Product managers have a lot of ground to cover. From staying on top of market trends, user needs, customer feedback, and industry insights to managing their resources, and planning what’s ahead for their product. It’d be nice if there were a helping hand sometimes that could take over the more tedious and repetitive tasks. What if we could harness the power of AI, or ChatGPT for product management?
With the release of ChatGPT, it seems like a digital assistant has arrived. Breaking-edge technology usually feels like something that requires advanced technical knowledge. ChatGPT on the other hand is easy to access, use and train for anyone. Professionals all over the world have been discovering how it can make their lives easier, as a tool for brainstorming, analyzing, generating content & increasing their efficiency. In this article, we’ll explore what ChatGPT is and how it works. You’ll be able to understand how to use chatGPT for product management, with plenty of useful examples. Let’s get started!
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI, built on a large language model. Chatbots are programs that let people converse and respond using natural language, based on the inputs they receive. They’ve been widely used for a long time to provide automated customer service on websites or in messenger apps, by answering questions & letting users perform tasks like booking an appointment automatically.
What makes ChatGPT different from other chatbots?
Chatbots have been becoming more and more sophisticated with time. What sets ChatGPT apart from the others is its ability to respond to questions on a wide variety of topics and reply in a conversational style, rather than a predefined response. This is possible thanks to the vast knowledge base that it was trained on and its advanced large language model. Language models generate and understand text by analyzing large amounts of data to learn how certain words and phrases relate to each other.
How is ChatGPT different from a search engine?
The difference between ChatGPT and a search engine is based on how they function and the data they provide.
ChatGPT is:
- An AI-powered chatbot that can have natural language conversations
- It can understand and generate responses on many topics
- It can provide personalized responses based on input and previous questions.
When compared to a search engine ChatGPT does not:
- Provide links to web pages or resources
- Is not designed to provide factual information-specific answers to complex questions
- Is not meant to find and deliver useful resources on the web
- Cannot provide real-time information like traffic or the weather
This difference is crucial because it’s important to remember that while ChatGPT’s responses are impressive and sound convincing, they can be factually incorrect. It’s a great tool for generating ideas & exploring topics, but not a substitute for data or information.
It is very easy to get distracted from a task by one difficult challenge, A.I. provides a way of giving yourself momentum.
Ethan Mollick, Professor of Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
How can I use ChatGPT?
The easiest way to interact with ChatGPT is by opening up your browser, and starting to chat with it.
Prompts
The interface is quite simple. You have a space to type in your prompt and once submitted, you start to see the generated response.
Prompts can be as simple or as complicated as you like, and on whatever topic is on your mind.
To get a feel for it, try something simple like
“What are some good activities for team building?”
or
“Write a sample email to customers announcing a spring sale”
The responses may seem to be a bit generic, but that’s because our input was also limited. The more detailed a prompt is, the more specific ChatGPT’s responses will become.
If you want help with creating a more detailed email, try to modify the prompt above with more information like this:
“You run a chain of bookstores in the United States. Write a short email announcing a Labor Day sale on all fiction titles.”
As you can see the response is much more detailed. And because ChatGPT remembers the whole conversation, you can ask it to modify what it generated. If you want to make your email more exciting, funny, or original, try saying: “Make it funnier”, “Make it shorter” or “Make it sound like Barack Obama”.
How creative you get and how you use ChatGPT is all in your hands.
API
Another way to interact with ChatGPT is by integrating it into your own programs via API. This allows developers to send detailed prompts, or entire data sets, and ask ChatGPT to evaluate them and generate insights or analyses based on the provided information. Inputs from users can also be submitted in real-time to ChatGPT in order to receive a generated response.
Other AI Tools
While ChatGPT has become the most known AI tool nowadays, there are other tools that use AI in other interesting and useful ways. Here’s a sample of a few of them, however, there are many more:
- Jasper is a tool for marketers & businesses to generate copy. It’s based on the same LLM as ChatGPT but has a different interface which makes it easier to specify what you want to create and offers templates for different projects.
- Fireflies is a tool that records, transcribes, and uses AI to summarize your virtual meetings or audio recordings, letting you instantly identify tasks, questions, and topics (Riverside is a great alternative for audio and video transcription).
- Ellie is a Chrome extension that learns from your writing style and helps you write emails easier and faster.
- Heyday is a chatbot for e-commerce websites that takes care of responding to customers in sales and support situations.
How can ChatGPT be useful for product management?
By this point, you probably have a few ideas swirling around in your head. One way to answer even this question is to ask ChatGPT what it thinks it can help with. Try out this prompt for a few ideas: “You are an AI designed to help product managers. Generate a list of the 10 best prompts for yourself.” While that might be a good starting point, we’ve also gone ahead and included a few prompts and ideas-based product management tasks that can be time-intensive.
ChatGPT for Product Strategy
You can use ChatGPT to help you throughout the various tasks involved in creating your product strategy, like creating the product vision, defining the roadmap, or alignment with the needs of the market & the company’s strategic goals.
As you learned earlier, the more detail that you provide to ChatGPT, the better it can understand how to help you. In our prompts, we’ve included a few key details, such as the job title, project description, product or company description, competing or similar brands, and the request.
Try to adapt some of the following prompts to your job, product, company, and needs to help you brainstorm ideas & get inspired:
- “You are a product manager planning to create a new website like TripAdvisor for cruises. It helps people find information about cruise lines worldwide, lets them add reviews, and has a forum to share experiences. Write a 1-pager that explains the product vision to the design & marketing team.”
- “You are a product manager working on a product that is a direct competitor to Uber in the Central European market. The product strategy is to become a ride-hailing platform that works hand-in-hand with local public transport services to offer rides during periods that are under-served by the available transport options. This will allow users to choose the most economical and eco-friendly transport options. Give me a list of roadmap ideas aligned with this strategy.”
- “You are a product manager and you want to understand the needs of your customers. Your product is a platform that lets users collaborate online by using mind maps. Design an NPS survey with 10 questions that measure their satisfaction with the current features. Include an open-ended question that asks about any missing features in the platform.”
Using ChatGPT for Product Development
Working with various teams & coordinating the development of your product is no easy feat. It takes planning, communication & a lot of organization. ChatGPT can help you make your life easier by preparing sprint plans and writing PRDs or go-to-market plans.
- “You’re a product manager working for a digital marketing agency that creates custom content management systems for other companies. Your client has requested a new feature to be able to add interactive quizzes on their website. Design a sprint brief for the engineering team that explains what they will be doing every day over the next two weeks to deliver the new feature.”
- “You’re a product manager for a software company that aggregates weather forecasts and embeds them in OOH advertising screens. You want to launch a new feature that will display the air quality in the places where the screens are located. Write a brief PRD for this feature.”
- “You are a product manager for a company that produces smart home solutions. You want to launch a new feature that makes your products interoperable with products from other manufacturers. Write a go-to-market plan.”
Using ChatGPT for Product Launch
When it comes to launching a new product or feature, there’s plenty to do. Marketing & sales strategies have to be in place, the documentation has to be ready & your coordination has to be spot-on. Here’s how ChatGPT can help.
- “You’re a product manager of a company that makes tax return software. You’ve just developed a new feature that lets users automatically check if they qualify for a tax return. Write a sales strategy.”
- “You’re a product manager of a SaaS company. Your product lets users collaborate on creating AI-generated content. You have just created a new feature that lets colleagues collaborate by video while creating content. Write a marketing strategy for the new feature.”
Using ChatGPT For Product Lifecycle Management
Once your product is available, it’s important to monitor and analyze its performance. This kind of feedback is crucial to make adjustments and understand where there is room for improvement. Tools like Usersnap are great for gathering qualitative & quantitative feedback that you can easily act on. ChatGPT can help you make important decisions, and parse through large amounts of feedback.
- “You’re the product manager of a company that develops educational software for universities. It lets students plan their day and serves as a hub for all of their relevant educational materials. You have been collecting feedback on customer satisfaction. Read the following feedback items and find the major pain points that students have with your product.
- I really like the idea of having all my study materials in one place, but I found it difficult to navigate between different subjects. It would be great if you could implement a feature that allows us to organize our materials by subject or class.
- The study planner feature is helpful, but I wish it could be more customized to my specific needs. It would be great if we could set our own deadlines and reminders, or even integrate it with our school schedule to get a better overview of our workload.
- I love the idea of having personalized study recommendations, but I noticed that the suggestions were often repetitive and not tailored to my individual needs. It would be great if the AI algorithm could take into account our previous study habits and performance to make more accurate recommendations.
- I appreciate having a platform to collaborate with my classmates, but I found it difficult to communicate with them effectively. It would be great if you could implement a messaging system that allows us to chat in real-time or even video call each other for group projects and discussions.”
- “You’re the product manager of a product that offers real-time translation services online with certified translators. You want to learn about how your product is doing. Following the North Star framework, what are the metrics that you would use to evaluate your product’s performance?”
Getting more done together with ChatGPT
ChatGPT is a fantastic tool for product managers, as a way to save time, brainstorm ideas & move your product forward. Once you learn how to use it and work with prompts, you can generate sample documents, recommendations, summaries, analyses, and much more. If you take the power of the API capabilities, your opportunities for analyzing data & generating useful responses and reports are even higher. We were inspired to create this article by the work of Aatir Abdul Rauf. He creates great resources on product management process & how to work with AI, and is a personality you won’t regret following.
While ChatGPT is impressive, it’s no replacement for a product manager. The outputs it generates still need to be evaluated, double-checked & decisions remain in the hands of you and your team. However, with the power of AI, you now have an extra set of hands on deck, always available, and lightning-fast.
Capture user feedback easily. Get more insights and make confident product decisions.
Getting feedback has never been easier and we hope you’ve realized that after reading this article. Let us know what you think, your feedback is important.
And if you’re ready to try out a customer feedback software, Usersnap offers a free trial. Sign up today or book a demo with our feedback specialists.
