Product Momentum Podcast 170 / Lena Sesardic: Building and Using Custom GPTs for Product Management
If you could hire an employee who never gets tired, never loses focus, and instantly adapts to your workflow, would you do it? In the latest episode of Product Momentum, Lena Sesardic leans on her experience as a tech product manager and business-savvy entrepreneur to explore this tempting proposition through the lens of custom GPTs – specialized generative AI bots now reshaping how product teams operate.
The episode isn’t a technical tutorial on how to build custom GPTs – though Lena does walk us through her 6-step framework. It’s more a conversation – peppered with easy-to-understand examples – that help us think in new ways about the nature of our work.
Here’s what we talked about:
Supporting creative and strategic bandwidth
Lena describes custom GPTs as “little AI employees” that can take loads of work off your plate. By delegating tasks like writing user stories or analyzing estimates, product managers can free themselves to focus on higher-order work: roadmapping, stakeholder management, and creative problem-solving.
We can train custom GPTs to be our “collaborative thought partners,” Lena adds, “sort of a second brain that can then free up our bandwidth for more creativity, more user connection, and more talking with your actual users or stakeholders.”
Demystifying misconceptions
Lena dispels concerns about the level of technical sophistication required to build custom GPTs.
“A lot of PMs I know think [custom GPTs] are very technical,” she adds. “I used to think I had to be able to code to create a custom GPT. But the more I worked with them, I realized, ‘oh my gosh, I can totally build these and take a bunch work off my plate.'”
Lena’s 6-step framework for building a custom GPT
Start a conversation with ChatGPT (Lena recommends a Plus subscription) to help you build your custom GPT.
- Cast the role. Decide the expertise you need from your custom GPT.
- Develop the system instructions. Add context; define the input-transformation-output formula to generate the results you want.
- Map out the workflow. Be clear about your desired outputs. And remember, as with any AI tool, iteration is key.
- Add intelligence. Upload additional frameworks and other documents to guide your GPT.
- Install the brain. Copy-paste the system instructions from your ChatGPT conversation into your custom GPT.
- Put your GPT to work. Feed it real world data. Test it. Return to the conversation and describe what you’re seeing. Find out how to tweak it until you’re satisfied.
Lena’s is a message that resonates: by embracing custom GPTs, product managers can amplify not just their operational efficiency, but their capacity for meaningful innovation.
The Product Momentum team will be heading to Cleveland for INDUSTRY on Sept. 9-10, recording live, in-person episodes with several conference keynote speakers. Be sure to stop by Product Momentum’s Podcast Zone to say hi!
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