Belated happy holidays, fam! I know it’s been a while since I dropped into your inbox. I was travelling back home and currently making a short pitstop at Dubai. I hope to get back on “Behind Product Lines” in full gear in the first week of February.
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In this edition of Behind Product Lines, we’ll address the hype around the biggest buzz of the town: ChatGPT.
LinkedIn’s been raining with praise for the generative AI tool since December. But when all is said and done, is it worth the $42 per month price tag, especially for Product Managers?
To determine this, I took ChatGPT for an extensive spin to explore a wide gamut of PM scenarios it could help with. I can confidently report that ChatGPT can have massive transformational effects on the discipline of Product Management as an aid. Some responses were mind-blowing while others left a lot to be desired. In some cases, I had to refine my prompt several times to get a meaningful reply.
With ChatGPT 4 around the corner, one can only imagine how the quality of responses will skyrocket. My assessment is that PMs that learn how to best use such tools to their advantage will leapfrog over contemporaries who resist.
However, relying on the tool without strengthening your PM core will lead to modest results. It’s all about the quality of input you feed it. As they say, garbage in, garbage out.
If you’re interested in going through the entire deck with the 45 scenarios, you can download it here:
But if you’d like a taste of what I covered in the deck, I’ll drop 5 examples here:
1. Aligning product teams with a 1-pager memo
Here’s the prompt I used:
I'm a Product Manager who is planning to build a new mobile app that's like Uber for petrol. It helps busy people order fuel for their car on-demand and get a refill while they're at home or office.
Write a 1-pager that I can share with my engineering & design team to explain the product vision & the product components that will most likely be involved.
ChatGPT’s response
2. Weighing pros & cons of product decisions
Here’s the prompt I used:
I'm a Product Manager for a 2-way automobile classifieds. We are launching a new car inspection service that will allow any user to request for a detailed inspection report on a car for a price.
The management is debating which party - buyer or seller - to monetize for this service.
Give arguments for & against each option.
ChatGPT’s Response
3. Questions to uncover jobs-to-be-done
Here’s the prompt I used:
Assume I'm a Product Manager for a grocery delivery mobile app. It will be serving the Toronto GTA region only. I want to conduct some consumer research to figure out my consumer's jobs-to-be-done.
What personas should I target and then what questions should I be asking them to elicit their job-to-be-done. Take inspiration from the book "Mom Test".
ChatGPT’s response
4. Generating roadmap ideas
Here’s the prompt I used:
I’m working for a product that’s a direct competitor of Gong - the revenue intelligence tool. The product strategy is to become a data-driven sales insights platform by building a conversation bot on top of all the sales call recordings. This will allow sales managers to query the bot for information like “Who is closing the most this quarter and what insights can you give me from their calls?” or “Who is handling objections around [X] the best?”.
Give me list of roadmap ideas aligned with this strategy.
ChatGPT’s response
5. Generating product copy
Here’s my prompt:
Generate common success & error messages associated with the billing module of a SaaS Product.
Create a table with 3 columns:
Feature capability, Success Message OR Error Message, Content
e.g. Download Invoice, Success Message, “Your invoice has been successfully downloaded.”
ChatGPT’s response
So, what do you think of these responses?
I would like to point out that in many of these cases, I had to refine my prompt several times to get a meaningful response.
ChatGPT can definitely issue smart responses that can rival anything an entry-level PM can produce in terms of content. However, you still need sufficient experience with the domain to craft the right prompt to take things to the next level.
Download the full deck and let me know what you think!
this is super helpful thanks
Great content and really awesome use cases Aatir. I have been building a bank of those for a couple weeks now. I also find it's great for PMs doing their job search. Posted my step-by-step approach on LinkedIn recently.