Dear Leah #6: I don't understand AI and everybody want's it from me.

Are we trying to polish the turd?

“Dear Leah” is my advice column, in which I tackle questions from the community. It’s a perk intended for my paid subscribers to get more focused, operational advice.

Submit your own questions to dearleah@productea.io or write them in the comments.

In this one, I try to highlight the most common mistakes I encounter when other product managers or leaders are pitching ideas to me or their leadership team.

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Dear Leah,

I’m feeling under a lot of pressure to deliver AI solutions in our business while I’m getting scared that I missed the train. I don’t really understand how they work and how to stay up to date on all the things that happen.

I’m not a very technical person and feel lost, how should I deal with it?

Sara

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We had AY AY AY in pitch decks for decades.

Hey Sara,

Currently, much of the AI craze feels like it was a couple of years ago when the term “Growth Hacking” came up. Remember that?

Everybody had these amazing hacks on how to improve your onboarding flows and what the latest and greatest was to gain 10,000 users or whatever a big number is for you. It’s a very marketing-driven idea of what “Growth” was, and it sounded enticing for product managers to jump on that train.

Not a lot of it is left nowadays, and the term has at least vanished quite a lot from my feed for a specific reason: it’s not sustainable and not repeatable. Hacks, tricks, and one-off things are nice but not suitable for a running business.

The way we understand growth now as a function is that it is a more repeatable function in a business where we optimize onboarding flows continuously with A/B experimentation and team structures that are likely to identify good, smaller improvements on a continuous basis. A job that you can do without having to have crazy ideas all the time.

You conduct interviews, you understand your customers you try to solve their problems little by little.

In other words: the Ideas about Growth hacking turned from a Marketing (Acquisition) idea to a Product (Retention) Market.

Now, AI rolls around, and we see the exact same thing happening. Don’t look towards the shiny features that rake in that much money (they often don’t or are just very few on the back of a lot of failed businesses), and think you have to copy those.

Many PMs freak out because they don’t understand AI models, open-source solutions, and all the crazy wrappers that pop up everywhere.

That’s fair I also don’t understand most of it, but my point is, you don’t have to. Yes, it can help to understand what’s possible and what the rough inner workings of AI are. But the fundamental business reason for you as a product person or founder to exist is still the same and will not change: