An introduction to product management in AI Artificial Intelligence

A product manager’s Job is to ensure that a company is building the right things at the right time and in the right way. A good product manager ensures that a company builds with a product mindset. This means that a product manager must make sure that everyone contributing to the product including stakeholders sees the end product as their goal, and not the individual component that they are responsible for.

A product manager’s role can be challenging because it spans almost every facet of a product. A product manager must understand:

• What it takes to develop a product
• The data required
• How to work around uncertain timelines and outputs

A product manager is accountable for the success of the product they are working on. You will find that product managers are great Idea people. This does not mean that they come up with the ideas, the means that they source their ideas from various places. This might include users, other employees, data and industry trends. Product managers then decide which of these ideas to forgo, prioritize and act on. A product manager acts at the core of 3 domains

• User experience
• Technology
• Business

This means that a product manager should have a broad knowledge of these three domains.

What is different about a product manager working with AI??

When working with AI, there is an extra domain a product manager has to act on: DATA. In the case of AI, a product manager is responsible for the collection, security, variety and accuracy of data that is used to develop products.

A product manager working with AI works with more uncertainty because working with AI shifts the engineering process from a more deterministic one to a probabilistic one. This is because AI problems require data science applications that work with data in a variety of ways until a successful output is achieved. This means that there is a probability that the desired output is not achieved.

In addition to the probabilistic nature of an AI product manager’s job, An AI product manager also has to take on the challenge of communicating AI to senior leadership. AI is a new field and a lot of leaders do not understand AI. It is the duty of an AI product manager to communicate and breakdown complex AI topics to senior leaders.