In 2025, AI tools will become part of our working toolkit if they haven’t already. PMs that will use AI tools smartly will be more productive and potentially more successful than their AI-less peers. What tools should you add to your toolkit first?
In this series, I’ll look at different categories of AI tools that could be useful for product managers:
- Product creation tools
- Writing tools
- Discovery tools
- Productivity tools
Some of the tools I am already using, and others I’ll test especially for this series. I’ll not rely on second-hand opinions, I’ll write about only personally reviewed tools. But before we dive in...
Why do you need AI tools as a PM?
To quickly test ideas
Product building is all about validation. And the ultimate test of your ideas is the market. Is your product being used? Are customers paying you? Could you improve the experience? Can you attract a new audience?
All those questions need to be answered and continuously answered. There’s no better way than building your product, shipping it to customers and seeing if it’s being used. But building things is expensive, and often takes a long time. Luckily, PM now have a whole bunch of new tools that could help to quickly test ideas for a fraction of the cost of building the real thing.
There's a whole bunch of new tools available to PMs these days that could make product validation much faster and cheaper. Think about them as MVP builders on steroids. You only need a basic technical understanding to use them and how far you can get only depends on your imagination.
To make your point stronger and win opinions war
Building products in a large organisation is much more complex, long and often frustrating. There are so many people that need to be consulted, so many variables to take into account and sooooo many meetings you need to have.
For years now we have a push to be more data-aware when making our product decisions. Yes, all PMs these days are trying to be more data-positive. However, in lots of organisations that’s still an impossible state to be in. Often the data is guarded, or it’s incomplete, or incorrect, or it couldn’t be analysed in time… so many reasons and obstacles product people face when they want to use the data for internal conversations and decision-making.
That’s why many decisions taken even in the biggest of organisations these days are based on vision, strategy or more simply - on opinions. Yes, whether we want it or not - HIPPO is well and thriving. PMs are often forced to participate in those opinion wars to make progress with their products. And we need help that could come from modern AI tools. They could help you make your points stronger on the decision battleground.
To increase your productivity
Some PM tasks are not difficult but take lots of time. AI tools might take that workload away so you can focus on things that only you can do, where you can add unique value or simply, do things you enjoy most. For example, I like to write (duh), hence I wouldn’t outsource writing user stories to AI, however, acceptance criteria I don’t like to write, often I feel they are forced and too repetitive. So I’d definitely ask AI to write acceptance criteria based on my user story description.
Or take data analysis, I hate Excel with a burning passion, but I like writing SQL queries even if I am quite bad at writing them. So often I know what I’d like to ask the database but I fail to express it in SQL. Now I don’t need to as there are a number of really cool tools that could translate from human to SQL so I can “have a chat” with my database and get the insights that I need.
To feel less lonely
The PM job could often feel pretty solitary. Especially, if you’re the only PM at a company or if your organisation works in silos. At times, you absolutely need to bounce ideas off someone, have another pair of eyes on what you produced, or just vent your frustrations. Yes, surely AI is nowhere near to having an empathetic work buddy, but it could serve as a half-decent sounding board. Modern conversational AIs became pretty good at active listening. Often, you don’t need much more.
Where do we start?
I’d like to start with the hottest topic in town - AI agents. Those are not only chats but a set of services that could actually accomplish a task. They can create pictures, videos, websites, databases, reports, connect different services together and many more cool stuff.
AI agents develop very quickly, now they can do a bunch of cool stuff but in six months it will be capable of so much more.
So this first “review” will be more of an introduction. I’ll pick real tasks from PM’s life and try using different AI tools available on the market today to accomplish them. I’ll share my experiences and thoughts on using each tool so you can see how useful those AIs could be for you.
The first use case in the product building AI category will be published in two weeks and it’s a community-favourite called “Lovable”.