Copilot & GPT for product managers & owners

 

GPT, or Generative Pretrained Transformer, is a type of AI language model that can generate human-like text. This technology has the potential to revolutionize the way we create content, making the process faster, easier, and more efficient.

I am a Product owner & manager, and in my role -

·         I need to create a lot of contents fast,

·         Analyze a lot of data.

·         Need to find documents fast in my system.

·         And need to discover documents to refer across the organization.

·         Churn out POCs very quickly.

And for all these, GPT has been God send for me. And thanks to my organization they have made MS Copilot available to me. Microsoft 365 Copilot internally utilizes GPT-4.

Do not consider this as the ultimate reference, but some of the ways I have used GPT & Copilot are.

·         Using Copilot to create meeting summaries, sharing it with the team, and keeping for personal reference.

·         Creating reference documents on a particular subject – by downloading transcriptions of all previous meetings recorded and combining them with all notes and creating a summarized document from them and then finally manually structuring them.

·         I rarely have recently created a document on MS doc from scratch without getting a draft from MS doc Copilot.

·         Created notes by summarizing multiple documents to create information from large data and have made them consumable for wider audience.

·         Created presentations, slides & organized slides from unstructured documents and have made them consumable for wider audience.

·         You can create your own chat bot by putting your tabular data on an excel table and then use it for question answering using Copilot over excel.

·         I have discovered documents across the organization for reference using Microsoft 365 Copilot.

·         I have used Microsoft 365 Copilot to ask questions & find documents while searching for particular contents within my personal Organization One drive.

·         Being an AI product owner, I have particularly used Copilot to demonstrate the concept of Sentiment analysis over MS words & excels which I never thought could have been possible.

I think Copilot on an average has saved 30-45 minutes ~ improved 5-7% of my productivity, on a daily basis.

The rise of Entrepreneurial Engineers

 

I often use the sentence – Good engineers build things; great engineers build valuable things. But the idea of value is abstract, what might be valuable to one person may not be valuable to another. But it is not so, when it comes to profitable organizations. Here ultimately it should end up – in contributing to organization value while complying all governance checks. I have seen engineering colleagues wondering if we should worry about all this. May be 5 years back the answer would have been not necessary, but now it’s necessary. The rise of Entrepreneurial Engineers is like what we observed with rise of Citizen Data Scientist, but also the other way around. The idea is, though this engineering team still works with the Business Owners and Product owner & management team, they have skin in the game of what gets build. They understand business priorities and are driven towards solving customer problem and adding business values. They are aware how to apply their engineering mindset to solve impactful problem using sustainable solutions. 

With teams I work with, it is something we continuously work towards. Some of the steps, I work towards with my team, and I can recommend are:

Before adopting any feature, we try to ask ourselves:

1.  How will this feature add value?
2. What will happen if we don’t adopt this feature?
3.  How is this problem currently addressed?
4. Can we find out the financial impact & Return on Investment on this feature?

All this can be documented under different artifacts like – CONOPS document, Value document, User story etc. 

Teams I work with, with experience, we have discovered, learned, and created a process of continuous – conversation & collaboration. It is a cycle of continuous conversation with other stake holders. Some of the check points we have developed over the years, are - 

1. Do an internal tech team analysis – feasibility, compatibility & valuation analysis
2. Present understanding, POC or plan to business leaders, owners & SMEs.
3. Broader Technology team peer presentation
4. Discussion with vendor to clarify assumptions, if required
5. Discuss with enterprise architects how this piece will interact with overall architecture
6. Then start the implementation

But there may be scenarios, where, before being able to do any of this, you might need to have an MVP in place before you can have any discussion. This strategy is extremely useful when the overall team is not too sure, building what would be valuable. Its when, all the stakeholders, see a tangible MVP in front of them, they start to share improvement ideas. In most new product development lifecycles, first few features, are developed like this, until the process matures.

In the last decade with more engineers in board rooms than ever, this new breed of entrepreneurial engineers will be a significant player in the organizational vision & roadmap. The organizations which will thrive & grow, will need to have 2 things:

·         Superior product-market fitment

·         And a good product - Design & Architecture

 

Organizations should put a lot of focus in these two areas. Once these two are in place, it enables the Sales & Marketing team to effectively do theirs. Organizations & teams should be very aware that all operation & enabling process should be focused around improving these 2 areas. Once a solid foundation of these is in place, Customer relationship & Delivery should take care of themselves.