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
Can You Still Take Accountability for AI-Assisted Product Decisions?
Linked Better Practices over Stacked Best PracticesDear Reader, Sorry for the slip in sending this one out on Friday. To make up for it, there will be (for the first time ever) two newsletters going out this week. Recently, a CPO told me about an engineer who had used AI to develop a proposal. But when the decisions in it were questioned, the engineer kept referring him back to the output. The CPO wondered how that conversation would go when they needed to ask others for funding. Using multiple models hadn’t resolved his concern. AI can help you compare options and consider approaches you might otherwise miss. But you still need to understand why a recommendation makes sense for your strategic context. For example, imagine using AI to develop a proposal for automating part of your customer onboarding. The proposal might explain how automation could help customers get started faster and reduce the work required from your support team. A colleague asks whether simplifying the existing onboarding steps would achieve a similar result with less effort. To discuss that alternative, you need to understand what makes onboarding difficult and why automation seems worth pursuing. You might have evidence that supports your recommendation. You might also realize that you haven’t considered the simpler option closely enough. Or how it links up to business goals. Of course, defending a decision doesn’t mean sticking with it regardless of what you learn.
With all the beautiful possibilities to speed up the creation of products, strategies, OKRs, and PRDs, keep in mind to use that freed-up time wisely. Like investing in making sure you have a narrative backbone. Before your next review, ask a colleague to question one consequential choice in a proposal you developed with AI, and pay attention to where you struggle to explain the reasoning beyond repeating what the document says. 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 #427 Your Strategy names one audience; weak evidence describes another PUBLISHED Sep 24, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, One of the most common questions that came up in my recent Strategy to Execution workshop at the ProductLab conference revolved around intentional strategic audiences vs. reactive chasing of new business. Many teams either operate where the company focuses on all customers of a given market (i.e., "all lawyers") or throw a wishful-thinking segment out...
Product Practice #426 You don’t need toinvestigate every problem PUBLISHED Sep 18, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, Discovery without direction leads to endless exploration. Teams can feel overwhelmed, believing they must investigate every problem. Your strategic audience choices determine which customer feedback deserves priority investigation, while discovery insights reveal whether your strategic assumptions about customer problems and competitive positioning hold up in practice. This...
Product Practice #425 What Part of YouIs Making the Decision? PUBLISHED Sep 11, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, For much of my career, I’ve helped product teams work through uncertainty. Chilling with my buddy King Arthur at Tintagel Castle I challenged assumptions, introduced frameworks, and helped people make better decisions when there was no obvious answer. While I still love doing that work, I’ve become increasingly interested in a deeper question over the past six years: From where...