How the Top 1% PMs Use AI

If you’re tired of the AI noise, this episode will help you understand how to leverage AI. It’s straight to the point, hands-on content.

This podcast is different because we had a live interaction on how to use AI. You can expect real examples.

Mustafa Kapadia has been in this game for 25 years, including leading innovation at Google and products at IBM. Currently, he’s helping organizations become more effective at product development. Honestly, we can learn a lot from him.

Before jumping into the content, I have a no-brainer offer to you.

I’m running a free lightning session with Maven. We will cover how to avoid deadly mistakes with product discovery (most teams face them).

Back to today’s episode.

Here are 10 key takeaways from this podcast.

1. PMs fall into three AI adoption buckets

"Most PMs kind of fall into three buckets. There's one bucket that is in denial. There's a second bucket on the other side where they're all in on AI... And then there's the middle bucket... more of a surface-level use."

2. The top 1% use AI as a second brain

"The other bucket that we just talked about, the one that's all in—the top 1%—they use it for so much more. They literally use it as a second brain."

3. AI can do days of work in minutes

"David, I have been able to condense work that used to take my PMs days to do. Right. And it is a high-quality response."

4. The best AI users have playbooks and structured prompts

"The top PMs also have this playbook. And the playbook is basically their top most popular tasks."

5. AI enables better decision-making, not just automation

"AI can actually make them better PMs. And so you can actually use AI to make better decisions, be more creative, be more innovative, create documents that are much better quality."

6. Micro-tasking with AI yields better results than a “magic prompt”

"Instead of having AI asked to do a complete PRD, it's much easier when you ask AI to just do segments of your PRD, because the output quality is much better."

7. Prototyping with AI accelerates iteration

"We've been talking for the last, what, 10-15 minutes, right? And we went through four tasks that usually take PMs weeks to do."

8. AI will not replace PMs—it amplifies their strengths

"AI lets you be more you."

9. The key to great AI results is asking the right questions

"It is more around how much you can get out of AI, how much value you can squeeze out of AI, and it all comes down to the first fundamental skill: how you ask questions."

10. Bias and hallucinations can be mitigated with multiple models

"There's nothing stopping you from creating and opening up a second tab and firing up the same question and having the two LLMs compete with each other."

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