My Product Management Toolkit (63): AI tools for Product Managers

7 min readJul 31, 2024

A few weeks ago I wrote about what makes AI Product Managers different, examining the AI product management specialisation. My main takeaway was the AI PM will still conduct key product management activities, from identifying customer problems to shipping solutions. The same applies to product managers not specialised in AI: even with the advent of ChatGpT and other AI based tools, a good PM will still need a solid product mindset, ask the right questions and utilise the right data to answer those questions. However, there’s no doubt in my mind that AI tools will change the nature of a PM’s daily activities. In this post I’ll dive into some of the AI tools and prompts that PMs can use throughout the product development lifecycle (from ‘why’ to ‘how’ and back again), using AI to work through specific tasks or questions more efficiently.

Why

Starting with the ‘why’, the PM needs to understand the customer problem to solve. Specifically, they need to:

Identify users goals, user Jobs To Be Done
Identify users pain points and assess their impact
Understand existing alternatives to solving the problem
Outline the business case behind the problem to solve

Task 1: Identify user goals → How AI can help the PM: Identify user goalsList and predict user goals based on historical data → Sample tools: Pecan and Azure Machine Learning

Task 2: Discover user problems → How AI can help the PM: Analyse user interviews, reviews, tickets, usage metrics and social media posts to identify user problems → Sample tools: Maze, Dovetail, MonkeyLearn, ChatGpT, Claude and Gemini

Task 3: Do market research → How AI can help the PM: Map and track competitors automatically, generate competitive insights and trends → Sample tools: Crayon, Kompyte and ChatGpT

Sample prompts to use to get help with figuring out the ‘why’:

My target persona is [brief persona description]. What are their main pain points with respect to [problem or need].
What assumptions can you give about why a [persona] would not pay for a [solution].
I am building [product or feature]. Tell me 5 reasons why this feature will work for my users. Tell me 5 reasons why this feature won’t work for my users.
I am building a [product or feature]. Can you give a me list of the top 5 competitors in this space, their strengths and weaknesses. Please put the data in a table format.
Using the historical financial data provided for [business or product], generate a financial forecast for next year. Include revenue, fixed and variable cost, and profit margins.

Who

PMs can use AI based tools and specific prompts to identify and understand their target persona(s):

Who has the problem that we’re looking to solve?
What are the main characteristics and demographics of our target persona?

Task 4: Identify personas or create customer segments → How AI can help the PM: Analyse customer data to find patterns in existing customer data or identify potential customers → Sample tools: IBM Watson Analytics, Helixa and Audiense

Task 5: Create a persona or ideal customer profile → How AI can help the PM: Automate template creation → Sample tools: Hubspot Make My Persona, UXPressia and Delve AI

Task 6: Granular understanding of customer behaviours and needs → How AI can help the PM: Process and analyse large customer data sets and create customer segments → Sample tools: RapidMiner, BigQueryML and IBM Watson

Sample prompts to use to get help with figuring out the ‘who’:

Describe a typical user of a [product or feature].
What are the common demographics of a [target persona].
Develop a detailed user persona for a [product or feature].

What

Whether it’s coming up with a strategy or writing a product requirements spec, AI can help PMs provide great input into the ‘what’. PMs will need to make sure they use they feed the right data and prompts to:

Create a product vision and strategy
Identify strategic opportunities
Set product goals and KPIs
Draft a product roadmap
Gather product requirements

Task 7: Create a product vision and strategy → How AI can help the PM: Analyse user data, markets, competitors to identify trends and new opportunities → Sample tools: ChatGpT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity

Task 8: Identify strategic opportunitiesAnalyse text data from reports, news articles or social media → How AI can help the PM: Simulate market scenarios and predict business impact → Sample tools: ChatGpT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity

Task 9: Set product goals and KPIs → How AI can help the PM: Collect and analyse data to inform or suggest goals and KPIs → Sample tools: Tableau AI, Workday Adaptive Planning, ChatGpT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity

Task 10: Draft a product roadmap → How AI can help the PM: Generate roadmap items, making sure they align with the product vision, strategy and goals → Sample tools: ProdPad, ChatGpT, Claude, Gemini and
Productroadmap.ai

Task 11: Gather product requirements → How AI can help the PM: Generate a Product Requirements Document (PRD) from scratch or iterate on an existing one → Sample tools: ChatPRD, WriteMyPRD, Notion AI and Jasper AI

Sample prompts to use to get help with figuring out the ‘what’:

I am building a [product or feature]. What are the main functional and non-functional requirements to include in the Product Requirements Document?
My product is a [product or feature]. Help me brainstorm new features for a multi-year roadmap for this product.
This is the existing PRD for [product or feature]. Help me improve the existing PRD.
Can you discuss potential solutions to overcome [specific user problems or challenges].
I am building a [solution] for [persona]. Can you help with 10 important user stories.

How

The ‘how’ of designing, building and delivering a product is a broad one. We already see how AI tools can help PMs, designers and engineers in their jobs, and here are some good sample tools to consider:

Task 12: Designing and prototyping → How AI can help the PM: Generate prototypes based on requirements as well as suggest design patterns → Sample tools: Figma AI, Adobe Firefly and Uizard

Task 13: Writing code → How AI can help the PM: Generate code and assist with refactoring code → Sample tools: Devin, Microsoft Copilot and Github Copilot

Task 14: Testing & QA → How AI can help the PM: Writing and conducting tests independently → Sample tools: Katalon, Codium, Diffblue and Code Climate

Task 15: Continuous integration and deployment → How AI can help the PM: Predicting potential failures in continuous integration / development pipelines → Sample tools: Jenkins X, AWS CodePipeline and Seldon

Sample prompts to use to get help with figuring out the ‘how’:

Develop a QA test case scenario to test [product or feature].
Design a comprehensive bug testing protocol to anticipate potential issues with our upcoming software release
I am building a [product or feature]. Draft a delivery plan that outlines the delivery milestones, dependencies and risks
I am building a [product or feature]. Carry out a pre-mortem analysis to anticipate potential risks for our software project

Main learning point: The role of the PM is already being impacted by AI, but in a good way. AI tools and prompts that I’ve looked at in this post help reduce the ‘cold start’ problem many PMs face: getting started with the problem to solve or the plan to achieve the desired outcome. With the right inputs and data, ChatGpT and specialised AI tools can help PMs get started with the ‘why, who, what and how’, providing them with a solid starting point to manage the product throughout its lifecycle.

Related links for further learning:

My Product Management Toolkit (63): AI tools for Product Managers

Written by MAA1