Harnessing ChatGPT: 5 Practical Uses for Product Managers

You’d have to be living under a rock these days to not have heard of ChatGPT, Large Langue Models (LLMs), GPT4, Generative AI and a whole bunch of other geeky technologies that have now become mainstream. You know they’re going to have a huge impact on our future when they’ve become a household name and your parents start asking you how to use them. For someone like myself with experience in Product, Technology and ML, this was an indication that perhaps I should throw my hat into the ring and share my take on how we can use this new tool as a way to augment our day-to-day work (definitely not trying to capitalize on the hype cycle here).?

As a product manager, you’re trained to not always run after the newest, shiny thing. But you're also constantly at odds trying to balance your obsession with relentless execution, and pondering long-term strategy. However, ChatGPT and LLMs are no longer tools we can ignore, hoping they die a swift death once their moment in the sun fades. They will fundamentally change the way we operate, and it makes sense as Product Managers to find the best ways we can use this new technology to augment our work.

In this article, I dive into five tactical ways ChatGPT can support, enhance, and bring fresh perspectives to your product management process. I considered using ChatGPT to write it, but there was something fundamentally unsettling about using AI to write about why you should use AI. Here are my top five use cases:

1. Brainstorming Product Ideas

Let's be honest, some PMs are built to lead brainstorming sessions and others are not. And no matter what group you fall into, there are always ways to get better. Why not use ChatGPT to provide out-of-the-box suggestions that can spark creative thinking? Use your company's target market, industry, persona or product description and let ChatGPT iterate upon it and generate a list of potential ideas. Rinse, repeat and fine-tune your input to discover new opportunities you might have overlooked. It’s a low-effort and high-impact way of getting some diversity into your thinking.

2. Market Opportunities Evaluation

How big is the market you're targeting? What’s the TAM? One of the hardest parts of a PM’s job is to build a clear picture of the market they are targeting with their product. Try using ChatGPT to help consolidate market research data and condense it into actionable insights. You could feed the model a variety of inputs such as market size, trends, and competitor analysis, and use it to compile this information into a coherent and easily digestible summary. This will save you time and perhaps look way better than you saying it’s “a $5B market and all we need is 1% of it to be successful”. Don’t lie, we’ve all done it before.

3. Creating Go-To-Market Content and Strategies

This is where ChatGPT can really level up your game. An effective Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy ensures that your product reaches its intended audience and creates that buzz in the market. Use the tool to help you craft persuasive GTM content, including sales pitches, press releases, articles and social media posts. Use your product's unique selling points and target audience, and it can pump out compelling content tailored to resonate with them, optimizing for SEO or clicks. You can easily generate multiple iterations of similar content so that you can use it in A/B test. Obviously, spend the time to refine your outputs, but what better way to get a comprehensive first draft to work off of.

4. Streamlining User Feedback Analysis

Hopefully, you’re talking to your users. And hopefully, you love to do it. There’s no better way to understand your user base, feel for their pain and learn about their needs. But let’s be honest, it sucks to take notes, read through them and analyze the user feedback. There’s already transcribing software that uses AI to help with the note-taking part (ex. Otter.ai). Use ChatGPT to summarize those notes and help you quickly understand the key takeaways from user feedback. This will save you tons of time unless of course, you enjoy doing it yourself.

5. Communication done right

We’re all juggling meetings, email threads, and Slack messages and it gets overwhelming at times. One of the most obvious ways to use ChatGPT is to help effectively summarize the most critical points in long reports, meeting minutes, or chat logs. If you want to get a little crazy with it, you can use AI to draft emails, presentations, or status updates, reducing the time spent on these tasks and keeping your communications concise and informative.?

So whether you're excited by the possibilities of using ChatGPT to enhance your product management process, or you're worried about the impending Skynet launch, one thing is certain: LLMs are here to stay. But rather than fearing the unknown, let's embrace the potential of these powerful technologies to revolutionize the way we work. By implementing the practical suggestions above, you can unlock new levels of productivity, efficiency, and impact as a PM. So, stay curious, stay open-minded, and let's see where this takes us!