. Some people got super excited as if the dream finally came true and we’ll all live happily and effortlessly forever after, while some others got close to the state of panic imagining machines overtaking the world. Most of the people however – got mixed feelings. That’s why we wanted our app to have a super modern look and cater to those who are loving the future that is unveiling, but at the same time it gives the sense of control and conscious choices to those unwilling to let go.
With the time passing, as always, the novelty is wearing off and the emotions are leaving the place to the ratio. I believe AI technologies will continue developing and providing new possibilities with some of them being leveraged for good, some for not so good and some will fade away in the natural innovation elimination process. Personally I think this is a great tool that can make many of our activities more efficient, create tons of positive impact and leave us space for creative, strategic and hopefully compassionate initiatives in the days to come. If you have curiosity and a bit of opportunity, I’d say get on this train. It might be on auto-pilot though 😉
Need a fractional product manager for your new AI product? Let’s jump on a call, I’ll follow up with AI generated notes 🙂
