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Marc Andreessen famously stated “software is eating the world“, and very few doubted him on that. But I think there is a new king in town: Artificial Intelligence.

Every day we are hearing of amazing new applications of AI (check out Business Insider’s cool list here) that are slowly changing the world, or sometimes quite rapidly.  More recently, Google has been able to turn those low-quality Street View images from Google Maps and make them beautiful, all using AI with no human interaction.

As always with new, revolutionary technologies, we have the constant fear that our jobs we’ll be replaced by that technology. It’s no different with AI. AI will kill the need for humans in some blue- and white-collar jobs, and hopefully be starting with the dull and dangerous jobs. My sincere hope is that AI will do a number of things for the human race:

  1. Increase our life span by taking over the aforementioned dangerous jobs such as mining, adding more safety automation into our lives such as autonomous vehicles, and help provide more accurate diagnosis of diseases earlier and even assist in determining leading indicators of potential diseases.
  2. Lower the overall cost of living as machines are more efficient, and so the cost of creating goods and services should decrease. AI can also help us be effective agriculture-wise to help increase harvest sizes and decrease waste.
  3. Allow humans to spend more time not working in two ways: take over the mundane aspects of our jobs (the “dull” components) and assist us in our work helping us make better decisions, produce higher-quality work, and thus allowing us to go home sooner.

Out of those three above, I think #3 will directly show those worried about AI’s impact on our jobs that AI is more useful than dangerous, and it’s designed for your benefit. Eric Schmidt recently shared the same sentiment when he mentioned a McKinsey study stating that 90% of jobs are not fully automatable, meaning AI will be there to help, not replace.

(I couldn’t find the mentioned McKinsey study with that particular fact, but this could have been it)

So how can AI help me as a Product Manager go home sooner?

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As designers, whether we are Product Managers, Product Designers, or in HR, there are consequences of what we do, and often we’re okay with that. Uber knew it would be taking away jobs from existing taxi drivers, travel search engines like Hipmunk and Kayak knew they were making travel agent less relevant, and Hotmail, Gmail, FedEx, and UPS knew they were making the postal service less necessary. Isn’t the point of incremental innovation and disrupting incumbents to provide a better product/service at the same or lower price?

But what about the unintended consequences? I wager that many of us do not spend the time deeply thinking of how our actions and products affect the world.

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Recently, I got a chance to start a business with an old friend of mine. We went for ten months before I realized that particularly business was not the right for me.

In those ten months, I learned quite a lot, and it gave me proof that I have the stomach to handle the intense startup roller coaster. There were definitely some dark days…

Here’s what I learned from my “failed startup experience:”

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When I co-founded IT Werks, I was coming in as the product and marketing guy, and because we had no outside investment, I would only get paid when we closed new clients. My partner has been B2B sales for the past ten years, but we also needed to invest heavily in the development of our product, which he was far better suited than I was.

In other words, I would be the sole breadwinner for the team.

Last time I was in a sales-focused role was between 2004 – 2007, when I was an “Electronic Sales Associate” as Staples and still in high school.

Surprisingly (or maybe not), I was crushing that role and trained new hires who were often older than me in how to sell. I did well because I was honest with my customers, I refused to hustle people and make them pay for things they didn’t need, and I could simplify complex technology into simple terms to help them understand what they needed and that they didn’t. Apparently, I was so good that some of my customers tried to get me involved in their pyramid schemes so they could get richer…even at 16, I couldn’t fall for that crap.

Shift forward nine years later, time to get into sales again. This time, in a B2B role working with small business owners.

But this time, I was failing miserably…

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These series of posts are based on my recent experience with starting a startup, and how I went about it with my partner to get us both on the same page for us to develop a strategy we both believe in and can execute on.

 

If you’ve been following my posts, at this point you know why you’re doing this, who is your ideal customer and target market, and what problems you want to solve for them.

And you’re probably demanding when are we going to start building a solution, because you already have a solution in mind, or have even started building one. So in this post, we’ll start looking at what we need in our solution.

But first…we need something: your value proposition.

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These series of posts are based on my recent experience with starting a startup, and how I went about it with my partner to get us both on the same page for us to develop a strategy we both believe in and can execute on.

 

Previously, we spoke about how to nail down your target audience and as a next step to do some customer development/interviewing to understand if your profile was accurate, and start understanding their problems and their needs.

Why not jump into building some solution if we know who are customers are? Our customers have hundreds and hundreds of problems, and so to ensure we don’t spend our time solving the wrong problem, we need to spend some time doing customer interviews to learn and validate their most significant problems, and then build a product around those problems and needs.

Such a focus will help increase your product’s chance of success.

Now that you have spoken to 10-15 customers about their lives and problems, you should have a decent list of issues. Here’s what we want to do now:

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These series of posts are based on my recent experience with starting a startup, and how I went about it with my partner to get us both on the same page for us to develop a strategy we both believe in and can execute on.

 

In my last post, we spoke about the importance of having a Why and one way you can discover your Why. Remember, the more personal the Why is to you, the more powerful it can be for you.

Chances are, you already have identified a product and a market you want to target. I don’t blame you; that’s how we work. We jump straight to solutions, but we need to take a step back to spend a bit more time defining and researching our strategy to increase the chances of our startup’s success. A little more work now will pay a thousand times over and over in the near future and far future. Defining and understand your customer will allow you to understand their problems since you are now focusing on a narrow range of people, and now you can design/build a solution that solves their problems perfectly.

Let’s dig into how we can define and understand our target audience.

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These series of posts are based on my recent experience with starting a startup, and how I went about it with my partner to get us both on the same page for us to develop a strategy we both believe in and can execute on.

 

I bet you know what you want to do.

I bet you know how you want to do it.

But do you know why you want to do it?

Why are you willing to put your reputation on the line? Why are you willing to put your career on the line? Why are you willing to alienate yourself from your friends and family during tough times by working nights and weekends with the hope this thing gets off the ground and makes a dent in the universe?

 

There’s only one answer to these questions: the why.

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As a Product Manager, I often describe what I do falls into 4 or so buckets:

  1. Strategy:
    1. High-level: Where should the product be going?
    2. Low-Level: What is the next thing we should build that will help us get closer to our goals/target?
  2. Execution:
    1. Discovery: What is the exact problem are we trying to solve and what is the outcome we want to achieve?
    2. Delivery: How do we build this solution we “discovered” during the Discovery phase?
  3. Analysis: Did what we design and build during the Execution Phase solve our users problems and bring us closer to our goals? Why or why not?
  4. Support: How can I help the rest of the organization? This includes working with Customer Success to help them understand the inner workings of new features/processes, and working with Marketing to educate our customers on these new features/processes.

I strongly believe that a Product Manager who cannot execute is not a Product Manager. You may have the great ideas/strategy but if you cannot work with your product team to validate the idea, build it and ship it, then what’s the point of having all these great ideas?!

I also believe that we’ve greatly improved our Delivery Process over the last 10-20 years. We now use some version of Agile with Scrum, Kanban, Sprint Planning meetings, etc. to break things up for the Engineering team, and most organizations deliver on at least a weekly basis or are hopefully moving to Continuous Integration and/or Continuous Integration.

The Analysis aspect is also easier than before. We can use services like MixPanel, Kissmetrics, and Amplitude to see what actions our users are doing, then create dashboards to understand trends using Periscope and Chartio.

What I’ve felt we’ve not yet effectively conquered as a disciple/profession are the Strategy and Discovery aspects, which are the most critical for any tech team since they help you avoid building crap.

Strategy is something I’ve recently started diving deep into so at this time I do not have a strong viewpoint to share, but I can share with you on how my Discovery process has changed over the last 3.5 years of being a Product Manager.

Couple things to note before we continue:

  1. I am not taking credit for coming up with any of these processes. Some were in place when I arrived while some I helped shape.
  2. These version numbers are arbitrary in a way; I grouped certain things together depending on when I started at a new company or when we found a process that worked for some timeframe.

Not sure what Discovery is or what some more detail, take a quick look at this post before continuing.

Let’s jump in:

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