An Experiment: Can AI Teach Product Management?
Spoiler alert: kinda
We’re all using AI heavily now. And if you’re not, well, as someone once said: AI isn’t going to take your job, someone who knows how to use AI is gonna take your job.
Which got me thinking: What if there was a blog about product management entirely written by AI. Would it be any good? Would it be worth reading? How much of the work to make such a blog could AI do?
Over the Christmas break, I decided to run a little experiment and see.
Behold: PM 101 (by AI)
This is a 50-post blog that’s a pretty thorough introduction to Product Management that’s entirely generated by AI.
When I say “entirely generated by AI” I mean:
The list of posts was generated by AI.
The content of each post was then generated by AI.
The title of the blog (and checking of available Substack URL slugs) was generated by AI.
The images for each post were generated by AI, based on the content of each post.
The script to generate each post and each image was generated by AI.
The uploading of the content and images to Substack was done by AI.
I didn’t really know what to expect, but the breadth and depth of the content is pretty good. If I was just getting started into product management, this would be a solid grounding — As an experience PM, I even got reminded of some good IC best-practices that I’ve not recently used.
The big gap - of course - is storytelling. The most compelling content, in my opinion, are the stories of real people, in real situations, and the lessons they learned — this AI generated content is mostly on point, but it’s dry as hell.
Next Steps:
Would love to hear what you think about the content.
Generate more posts on additional topics.
Experiment with AI generating more narrative or experience-based content. Can it rehash other people’s stories (should I even ask it to?!)? Can it generate it’s own anecdotes?
If you have other ideas and feedback, let me know in the comments below.
Note: I’m keeping this personal blog as 100% hand-written and not AI generated in any way. It’s fun to write. And I hope there’s always an audience for authentically human-created content.