What are the essential AI skills for the product manager?
So last year and half, and especially, last 3 months I’ve spent significant amount of awaken hours to learn AI skills, mainly because I see a lot of potential in it and somewhat of fear of missing out. And as I’m pretty sure all of you understand there is a lot of hype about it, plenty of info, and new models, new AI features, new promises about AI output… And this got me overwhelmed.
So I was thinking how can I help myself and get it more under control, and in peace with it. So I went to most reliable thing I could think of, simplify it and I hope you, as a reader, can take it into consideration.
What are essential, repetitive and highly automatable skills of a good product manager?
So, I’ve started thinking at first how can I learn to use AI to help and automate my day at work to make me more productive and get best out of it. And then I’ve realized I’m thinking from the wrong point of view. Instead learn all of AI ever, which is what is overwhelming me so much. Perhaps, I could structure it down, and learn AI to support me in product manager skill set. So I made a list:
Stakeholder alignment - This is done daily or weekly, usually one on one, but sometimes with larger audience.
Backlog grooming - Done multiple times during the week, reviewing, clarifying and reshaping tickets.
Roadmap communication - Maintain single source of truth and it is done daily
Metrics overwatching - Following up on KPIs, OKRs and any anomalies daily sweep, and once in 2 weeks deep dive
Competitive scan - Monitoring competitor releases and checking about implications, which is conducted once in 2 weeks
User Signals - Aggregate, tag, and quantify user pain/themes from support/interviews on a daily basis.
Release notes & changelog drafting - Translate technical changes into customer/value language.at every release.
Meeting prep & follow-up - Create proper agendas, pre-reads, and action item tracking. on a daily basis.
As well, I’ve asked AI to make the same list for me based on the question, and here is the prompt:
“You are a world-class product management coach with 15+ years experience at top tech companies (FAANG/unicorn level). List the 10 most essential, repetitive, and highly automatable daily/weekly skills of an exceptional product manager.
Present strictly as a bullet-point list.
For each skill:
- Bold the skill name
- One short sentence (max 15 words) describing the core repetitive activity
- One sentence linking it explicitly to daily or weekly cadence
- One sentence explaining why it’s highly automatable or ripe for AI/automation leverage
Use crisp, senior-PM language. No fluff, no introductions, no conclusions. Start directly with the first bullet.”
I’ve got my results, they are all more or less pointing out the similar bullet points. I’ve asked several AI models.
How would I go about it?
So what are the essential skills that one AI product manager should learn: And I’ll be getting certified myself as well, as I do see significant value.
Prompt engineering - An art of writing bulletproof prompts, as you can try to imitate, with AI, top tier product managers. Also using this skill you can create most incredible brain storming sessions, assigning different roles to AI, before even going to human counterparts.
Creation & scaling AI agents - Working on repetitive and most often boring items of work using AI agents. And reminder to myself: always make a AI agent fail safe and also it is always me who has decision making role.
Anything else that I forgot? I’m really eager to learn, so your comments would be most amazing.
