Transforming customer insight with AI – for product managers

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TLDR

In this episode, I sit down with Dr. David Robertson, senior lecturer at MIT Sloan and co-founder of ProtoBoost AI, to explore the transformative impact of AI on the innovation process. Drawing on decades of experience in product management and innovation, David Robertson discusses how product managers can leverage AI at every stage of the innovation lifecycle—from customer research and need-finding to prototyping, business case development, and cross-functional coordination. The episode covers practical challenges product managers face, ways AI can augment key skills, and the future potential and risks of AI-driven innovation.

Introduction

 Our guest is Dr. David Robertson, a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management. We are talking about the impact of AI on the innovation process. David is the author of Brick by Brick, the book on LEGO’s rebound from near bankruptcy around 2003, and the author of The Power of Little Ideas on complementary innovation. David spent five years at McKinsey leading the product development practice and has served as CEO of multiple tech companies. He recently co-founded his own tech company, ProtoBoost.ai to accelerate AI driven innovation. He has also taught at Wharton and IMD Switzerland and now runs MIT’s largest executive ed program.

Summary of Concepts Discussed for Product Managers

AI’s Transformation of Innovation:
AI can now be applied at nearly every step in the traditional innovation process—design sprints, customer insight, prototyping, business modeling, and more.

A Brief History of AI:
David Robertson reflects on the evolution from 1980s rule-based AI to today’s data-driven, generative models capable of natural language processing and complex tasks.

Challenges for Product Managers:
Many product managers have strengths in some areas (e.g. customer understanding, engineering dialogue) but lack expertise in others (e.g. financial modeling, stakeholder communication). AI is emerging as a tool to fill these skill gaps. David highlights the use of AI in helping product managers communicate with other stakeholders, understand the effect of a new feature on P&L, and talk to customers.

Synthetic Customers:
Recent advances show AI can act as synthetic customers, simulating human responses for interviews and market research, sometimes even more reliably than real users.

AI Agents for Every Stage:
David anticipates specialized AI agents for building business cases, segmenting markets, or validating user needs—PMs shift from juggling every detail to orchestrating and validating agent outputs.

Useful Links

• Connect with David on LinkedIn
• Listen to the episode about LEGO’s transformation: 537: Step-by-step community engagement for your product – with Jake McKee

Innovation Quote

 “Play all the keys on the innovation piano.
“Date your customer. Don’t fight your competitor.
“Innovation flourishes when the space for it is limited.” – David Robertson

Application Questions

1. Which stages of your innovation process could most benefit from AI-driven support or automation, and why?
2. How could synthetic customers or AI-powered personas change your approach to need-finding and user research?
3. Where do you see the biggest skill gaps in your product management team, and what AI tools could help bridge these gaps?
4. What challenges do you anticipate when orchestrating multiple AI agents to support complex innovation tasks?
5. How can deliberately introducing constraints in your innovation projects promote more focused and valuable outcomes?

Bio

David Robertson teaches AI-driven Innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management and is the Faculty Director for Sloan’s largest executive education program, the Executive Program in General Management.  David has also created and leads MIT Sloan’s new executive program Revitalizing Existing Products Using AI-Driven Innovation.  Prior to MIT, David was a Professor at the Wharton School and from 2002 through 2010 was the LEGO Professor of Innovation at the Swiss business school IMD.  At IMD David was given inside access to The LEGO Group where he wrote his award-winning book ‘Brick by Brick:  How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry’.   David’s follow-on book – The Power of Little Ideas: A Low-Risk, High-Reward Approach to Innovation – explained how to apply the LEGO innovation strategy to any company in any industry. 

David has been recognized as a “Thinkers50” thought leader, has won numerous teaching awards, and has published 3 award-winning books.  He is a member of the Cherokee Nation and is currently working on a book on Native Innovation. 

Thanks!

Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below.

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