Empowering Product with AI
For the last 8 months, I’ve led a team without any product function. I’ve filled the gap knowing of the challenges that comes with, but for one reason or another was a necessity.
Knowing that my time is limited already, I did not want this additional responsibility to take more time than necessary.
I’m going to discuss some things I’ve been doing in the hope it may help or inspire others to utilise AI to empower themselves or their team.
AI had to be the answer.
Writing PBIs with AI
I’ve found AI is incredible with taking unstructured data and making it structured. PBIs are no different. With AI powered transcription, you can literally take call transcriptions and use an awesome prompt that can be stored locally to build Epics, Features & of course, PBIs.
If you don’t have transcriptions on teams yet, no problem, I do, it’s great, but raw meeting notes are also fine. Me being the product owner, I have LOTS of transcriptions and raw meeting notes of the calls I am part when talking to stakeholders.
The power of the prompt
I am going to create a blog post on this in the future, so a small section here. Honestly, the title says it all. Do some research on prompting, how to do it well, etc. funnily enough, asking AI how to build a prompt isn’t the worst thing in the world, but it’s all about iteration. Tailor to what gives you the best results, change it up.
Practical Workflow
My team deliver PBIs at their smallest value, we tend to avoid estimating for the most part and focus on refining. As a Product Owner, while what we bring to refinement may not be perfect, it’s good to understand the team and tailor your prompt for that. Tell AI the context you have and it’ll help. If you have a transcription of a whole feature, ask it to try break it down into how the team prefer it.
Validate before Refinement
Use AI as your first eyes to what you’ve built, ask if questions that you would ask the team. Any issues with this? Given the Acceptance Criteria and Description, what am I missing? Can I break this down further into smaller value adds?
The Obvious Statements
Treat AI as your assistant, you are the Product Owner.
Rubbish in, Rubbish out - take pride in your prompting.
Data Privacy only use tools your company has approved, as a Product Owner you are dealing with possibly sensitive business information.
Learn and Iterate, iterate, iterate!!