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- ChatGPT as your product thinking coach
Hey there đź‘‹
Today, let’s talk about:
how to create prompt templates for your team
how to use ChatGPT to help develop your product thinking mindset
the new “Zapier for AI”
and lots more 👇
🤿 Prompt deep-dive: Product thinking
Product thinking and project thinking are two distinct approaches to developing and managing products. Product thinking involves a long-term strategy that focuses on the continuous improvement of a product to meet customer needs. It takes a user-centred approach and aims to create value for customers through iteration and experimentation. It’s about thinking in outcomes not features.
Project thinking, on the other hand, is more short-term and focuses on delivering a specific project on time and within budget. It is task-oriented and places more emphasis on meeting deadlines and delivering features.
Understanding the differences between these two approaches can help you choose the right mindset for your specific specific goals and objectives.
Both have their time and place, but in my experience, product thinking is the harder one to cultivate and practice, especially earlier on in your career.
ChatGPT can help you cultivate product thinking. One of the many things that stood out for me in Scott Adams’ book “How to fail at almost everything and still win big” is the importance of “Systems” in our life. He defines a system as “something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of success (happiness) in the long run.” In that sense, if you want to cultivate product thinking, you need a system around it. A system of tools and frameworks that can help you strengthen your core concepts. With ChatGPT acting as your co-pilot, you can train it be a product thinking coach 👇
You are here to help me switch from being primarily a project thinker to a product thinker. Here's the difference:
Project Thinking means valuing output over outcomes. When presented with a new idea or directive, project thinkers default to questions like: When does it need to be finished? Who will do it? How will we do it? Project thinking is centred around understanding expectations, formulating plans, marshalling resources, and coordinating actions.
Product Thinking: Rather than centring around the logistics of the project, product thinking is about understanding goals, motivations, devising solutions, simulating the effects of those solutions, and then choosing the best course of action. Product thinking involves questions like: Why is it important? What are our goals? What else could happen? How will we differentiate Product thinking means looking ahead to the effects you want to have on the user or audience.
When I come to you with a problem, one Product Thinking framework you can use is WAYRTTD = What are you really trying to do? Meaning: What is it that you’re trying to accomplish? Instead of just troubleshooting, let’s talk about the goal. Taking this step back can help to recenter the conversation on outcomes can lead to a better, more creative solution.
Do you understand these instructions and your role?
So that’s a really specific prompt, ensuring that we’re training ChatGPT to follow our (my) interpretation of the concept and how to apply it.
So ChatGPT has confirmed it understands the instructions (always worth clarifying when you’re asking it to assume a specific role), and I followed up where I felt there need extra clarification.
Now we can present it with a challenge we’re facing, and be coached into the right questions to consider.
Great. So I've just been approached by our head of sales, saying that our largest customer just escalated an issue to our CEO. They want audit logging and compliance reporting in the product in the next 3 months.
How should I respond?
The classic project thinker here would think “OMG we need a crisis meeting!” and instinctively assess what other projects would need to be moved around to “make the customer happy”. This could be a waste of effort, and it’s why you need to see beyond the question.
Luckily ChatGPT is here to keep us balanced in product thinking mode:
🛠️ Cool new tools
Available now
Pickaxe - Embed AI into your website and business, no code needed. Super simple to use. Could be really useful for teams looking to create prompt templates and systematise them for standardisation, such as Customer Support.
Get on the waitlist
Adept - Automation
“An AI teammate for everyone”. AI with automated actions in response to plain English commands. This “Zapier of AI” format is going to be huge.
Spellbook - Legals
Draft and check contracts with AI. Detect aggressive terms, draft new clauses, get negotiation suggestions.
Wizi - Development
Code search for frontend teams.
đź‘€ In case you missed it: AI Audit for Monzo.
AI Audit - an analysis of AI growth opportunities for a product.
Each week, in addition to the weekday newsletter like this one, I put myself in the shoes of a product team, ideate the generative AI opportunities and explore what I think would add the most value to the customers.
This week’s AI Audit is for soon-to-be-profitable UK challenger bank, Monzo.
đź‘€ For extensive guides on using ChatGPT, Bing and other AI tools as a co-pilot for building better products, faster, check out our wildly popular Prompt Books.
✨ Enjoying the daily emails and weekly AI Audit? Help spread the word and forward this to others who want to build better products, faster, with generative AI.
Thanks for reading, and happy prompting!
Martin, Chief Prompt Officer
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