From News To Product Launch: Why Product Managers Should Read More Technology News
A couple of weeks ago, I was attending a public Product Management event. One of the speakers said this: “it doesn’t matter which product you’re working on — if you’re not using AI, you’re missing out”. I think that was a bit of an overstatement. Forcing a solution on a problem is never a good thing, but I do think that following tech news, and news about AI specifically, is a huge part of the toolbox for modern-day entrepreneurs.
Yes, dear product managers (PM), especially if you’re not data scientists, you should be staying on top of what’s new in the world of AI. In this post, I’ll share my story of how following AI news helped me drastically improve our product, and why you should go ahead and subscribe to any of the 1000 slack channels or Reddit groups dedicated to the topic.
Adding OpenAI’s Whisper to Tagbox.io
A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled upon an article about OpenAI’s Whisper model — an amazing achievement in Speech Recognition, with the ability to transcribe video and audio in 99 languages and translate the texts into English.
While amazing, I quickly categorized it into the “another really cool tool, way to go world!” section of my brain, and life went on.
The next day, I was having a conversation with a customer, and she was asking about our plans to better support video. In short, Tagbox.io is a platform that helps marketing and creative teams automatically organize and collaborate on their thousands of visual assets. And while this works like magic for images, our support for video was somewhat limited.
Her question about video wasn’t a surprise: about half of our customers upload video in some capacity, and we’ve previously evaluated building the AI infrastructure to support the necessary functionality, but the quality wasn’t good enough, and most platforms didn’t support many of the languages we were looking to have (AWS, for comparison, only offers 25 languages, missing most of the European languages). In general, the cost, complexity, and uncertainty made it not worthwhile to do.
But now came the “ding!”. Better quality. 99 languages. Open-source. Is it time to re-evaluate? I quickly scheduled a few calls with some other customers to see if that’s something that might interest them. It definitely did. They were even willing to pay extra to get it. Game on!
We immediately went to work — verifying the advertised quality, checking edge cases, designing the UI and implementing the feature. We released it a few weeks ago, exactly 33 days after I first saw the article. Our customers are absolutely thrilled.
So here are a few generalizations of why I think it’s crucial for product managers to follow AI news and technology news in general:
Creating Nodes
One of the most important parts of an entrepreneur’s job is making connections. If you’ve ever worked on a B2B feature and found yourself saying “Hi, this part reminds me of my running app!” or anything of that sort, you know what I mean.
Our mind makes connections, but as any mathematician knows — you can’t make connections without first having nodes. Those reference points can be anything from your experience in high school athletics, to your browsing experience on Netflix.
It’s helpful to have related nodes. I personally love comparing the nuances of the chat experience between Messenger, WhatsApp, and Slack, but the best moments come from seemingly completely unrelated experiences.
“The world is changing”
I usually despise every marketing video that starts with these words. But in this specific case, the world of AI is literally changing every day. You probably know about Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT, and the 1000 apps built on top of them. Good luck finding a Product Hunt launch that doesn’t include the term “AI”.
Just like the life expectancy of an Israeli government — the title of state-of-the-art in AI is a very short-lived one (a very sad local joke). Because of that, today’s impossible might very well be tomorrow’s possible and next week’s old news. Don’t stay behind because you thought it’s the data scientist’s job.
Making better, more informed decisions
As Product Managers and as startup founders, we continuously evaluate value vs. effort, even when we don’t realize it. If you think something might take too long or it’s too uncertain, you might postpone even discussing it. Following the news can help you reevaluate what’s possible, plus risk factors.
Staying on top of the latest can also help with the build/buy dilemma, or in its AI form — should we dive into this 6-month research project — or use an open source / off-the-shelf product? The difference in time and costs can be 100x, and since the Data Science (DS) team is usually happy to jump on an interesting research project, it’s important to be able to give some counterbalance. Apologies to all DS that were offended by this — you’re awesome, but I’ve seen railways being built faster than your models.
Stirring your row boat
Finally, it’s a true cliché that a startup’s #1 resource is time. We keep getting asked “how are you going to beat Google or Amazon?”, and this is exactly how. This new abundance of tools not only levels the quality playing field, giving us little guys previously unattainable AI powers.
These tools also make us much faster, since that enterprise competitor of ours might not be willing to use open-source software and would hold out for a proprietary solution, and even if they will use it — it will take them months, and likely years, to make a decision on it.
When they finally are able to stir their “gajillion-megaton” aircraft carrier of a product — you’ll be way out in the distance.
Special thanks to Tremis Skeete, Executive Editor at Product Coalition for the valuable input which contributed to the editing of this article.
