How2 use AI as a product manager
If you’re a product manager, you’ve probably heard the whispers or maybe even the shouts “AI is taking over jobs!”
It's easy to feel a little anxious when a new technology can do things that used to be a core part of your job description, but what if we've got it all wrong? What if AI isn't here to replace the product manager, but to free them from the mundane, allowing them to become more strategic, creative, and impact than ever before?
How I see it, is that the reality is that AI is becoming the product manager's wing-person. If you learn how to harness it, it quickly becomes an assistant that handles the bits of the job that takes time that you would rather be doing something more constructive and not just admin. I have found it especially useful to process the noise, so you can focus on the truly human parts of the job and ask the right questions, and not miss anything. In fact, a recent study by Airfocus found that while 70% of product managers worry about AI taking their jobs, 92% believe it will have a significant positive impact on their work.
So, the next question is … “ok …. Soooo how???”
The Old You vs. The New, AI-Powered You
For years, the PM role has been a whirlwind of administrative and tactical tasks. Think of the hours spent on:
Synthesizing customer feedback: Skimming through hundreds of support tickets, survey responses, and forum posts just to find a few key trends.
Drafting documents: Starting from a blank page to write a product requirements document, release notes, a stakeholder update, a sprint update etc etc
Basic data analysis: Pulling simple queries and creating charts to understand feature usage or user behaviour.
Competitive analysis: Manually sifting through competitor websites and public announcements to build a competitive landscape.
Taking and sharing meeting notes: Summarising after a workshop or call they key takeaways.
These are all important tasks, but they often leave little time for the high-impact work that only a human can do.
Now, imagine an AI co-pilot taking on these tasks.
Customer Insights: Instead of wading through endless feedback, an AI can automatically categorize sentiment, summarize key themes from thousands of reviews, and flag urgent issues. You get a real-time pulse on your users, without the manual labor.
Documentation: With a simple prompt, an AI can draft an initial document, create a project plan, or write the first draft of your release notes, turning that blank page into a skeleton, giving you the time back to focus on the strategic details and the "why."
Data Analysis: AI can now write simple SQL queries based on natural language prompts, analyse survey results, and even predict potential user churn. This frees you up from the mechanics of data and lets you focus on interpreting the insights.
Competitive Intelligence: AI-powered tools can monitor the web, track competitor features, and generate a comprehensive competitive analysis in a fraction of the time it would take a human.
Note taking and workshop support: It can help summarise meetings and content, leaving you to focus on asking the right questions, and not stressing over taking notes frantically when people reply
The New PM Superpowers: The "Human" Skills That Matter More Than Ever
By offloading these tasks, AI doesn't diminish the role of a product manager, it elevates it. The new PM superpowers are the things AI can't do (at least not yet).
Strategic Vision: AI can analyse data and identify trends, but it can't set a compelling vision for the future. It can't look at a problem and ask, "What is the unsolvable problem here that our product could solve in a novel way?" That requires creativity, empathy, and strategic judgment.
Emotional Intelligence: Product management is a people-first role. Building rapport with teams and listening to their suggestions, understanding a stakeholder's true concerns, empathising with a frustrated customer. These are all things that require human connection. You are the grease that keeps the teams all moving together.
Problem-Finding: AI is fantastic at solving problems you give it. But a great product manager's job is often to find the right problems in the first place. This requires a deep understanding of human psychology and market dynamics.
Curating the Narrative: AI can generate a report, but it can't tell a story. You're the one who connects the dots, explains the "why" behind the roadmap, and inspires your team by linking their daily work to meaningful customer outcomes.
The true value of a product manager has never been in their ability to write a backlog items or a take notes. It has always been in their judgement, their empathy, and their visioning, with a the important trait of being able to lead. AI in my view is here to give you more time and better tools to focus on those things.
So, instead of asking if AI will replace your job, maybe the real question is: How will you use your new co-pilot to become a 10x product manager?
