By Bragadish Natarajan, Pramod Kamath,Karun Sarabhai
The advent of GenAI has opened opportunities for enterprises to innovate with new business models, elevate customer & colleague experiences and deploy tools for enterprise enablement. In this context, service providers need to evolve how they deliver client value and evolve the way they deliver their work.
The Core of Product Development: Speed, Quality, and Value
The traditional project mindset of scope, time and cost incentivizes teams to increase delay and cost of project, promotes resistance to change and leads to lower value delivered to business. On the other hand, a product mindset adopts three core principles: Speed, Quality and Value. The shift from time to speed ensures focus on velocity of delivery, the shift from cost to value prioritizes return on investment, and the shift from scope to quality ensures the solution provides the best experience to its intended audience.
These principles drive a different mindset, emphasizing the importance of revolutionizing product development from within.
Gen AI is an Enabler to Enhance Efficiency
Gen AI serves as an enabler in this context, enhancing the efficiency and creative problem-solving capabilities that are at the core of product development.
Think of GenAI as a toolkit that complements exiting processes and tools, addressing the existing challenges, while enhancing efficiency and creative problem-solving capabilities.
In product development, speed equates to efficiency, quality is managed systematically, and value is derived from the swift generation of ideas that cater to customer needs. In this context, GenAI acts as a tool to leverage existing knowledge to generate ideas, while simultaneously reducing time and enhancing quality.
Gen AI can not only accelerate the journey, but also open doors to solving different business problems.
Gen AI’s Impact on Product Roles and Work Processes
Few have contemplated how AI affects different roles in the product lifecycle, especially when it comes to reimagining the approach to product development. There’s a duality at play, where it calls for a balance between efficiency, creativity, and research.
On one hand, the aim is to improve speed, quality, and value. On the other, there is a need to explore innovative ways to switch from one approach to another, all while enhancing human creativity. The approach calls for a certain shift in mindset, redefining product roles, and upgrading work processes for the greater good.
As part of product development process, product managers and agile program managers play a pivotal role in navigating complex projects and programs, ensuring alignment, and coordination among teams, stakeholders, and management. Let’s understand how AI stands to redefine these roles:
AI in Product Management
AI offers opportunities to increase efficiency across the product life
Product Managers can use AI to make product features smarter by embedding AI into the feature set. Product managers can adopt AI to enable personalization at scale, leveraging AI to produce designs and prototypes to aid in visualizing product concepts and iterating on ideas quickly.
Opportunities also exist in optimizing product operations for driving continuous product improvements post go live.
AI in Agile Program Management
AI has the potential to offer data-driven insights and predictive analytics leveraging data from multiple sources like commercial metrics, historical trends, client/team meetings and feedback to make decisions, assess risks, and allocate resources with precision. It can also produce program-level reports and performance metrics efficiently.
AI can further provide early warning signals and predictive analytics, helping program managers to anticipate and prevent delays. It can help run complex programs efficiently, while adhering to Agile practices and program governance guidelines consistently.
As AI becomes more sophisticated, Product Managers and Agile Program Managers will need to grapple with ethical questions surrounding AI’s use, such as data privacy, bias, and transparency.
Acceleration in Time-to-Market
The question that now arises is how does a client stand to gain from its integration? The primary advantage lies in the ability to deliver value more swiftly.
When presenting a vision to a client, the product development team can leverage AI to collate data from similar client projects, offering tangible visions with clear business use cases tailored to the client’s specific transformation project.
The advantages in this phase go beyond tailored proposals. Swift prototype generation means clients no longer need to imagine; they can see and interact with it. In areas such as sentiment analysis, AI eliminates the need for manual analysis by offering real-time comprehensive insights, significantly boosting efficiency.
The benefits of using GenAi are not restricted to the roles mentioned above and are applicable to all roles involved in the product development lifecycle. (e.g. developers using AI tools for code generation test data generation, test automation, data insights) thereby accelerating time to market.
The net effect of all of the above is that the time taken from Idea to Backlog and Backlog to Production can be significantly reduced thereby accelerating the overall time to market.
The Future of Work
As the world transitions into the future of work, there is a dynamic transformation that extends across three key axes:
People: Shifting from Product “Management” to Product “Innovation” and Differentiation, it emphasizes innovating around the product, generating innovative ideas, understanding customers better, offering personalized product solutions, and employing data-driven decision-making.
Process: It places speed at the center, embracing a “Test and Learn” approach, with AI automation from sprint planning to reporting, AI-generated user stories, and AI-based prioritization.
Technology
This transformation, not only emphasizes innovation and differentiation but also enhances the efficiency and effectiveness of work processes.
In summarizing our exploration, it’s evident that Gen AI isn’t just a tool; it’s the catalyst for a fundamental shift in how products are created and delivered. The transformation is underway, guided by the principles of Speed, Quality, and Value. It’s time to embrace this evolution and empower business to thrive in the dynamic world of product development.
The authors are senior director product management and senior director agile program management, Publicis Sapient, respectively
Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn
Source link
credite