1 tip & 3 resources per week to improve your Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery practices in less than 5 minutes. Explore my new book on realprogressbook.com
AI Won't Fix Your Product Discovery
4 Opportunities to Layer AI into Your Product Discovery ActivitiesDear Reader, To use AI to shorten your lead time and reduce uncertainty, consider it a layer to supercharge your existing workflow.
Instead of generating with AI, think about supercharging with AI. Here are four common Product Discovery activities where thoughtful AI integration can dramatically reduce uncertainty without sacrificing quality: #1: Writing Interview QuestionnairesDON’T: Ask an LLM to "write interview questions about our app" and use the output verbatim. You'll end up with generic questions that miss your specific research goals and introduce subtle biases that skew your findings. DO: Feed the LLM with the context and constraints for your interview. Get crystal clear on your business goals and the research intent questions or assumptions you need to find answers to. Share what existing insights emerged from quantitative data. Use (re-) documented internal better practices for interviews and offer these as constraints. Add the interview duration and input on prototypes you want to use—if possible, share “what “good looks like” from” other interviews. Then, get to drafting. You'llmazed by the (reduced) amount of correction required. #2: Synthesizing Research InsightsUtilize built-in capabilities of research repositories like Dovetail:
None of these should be done solely by hand. Note how these also stand on the shoulders of your clarity of research goals and method execution quality. #3: PrototypingTools uizard make getting to a first draft easy–given the correct input. Create a prompt for what you want to do, feed it with screenshots of your product or a competitor solution, and have it create an editable and clickable prototype using your brand colors in minutes. While not immediately usable for all user testing out of the box, imagine how powerful the presentation of your ideas becomes if you quickly spin it up and modify it in a meeting to help communicate with domain experts. There are many more opportunities to take this further through Lovable or Cursor, but I haven't ventured into these territories yet. #4: Scaling Discovery KnowledgeCurate your company's commonly agreed-upon best practices for Product Discovery and feed these into a CustomGPT (or equivalent). Then, teach teams how to prompt it to scale “Discovery Coaches” and overcome” the bottlenecks of centralized departments. These can still come in for hands-on contextual support beyond the LLM materials. Garbe-in-Garbage-OutBeware that this is (for now) often a situation in which the quality of your inputs determines the quality of your outputs. You can talk to hundreds of random people, but if you only ask how they like your product, the AI will only surface these lip service-like insights.
Your unfair advantage remains your domain expertise. Use AI to scale processes, but rely on your critical thinking to set direction and prioritize what matters in your context. Did you enjoy the newsletter? Please forward it. It only takes two clicks. Creating this one took two hours. Thank you for Practicing Product, Tim
As a Product Management Coach, I guide Product Teams to measure the real progress of their evidence-informed decisions. I focus on better practices to connect the dots of Product Strategy, Product OKRs, and Product Discovery. |
Product Practice Newsletter
1 tip & 3 resources per week to improve your Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery practices in less than 5 minutes. Explore my new book on realprogressbook.com
Product Practice #403 Linked Better Practices over Stacked Best Practices PUBLISHED Apr 9, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, During my last webinar on Connect Strategy, Goals, and Discovery with Progress Wheel, I asked people which part of their work is most prone to Alibi Progress. Almost everyone who chimed in named OKRs. And that's because many OKR cycles start the same way for teams: Someone opens a spreadsheet, fills in three to five semi-random metrics, and picks a value that isn't...
Product Practice #402 Product Discovery forInternal Enabler Teams PUBLISHED Apr 2, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, Because the customers of your product just sit three desks away, you might think you can just "talk to them." And that's precisely what often leads to the low adoption of better product practices among product teams working on internal products (also sometimes called Enabler Teams). And why, when a user has a company email address, it is likely nobody's doing discovery on...
Product Practice #401 How to Close Your Confidence Loop PUBLISHED Mar 26, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, Most teams can tell you what they're building. Far fewer can tell you why it matters and how they will know it has worked. And I mean in a connected, defensible way that traces from their next release or discovery back to a company goal. That gap is where confidence lives (or doesn't). The confidence loop describes the critical questions you need to be able to answer and connect to...