ChatGPT for product management

With the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT at the very end of November last year, there has been an explosion of enthusiasm. Here’s their trajectory to a million users!

(Thanks to Azeem Azhar of Exponential View)

Initially, the response was ‘Look at this cool poem that ChatGPT wrote.’ Thankfully more considered use cases are now developing.

So here are my thoughts on how ChatGPT can help Product Managers:

Broad Use Cases	Use Cases for Product Management
Summarisation of a long body of text	Summarising large amount of texts for requirements analysis chatGPT is surprisingly competent at summarising text eg for condensing a whole list of free-form product requests from customers into a couple of pithy themes.
And the inverse, extrapolation of short body of text.	Writing product descriptions for product marketing. a. Reinterpreting features to benefits b. Rewriting product marketing copy for particular audiences
Variation of an existing body of text	Wearing your product marketing hat, you have written some descriptive words, but they need some help or the body of text needs to be shorter to fit into a text box on the website or on your PowerPoint.
Initial research into a topic or industry	As Product Managers, we spend a lot of time trying to make sense of a market / customer / technology / product / service. I can see myself using chatGPT as a great start to understanding the four walls of a market. Market research: what do I need to know about XYZ? What’s new and important in the XYZ sector? Who has the competitive advantage and why in XYZ sector? It’s great a high-level summaries, but not good enough for the details that matter.

As always the devil is in the details, but at least it gives the Product Management some boundaries and some structure to start with. And you would never submit the output from ChatGPT as your completed, best thoughts, BUT it does provide a start and save on that first half hour / blank canvas problem / writer's block when you’re wondering where to start from.

ChatGPT for managers

One great advantage is that it can create consistency when you have review or compare work from multiple teams. By getting your teams to start with ChatGPT's output, then at least all the teams have started from the same point with their use case (not using a template).

What it won't do effectively?

Some have claimed that it could be used to write product requirements. Nope – well, not to a meaningful level and certainly not good enough to give to a developer.

Cute Use Cases

• There’s one elegant use case of writing a Value Model Canvas.
• I Interviewed ChatGPT for a PM role, and it almost got the job

Side Notes on OpenAI

• Who are their investors - it's always useful to know where the money flows. 
• Y Combinator
• Peter Thiel (founder of Paypal)
• Reid Hoffman Foundation (founder of LinkedIn)
• Khosla Ventures 
• Elon Musk did invest, but has now sold off his stake
• Microsoft Ventures ($1bn investment in 2019 + MS has built a supercomputer in Azure to support OpenAI ML research)

OpenAI have more complex corporate structure than most: there is for-profit corporation OpenAI LP and its parent company, the non-profit OpenAI Inc. AND in 2019, OpenAI transitioned from non-profit to "capped" for-profit, with profit cap set to 100X on any investment. (Source: Wikipedia)