Jessica Fain: prediction

Transcript context

…Okay. Let's talk AI. I feel like you cannot do anything these days without mentioning AI in some way. How is AI changing the skill of influence? What's changed in the past couple years in trying to convince people to do the things you're hoping them to do? I think that we are entering a golden age of product management, not of product managers, but of product management and the core skills that made this function the thing that I love to do. More than ever, what we have to do is have really interesting ideas that are grounded in user empathy, curiosity, testing, iteration, but we will still be working in organizations where getting buy-in to those ideas and influencing people to fund not just the V1, but the much more expensive V2, three, four, and ongoing support become 10x more important. And as execution basically plummets in complexity and everyone can be a builder, PMs and product thinkers, which I think is far beyond the product management function, can be so incredibly influenced by those core skills of bringing people along for the ride. So I think that product managers for a long time have made their careers on being the most type A, the Gantt chart master, the best note taker in the business. And if AI is better than you at analyzing data or taking meeting notes or running experiments, what's your job now? So the leverage actually shifts from doing that work and being the synthesizer to deciding what work actually survives and encouraging other people to buy into that process. And I actually think it's just so incredibly exciting because PMs and other functions, engineers, designers are so empowered to bring that first version to bear to get that momentum, to get that signal on product market fit, on user benefit, and then build momentum from that point in a much faster cycle. And so it's actually an incredibly exciting place, but the act of influence, the act of stakeholder management, the act of learning... ... active influence. The act of stakeholder management, the act of learning is the 10X skill. Awesome. This is such a fun topic. The way I've been thinking about this is just where are human brains going to continue to be necessary and useful in this new world?…

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