This article is based on Prithvi’s appearance at the virtual Product Operations Festival.
I'm Prithvi, Product Leader at DevRev, and my extensive background in product management, engineering, and distributed systems has given me a unique perspective on the transformative potential of AI in our field.
In this article, I'll explore the pivotal role of AI in modern product management. We'll delve into how AI can streamline operations, reduce chaos, and allow product managers to focus on strategic and creative tasks.
Join me as we uncover the potential of AI to revolutionize product management and help us achieve new heights in delivering customer value and driving business success.
The product manager's role: Beyond product to business impact
In our experience as product managers (PMs), we often hear analogies comparing us to general managers or even CEOs.
While this comparison may not be entirely accurate, it holds some essential wisdom at its core. The idea is that by elevating our outlook and work to that of a general manager, we can impact the entire business, not just the product. This involves covering all aspects of the customer, the product, and the business.
If adopting a general manager's perspective is the right attitude for PMs, how does this play out in practice? There are some interesting observations about how product companies are set up and how they evolve over time.
Building great products in today's economy is akin to fighting a war, where all of us are warriors waging battles on multiple fronts. This comparison is meant positively, as we need to build our products, manage projects, sprints, roadmaps, and all the associated work.
We are also responsible for supporting our customers, handling customer conversations, bugs, tickets, and feature requests, all while growing our business through distribution, campaigns, and content. This multifaceted role often involves managing or at least helping with various customer interactions.
In larger organizations, the different clusters of responsibilities —support, customer success, engineering, design, infrastructure, sales, marketing, and growth— evolve into distinct departments.
Each department develops its own tools, systems, processes, and knowledge bases. For instance, Zendesk is used for support, Jira is used for engineering work management, and HubSpot or similar CRM tools are used for sales and marketing.
However, these tools often become disjointed, leading to siloed information and disconnected, stale data.
Initially, PMs hold these systems together, but as the organization grows, more people are brought in to manage this disconnectedness. This results in an increasing reliance on program managers, project managers, and various coordinators to manage integration points, scaling until chaos ensues.
As PMs, we find ourselves central to this chaos, whether knowingly or unknowingly, intentionally or unintentionally. We all experience the endless recurring meetings, status reports, and alignment updates —work about work— that sometimes make us feel like the actual work of creating customer impact and driving business value is at risk of being forgotten. This actual work is what a general manager would care about, and it is what we should strive to focus on.
Adam Bennett
Product-led alliance insider
Thank you for subscribing
Level up your product-led alliance career & network with product-led alliance experts.
An email has been successfully sent to confirm your subscription.
Follow us on LinkedIn
