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Holly Jones's avatar

This made me laugh out loud 🥲 “PRD > (a beautifully formatted 12-page novella admired by many but read closely by precisely zero)”

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Kinga Magyar's avatar

Hi Julie, very provocative article indeed. :)

I was wondering if it really is AI that revolutionizes how companies build products or rather adopting a product mindset (focus on value creation, than on churning out features).

The traditional product development best practice you mention at the beginning of the article (idea -> mocks -> PRD -> code -> launch -> surprise) is already missing important aspects of building a valuable product. Where is the problem discovery? Are we building something that actually solves a user problem and brings us closer to achieving our targeted business outcome? Where are we quickly validating, in this process, whether we are solving an important opportunity for our users and then validating that the solution we ideated actually solves that user problem?

If we sprinkle AI on our product development process, then yes, we might do certain activities quicker, but it doesn’t mean we will do them better. For instance, AI enables people to write a PRD much faster, but it doesn’t mean that results in better product development. It doesn’t mean anyone will read that, not even its author.

I agree that AI enables teams to prototype quicker and run more experiments faster, but in companies where this wasn’t part of the culture until now, AI won’t magically fix that.

I think AI is not the silver bullet. A mindset change is needed to build more valuable products, to focus on the value we create, rather than the number of features. That’s why I don’t think encouraging leaders to “Track speed of feature development: ensure that it’s going up” is the right way. Since business leaders already do this and it results in a lot of waste.

I’d be happy to hear your opinion on this. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!

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