Introduction
With the increase in data-heavy tasks and product optimization ventures in the current market, there is a growing demand for AI Product Managers (AIPM). The salary of an AI product manager ranges between 15-35 lakhs per annum in India, with some senior managers even getting close to 1 crore per annum. As an AIPM, it is essential for you to frame a perfect AI product strategy that resonates with the business and ensures seamless optimization. A concrete AI product strategy will help your team to implement complex projects seamlessly while simultaneously adhering to stringent deadlines. Here is a three-pronged strategic approach in AI product management.
AI in Product Vision and Decision-making
Businesses usually follow a customer-first policy towards creating products. Therefore, they look for skilled AIPMs who enhance strategic planning, product development, and user experience. As an AIPM, you need to implement an AI tool that is capable of analyzing vast amounts of data to identify market trends, predict customer requirements, and create a product. The designed product should empower business users to personalize product offerings that are tailored to address customer requirements. This enables companies to accelerate decision making, make quicker iterations, and create innovative user-centric products.
As an AIPM, you should have sound knowledge of the business and suggest appropriate AI-powered solutions that help in optimizing the processes. You must also proactively suggest new methods to help in improving the product line and different ways to incorporate AI to continuously optimize operations in the product lineup of the business. Your AI product vision should translate to a fine product that can be deployed quickly and should be easy to adapt to different scenarios as well.
Design Thinking and Execution Strategies
Let us say that you have a brilliant product that could revolutionize the industry and business operations, but the requirements of users do not seem to align properly. This is where design thinking comes into the picture. Design thinking is crucial for product managers as it drives a transformative result for your business through reasoning and empathy. The key here is to implement a human-centered approach that focuses on empathy, collaboration, and iterative learning that leads to an amicable agreement. Here are some of the core principles of design thinking for product managers.
Empathizing with need
Just understanding the user’s requirements is not enough; you need to put yourself in the user’s shoes and experience the challenges that they face. Empathy is the key to ensuring that you understand the crux of user requirements at all levels. Most importantly, you need to capture the aspects that excite the users and what they experience every day. As a product manager, it is crucial for you to understand the pain points encountered by users. You need to understand their requirements and directly engage with users. The key here is to analyze how users interact with products and conduct in-depth interviews.
Cross-functional collaboration for innovation
Now that you have understood the user’s requirements, you need to assemble a team of product managers, data scientists, engineers, compliance experts, and product designers. This will ensure better team collaboration, easy access to resources, and establish a clearer understanding of the market. A pro tip here is to assemble a diverse team with sound product knowledge and AI knowledge.
Experimentation and prototyping
When it comes to AI and machine learning in product management, there is no one-stop solution for a problem. You should always be open to experimenting with new implementations and building new prototypes that can be modified. Think of each project as building a prototype, as this mindset will help you expand your horizons by looking at various scenarios from real-time data. This will help you continuously innovate and build a suitable, structured solution that is open to handling new updates (flexible).
Testing
In the testing phase, you need to take the prototypes back to users and gather their feedback after they use them. At this stage, you need to gather all the relevant information on their satisfaction with the product and take their feedback to implement new process improvements accordingly. This is where you need to implement design thinking, as it helps you obtain actionable insights according to user behavior.
Implement Models in Design Thinking
Did you know that each organization uses different frameworks in design thinking. This is because different frameworks help in reshaping how AI-driven products are being developed. Here are four of the most commonly used models in design thinking.
Stanford D’school’s five-stage model
The five stage model is now the core standard in design thinking as it is a straightforward model that encompasses the entire creative process from initializing to final testing. Here is a brief on Stanford D’school’s five-stage model.
- ● Empathize with users
- ● Define their requirements and gather relevant insights
- ● Ideate a product/AI model that generates a variety of solutions and ideas
- ● Turn the ideas into new prototypes
- ● Test the solutions with users and refine them according to user feedback
IDEO’s three-phase model
As a global design company famous for pioneering in design thinking, IDEO helps in simplifying the process as inspiration, ideation, and implementation.
- ● During inspiration, you need to gather the required insights from users and based on experience.
- ● In this model, ideation refers to coming up with ideas and solutions based on user insights.
- ● At the implementation phase, ideas become actionable results that are ready to be deployed in real-time.
UK Design Council’s double diamond model
The diamond model comprises four phases of design thinking that are as follows:
- ● Discover the user’s problem
- ● Define the actual problem that needs to be resolved after an analysis
- ● Develop solutions through a working prototype
- ● Deliver a fully refined solution after gathering the required inputs from users
Balanced breakthrough model
The balanced breakthrough model focuses on three essential pillars for a successful product innovation. It focuses on achieving a balance between desirability, feasibility, and viability. This will ensure a successful product innovation and encourages teams to create products that are technical, economically feasible, and desired by users. This model also focuses on the practical and sustainable aspects of the solution.
Now that you have understood the three-pronged strategy used in implementing a concrete AI product management strategy, you may have a lot of questions on how to implement the strategy in real-time. This is where the mentors at Eduinx can help you. Eduinx is a renowned institute in the edtech industry with over a decade of experience in data science, AI, and machine learning applications. At Eduinx, our mentors are non-academicians with several years of experience under their belt. They will guide you to implement different strategies in AI product management through a hands-on approach. They will help you implement an AI product strategy according to the user’s requirements. With several AI product manager jobs in the market, Eduinx will help you get your dream job in your respective field with 360-degree career support. Get in touch with Eduinx to learn more about the AI product management course.
