The Role of the Product Manager in the AI Era

As technology continues to evolve at an unprecedented pace, the role of the Product Manager has become more vital than ever to today’s businesses. Product Managers are often thought of as the "translators" of the business and technology world, bridging the gap between customers, business goals, and technology.?

With the dawn of the AI era of computing upon us, I want to take a moment to reflect on how this important role may begin to change, and try to make the argument that product managers, because of their skill set, are uniquely positioned to capitalize on this transformative moment.

Today, product managers play a crucial role in understanding customer needs and aligning them with business objectives. They’re the orchestrators of innovation, responsible for identifying market opportunities, defining product strategies and roadmaps, and leading cross-functional teams to bring ideas to life and fine tune them to maximize value.

In this new, and emerging, AI era, their toolkit is about to expand exponentially.

Artificial Intelligence, particularly of the generative variety, is not just a buzzword; it's a game changer that will reshape the way we work, the way we write software, and, in turn entire businesses and industries. Product managers who can leverage large language models in their jobs will have a distinct advantage in building successful products. So, what do I exactly mean by that?

First and foremost, product managers must recognize the critical role they play today as translators between customer requirements, business goals, and technology capabilities. They possess a unique ability to distill complex concepts into clear and actionable plans, facilitating effective communication between stakeholders with different backgrounds and areas of expertise and development teams with the technical skills to create working software. They bring “clarity to unclear situations,” and, in a way, they’re already master prompters.

Product managers who possess the ability to effectively prompt language models like GPT-4 and PALM 2, to generate real application code will have a significant advantage going forward. Imagine being able to communicate your vision to an AI model, which can then transform it into functioning code for a proof of concept, or even perhaps the start of a production application. This AI breakthrough will empower product managers to prototype and test ideas faster, iterate more efficiently, and bridge the gap between concept and implementation with unprecedented ease.

Said another way, by learning to prompt an LLM to generate code, product managers will no longer be limited by their technical skillset.

That’s not to say engineers, designers, anddata scientists are no longer needed - quite the opposite. This simply means that Product Managers, engineers, designers and data scientists can come even closer together in their teams and in their work, collectively contributing to the product in very direct and meaningful ways that weren’t always possible in the “before” times.

In summary…

In this emerging AI era, Product Managers have the chance to elevate their skills and become the leaders of tomorrow that I’ve always known them to be. By embracing AI technology and learning to effectively prompt Language Models to solve problems, including generating real working code, they will unlock unprecedented capabilities and become even more effective in their careers.?