r/ProductManagement

Curious, What AI tools do you use for product management?

For some context I have about 4 years and 4 months of SAAS experience at the same company across customer success (2 years 3 months) and as an APM (2 years and 1 month). At some companies apparently that’s a bit long as an APM but I’d say roughly 2.5+ years is average here to spend as an APM given that it’s a large slow moving company.

Ideally I want to stay til I hit either 3 years as an APM or get promoted to PM here but there is a decent chance my fiancee may get a job in another city soon. Ideally I wouldn’t want to do LDR for a long time and am wondering if I theoretically started applying in a month would PM roles be possible? Or would I still be looking at entry level and hack it out by any means necessary especially given the market atm

Hi folks! I am looking to understand how people are breaking into fintech PM in western eu/asia. I have 7+ years exp in banking research and consulting and really enjoyed app implementation and build projects. I will be going for my MBA this year and would love to work in a fintech building something tangible rather than strategy consulting.

I have commerce/business undergrad background. I know there are glaring gaps - I dont know coding and I havent handled pnl of the team. I have driven the entire process of app building for banks from designing screens to researching regulations and policies, conducting customer interviews, building marketing content, working with all cross functional teams, getting approvals from cxos, etc. I understand agile and scrum methodologies really well but I have not taken a course online for it.

My questions:

1. Is there any course I need to take for those first round of interviews/resume building for this role?

2. Since top mgmt has become super AI obsessed, are there any courses you are taking that is helping in your day to day work as a PM?

3. Any learnings from tenured PMs as I try to navigate this industry?

Thankyou!

Hey :)

I’m a fresher, a recent B.Arch graduate.

I honestly was never exposed to different job roles that exist and my way of thinking has always been narrow. I recently came across PM.

I wanted to know what it is, how it works and how the portfolios are different from an Architecture portfolio.

I’m always exploring my options and love learning more about new things and perhaps even get enough ideas to start pushing myself towards them.

In short, I’d like to understand what PM is, how does one become a PM and what are the ups and downs that come with it.

Thank you.

It keeps happening to me even after 2 decades of product management experience. If you come into a new business and you look at a product and something just feels off, and the data tell you everything is fine and everyone in the company tells you it's fine for 1000 reasons....

Trust your gut and dig. Worst case is you get to know the data a bit better. It happened to me again in the past month and I could have discovered something serious 3 monhts earlier if I just trusted my gut and what stared into my face. But I went with the group think and kind of accepted notions even though i'm usually quite thorough with analyzing my own data in detail.

If you see me 3 months ago, please tell her. F***

I’m working as a technical writer at a major cybersecurity firm. I graduated 4 years ago and pursued this path, and then the AI boom happened right after. Since then, my career is being existentially threatened. I am looking for backup career options. I love talking to various stakeholders, project planning, writing about new features, and being close to users. I also do user research and previously assisted a PM deliver usability testing presentations to executive leadership. It was scary, but I had a blast delivering that. I also learn to deal with tight deadlines, lots of ambiguity, conflicting needs, and heavy scrutiny/feedback to get docs accurate and delivered. That doesn’t phase me. Most of my job is very thankless and undervalued by the business where you are in constant cycles of revising docs based on conflicting feedback and user priorities. Obviously, that’s not anywhere near as visible as PM.

The problem is that I’ve historically been prone to depression and high anxiety mostly due to uncertainty of my career. I currently deal with high stress and anxiety completely due to AI swallowing up tech writing jobs and my current one being on the chopping block. I also have a baby due in 3 months, and I’m existentially scared of being locked out of a well-paying career. I figured I’d rather be stressful in a job where I have things more in my control than the existential stress of working a dead-end and easily-replaceable/reducible career field.

My previous company wants me to interview for an APM role where I’d be in charge of the product I used to write manuals for. I love the idea of being a PM and having high stakes business visibility, but I feel highly unqualified. Being the mini CEO, engineer, and CFO of a product sounds insane but equally rewarding. I figured the stress of trying new things is a little less stressful than the existential dread of being unemployed and automated out of a career where my skills don’t transfer elsewhere that easy. I know the director of PM very well and we talked over coffee a few years ago about inquiring the field, and he seems like an incredibly encouraging and nice guy. I also have strong relationships with the other PMs under him since I collaborated with them all the time.

They have given me advice and encouragement through this process and sound like they really want me to interview.

I have observed some of the biggest product decisions come from realizing an assumption was just totally wrong.

I remember working on a feature that looked an obvious customer need. When we got into the problem a little more, it turned out the pain point was something much simpler. That totally changed our next priorities.

It was a good reminder that assumptions can be surprisingly expensive. Has your team ever had a moment like that?

I’ve been thinking about a gap I see a lot in everyday service products.

A user can complete the flow, but still leave not knowing what happened, what happens next, or whether they did the right thing.

This shows up constantly in banking, healthcare, government services, insurance, onboarding, document submission, claims, approvals, and anything with back office processing.

From a PM perspective, task completion can look fine while the user’s actual understanding is broken.

Curious how others handle this. Do you measure whether users can explain the outcome of a flow, predict the next step, or understand why the system asked for certain info?

Or does that usually get hidden under CSAT, support tickets, and “UX will handle it”?

Have been looking at some maven courses for product management. Usually see that the cost is around 2k+ dollars. Is it really worth the money?

I took over a new team (as a product director on one year secondment) and have a situation with one of my product managers that I would appreciate advice on. I can't fire anyone or change the team structure without approval from the returning product director (and they don't want changes made while they're out).

Before joining I was warned this PM is disengaged, not technical and arrogant. PM was open from the outset that they'd been overlooked for promotion for several years and their squad doesn't listen to them. I've spent time coaching the PM but they seem more interested in managing (or complaining) upwards than trying to resolve issues within their sphere of influence. The PM seems to be in a toxic loop with their engineering lead. If I thought it would make a difference, I'd swap PM but I suspect they'll have similar issues in a different squad.

The PM is great at bullshitting and schmoozing but doesn't really deliver on their promises and they are the first to blame everyone else. That's bad enough but there are other issues with PM too. If it were my choice I'd be putting PM on a focused PIP to address but it's been blocked by my boss who wants informal coaching to continue until EOY. If it hasn't improved by then the returning director will put PM on a PIP.

What do you recommend in the meantime? What feedback and coaching topics would you prioritise? Engineering Lead ofc has a different reporting line and the idea of having two directors involved to try to mediate seems ridiculous. The relationship isn't improving with light touch coaching and my PM will report they spend 3 hours arguing with their engineering lead to still not be aligned. We're getting to a stage where implimentations don't match what's committed by the PM, PM isn't checking, engineering lead doesn't communicate directly (according to PM but docs say otherwise), deadlines are missed and they're blaming each other.

I'm so pissed off with the PM at this point (every week there's new issues that PM never takes responsibility for) and I don't want to invest more time in someone who seemingly DGAF. My boss, who said to continue coaching, has skip levels with PM so I've said I want him to coach as well if this is the approach he wants.

Looking for PMs who create and fine tune AI evals for their products. What has your experience been? Which resources did you use to learn and keep up with the changes?

I want to know how do big companies like Apple or any large tech company actually manage confidential launches. By the time a product is announced you've got engineering/product marketing/PR/legal etc. it feels like thousands of people have worked on the project.

I know NDAs and limiting access are standard but it seems like the biggest risk is still people. One agency partner gets phished or one product manager shares something in the wrong place or even one fake executive call slips through and suddenly the entire launch is all over the internet.

A friend of mine works on launches for a pretty big tech company, and we got talking about how much goes into keeping everything under wraps. He mentioned things like access being split across different teams, fake project names, using Kibu for communications and and even planting decoy leaks to throw people off the scent.

It made me realize there's probably a lot more going on behind the scenes than just NDAs and telling people not to leak stuff. Is that becoming pretty common now or do most companies still rely mostly on compartmentalizing information and trusting the people involved?

Working on a "Summer Recap" style feature (think Google Photos Memories), a rule-based lexical scoring system picks the top 15 photos from a user's library based on tags and assigned weights/scores for each tag. My job is to figure out if this logic is actually good enough to ship or not.

Problem is I'm non-technical, I don't have engineering bandwidth to build a proper eval pipeline, and I've got about 3 weeks to get to a ship / no-ship decision.

What I've figured out so far:

- Need a rubric for what "good" means (no screenshots/blur/duplicates, diverse across days and events, feels like an actual summer highlight reel)

- Ideally want to score sets of 15 photos, not just single best-photo picks

- Was thinking of using Claude/GPT vision as an "AI judge" against the rubric instead of manual human rating, since I don't have a rater team

- Considered building an actual lightweight no-code tool for this (Claude artifacts can call the API directly) instead of manually uploading photos into chat one set at a time

Questions for anyone who's done something similar:

1. Has anyone actually shipped an AI-judge-based eval like this without an eng team? What broke, what worked?

2. Any no-code / low-code tools you'd recommend for batch-running images through a vision model and logging structured scores (thinking Zapier, Make, Airtable + API, Google Sheets + Apps Script, that kind of thing)?

3. For a rule-based (not ML) recommender/ranking system specifically, is there a simpler eval approach I'm missing, given I don't need to retrain anything, just score outputs?

4. How many test cases would you consider the minimum for a credible go/no-go call in this kind of timeline?

Not looking for a full research operation, just need something defensible enough to bring to my manager for a ship decision. Any playbooks, war stories, or "don't bother, just do X" advice welcome.

I’ve been noticing that as AI has gotten better, the PM workflow seems to be changing pretty quickly.

Instead of making static mockups, I’m seeing more people talk about building actual working prototypes with tools like Claude, Codex, Bolt, Lovable, Replit, etc.

I’m curious how this actually works in practice.
If you’re a PM, are you using these tools yourself?

Do you just spin something up in Bolt or Lovable, or are you opening VS Code with Claude Code/Codex and iterating there?

And what do you expect from these prototypes? Are they just meant to communicate an idea and get stakeholder feedback, or are they detailed enough that engineering can actually build from them?

I’m mostly asking because I’m trying to understand how AI is changing the role of PMs. It feels like the line between product, design, and engineering is getting blurrier, and I’d love to hear how people are approaching it on their teams.

Do large companies have strict procedures, artifacts etc, or is it all just vibe solving issues like I've witnessed so far? In my company they say "figure it out yourselves, we don't want to lock you in" but then everyone does their own thing and we spend so much time on aligning on stupid stuff that should, in my opinion, be predetermined. I feel like we're losing on 80% productivity because we don't want to lose 20% freedom. Maybe I'm wrong and I'm missing something?

Product thought leadership is going gaga about how taste is the moat in this new AI world. What is the definition of taste for you?

I can’t figure out if I’m dealing with severe burnout or I just suck at this job; it feels like I’m always barely keeping my head above water with the amount of ambiguity and number of random ideas/pivots thrown at me.

Can you describe the situation / conditions that have led to any sense of joy / accomplishment? What conditions makes or break the experience?

So my wife is a sr. Product manager at a very big well known organization and we recently our own business/service (unrelated to her job) i wanna know what title she should have or should show in linkedin n elsewhere? Is cpo too big of a jump from sr. Product manager but she is managing the whole product in our business as its just us two. Or should she be vp of product which looks more subtle and realistic after sr. Product manager. Also not sure if cpo term will get her less job offers in future since they might think she is overqualified for alot product manager related roles. (I have no product background sorry if this sound dumb) thanks for the suggestions.

If you open LinkedIn jobs, from entry level to Director/VP level, 90% of Jobs demands direct experience(to various extent as per role) in either building->deploying "Agentic AI" or owning P&L for such charters.

If I go by the JDs(particularly B2B SaaS), there are no takers for non-AI experience such as product managers working on platform, CRM, ERP plumbing, APIs/Integrations, connectors, data lakes, orchestration, governance, compliance, and products that do not need or use AI directly ie the AI layer sits above them or adjacent to them. The list is long and you folks understand. These are table-stakes products or solution which don't exactly filled with and sound fascinating with the "AI buzzwords."

And No, using AI tools to write PRDs, triage Jiras, generate documentation, respond to support tickets, reply to emails, do market research and competitive analysis, build gtm slides, analyze UX surveys etc is not exactly what recruiters are looking for. Even marketing/HR interns are using Copilot/Claude on day to day basis. It neither counts as a skill nor experience. Pinning all those $4000 Agentic AI training course certificates is of no use when you aren't putting them into practical or commercial use. There is a huge difference in understanding the technicals vs deploying agents across an Airline client workflows creating tangible business impact. Yes one can upskill and learn these tools, frameworks, concepts etc but end of the day if you do not own the SDLC or P&L of such AI native products, your resume is de-ranked to bottom of the stack, or not even picked up.

So are you worried about your employability in this market? Has anyone from Non-AI experience/team has recent experience in switching/finding jobs at higher positions(10+ exp)?

Any Senior/veterans here who have seen such waves, who can share an opinions here on how the PM hiring market will shape up in coming days.

PS: The post may look like FOMO but this is the reality. Product Managers not directly owning AI P&L charters are secondary citizens in every org and even worse in the hiring market.