Product management is relational

Yesterday, I was thinking about the ways people might use LLMs for wedding planning. I was considering where I find that reasonable and where I find it mortifying. The idea of a couple using Suno to generate the song for their first dance, for example, fills me with dread. So do memories of Reddit posts about ChatGPT-authored vows.

I’m very onboard, though, with delegating logistics to an LLM, or deferring to an LLM when there are too many small decisions to make. Deciding which shoes to wear when you’ve spent months picking out a dress. Figuring out which cocktails to serve. Establishing timings.

This all felt intuitively true, and I wanted to understand that intuition. I concluded that the tasks I would be happy to hand over are the ones that fatigue a person but which are not personally important. Meanwhile, the ones that I would protect from automation are the ones that let someone reveal something of their history; their feelings; their inner world.

Once I have a framework, I like to see where else it fits. I turned to product management, to figuring out where I think LLMs help us and where they’re more like Suno first dances. I find LLMs incredibly helpful for automating the laborious parts of my job: building dashboards, writing weekly updates, finding contact details. These tasks genuinely slow me down and use up a lot of energy, and I’m far more effective when they’re solved.

Equally, I feel concerned when I see product managers across the industry using LLMs to figure out what to build; when to build it; and who to build it for. That’s not to say LLMs have no place in strategy work. I often think out loud with an LLM to develop something I already have: a pattern I've noticed, a frustration I've heard, something that just doesn’t feel quite right. The model helps me turn it over, but the signal is mine. The problem is when someone asks "what should we build?" as their opening move and treats that as a substitute for talking to users.

Product management careers are so varied that we don’t often crisply define our role and its value. I think the job of a product manager is to understand what customers need and figure out how their business can deliver it. Business value is obviously a crucial part of the puzzle, but if the whole point were just to generate as much shareholder value as possible, every product would pivot to being a pension fund.

The relationship between a product manager and their users underpins a product’s value. Think of a well-designed thing you own - my current favourite is my light therapy glasses. When you use something that meets your needs, something that simply works, that feels magical, but it isn’t accidental. Someone has done the work to understand what their customers are missing. They’ve heard this, and they have planned and delivered a way to solve it. The solution can only ever be as good as the listening.

To put it another way, when you use a good product, there is something relational about that. Somebody understood people like you, and they made something that they thought you would like using. They heard human frustrations, worries, and wishes; and connected them to their own. Product management is empathy and problem-solving, and that involves the product manager asking every step of the way - if I had this need, would this solution fulfil it?

I don’t love a song because the melody is pleasant or the rhythm is catchy. I love it because the people making it expressed their human feelings, aesthetics, and ideas - and when I listen to it, it reaches something in me. As much as I have surely already enjoyed a song that was written wholly or partly by Suno, it will never show me human experience from a new perspective. And as much as Claude can put together a beautiful website, it can’t connect to the human needs that I don’t have words for. Only another human can do that, because they have a felt history of needs and preferences, and their emotional capacity lets them see me.

LLMs are excellent at generating competent-looking feature ideas, so it’s easy to see one and think it’s equivalent to the other. But product management is an exercise in connecting, human-to-human, and that human connection is how we build things that matter.

So, here’s my opinionated advice. Use as many AI meeting transcripts as make your job easier. Get Copilot to write your SQL queries. But remember the meaning: your job is to listen to people’s concerns, and to find the answer they didn’t know they were looking for. That’s why we’re doing this.