Upstream, Full-Stack: Product, Strategy, & AI
Strategy-driven product mindsets you can learn from
“What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.”
Zig Ziglar
Welcome back to the latest edition of the Upstream, Full-Stack Journal, helping you go upstream and be more effective across the full value delivery stack.
If you think a friend might benefit, please forward along.
Let’s dig into a few ways to put Product, Strategy, and AI in context.
In this edition:
Designing an effective Generative AI product strategy
Startup leader Hiten Shah shares his favorite AI workflow
Parv Sondhi shares a first-principles approach to understand the best approach to AI/ML for your product
Let’s jump in!
If You Don’t Think Your Product Needs An AI Strategy, You’re Wrong
Navigating the promises and perils of AI for your product, and how strategy design can help
In my latest piece, published via Product Coalition, I go deep into the “why” and “how” to design strategy with a disruptive, “flattening” technology, using AI as a prime example.
From the intro:
“How might we understand ways to put Generative AI tech in context to provide genuine value to our users, and avoid getting disrupted in our industries by faster-moving competitors?
In this piece, we’ll unpack a better way for designing strategy to integrate Generative AI into your product.
We’ll also review one important reason why Product Managers should think twice before ever letting Generative AI design their strategies for them.”
Read the full story on Product Coalition via Medium here.
Startup Leader Hiten Shah on His Next-Gen AI Workflow
Hiten Shah, CEO at Nira, shared this great AI-driven learning workflow.
One of my core AI workflows:
1) Find audio/video I want to learn from
2) Transcribe it using Descript App
3) Download .docx file of the transcript with time stamps and speaker names 4) Upload to Anthropic AI’s Claude web interface
5) Chat with Claude to get learnings
My biggest takeaway from this is how a 20-year SaaS veteran CEO is still fueled by a desire to learn, and has devised an effective workflow around AI to do it.
A first-principle approach to integrating AI/ML for your product
Over on X, Parv Sondhi shares this brilliant heuristic:
It's important to follow a first-principle approach to understand whether the best solution for your problem is AI/ML
Here is a walkthrough of how to evaluate a product problem along with a concrete example of understanding how to deploy an AI/ML solution 👇
Check out his blog and podcast, “Trying to Product,” or follow him on X.
That wraps things up for this edition!
Join me next time as we continue to go upstream and use strategy, goal-setting, and product management to make you more effective.
