May 2, 2025 by Sanjay Maharaj
What's ProductCamp?
ProductCamp is a free one-day event for product managers that focuses on facilitating ideas, discussion, and networking to help product managers and their colleagues in adjacent roles thrive in the workplace.
Hosted independently across multiple cities worldwide, the April 26th event in Vancouver was the largest yet, with over 700 attendees. What makes ProductCamp unique is its "unconference" format, trading traditional high entry costs and commercial formalities for an informal, community-driven event centered around candid discussions.
The AI-Enhanced Product Manager
Now is the best time to be a Product Manager, as long as you're learning to embrace AI by leveraging new and upcoming tools to improve the way you:
Collect data
Analyze opportunities
Communicate with stakeholders
Build trust
Specific to the tech industry: With the advent of "vibe-coding" and rapid prototyping tools such as V0, Lovable, Cursor, and others, Product Managers are increasingly expected to be more technical, delivering greater value by mocking up solutions independently before allocating additional resources to other departments (i.e., engineering).
Balancing Data and Intuition
Product Managers have always balanced data and intuition to drive decisions forward. Tomorrow's successful PMs will embrace AI to help reduce the time and effort required to perform data-centric/quantitative work, so they can spend more time on real-world, human-centric/qualitative work that builds connections and truly makes their products special and unique.
A Lesson from the Past
Back in the early 2000s, Chief Engineer Yuji Yokoya was tasked with developing the second-generation Toyota Sienna minivan. He took the first-generation minivan on a 53,000-mile road trip across North America with his family to find weaknesses in the prior generation's design, relying on intuition formed from real-world experiences to inform improvements for the next-generation product. [Source Article]
While certain competitors were busy using spreadsheets to cost-optimize their minivans into oblivion, Yokoya's dedication to the user experience led to a 60% sales increase of the new Siennas in the first 11 months after launch compared to the first generation.
The Lesson:
In today's world, there's an ever-increasing offering of tools. Use tools to optimize your workflow with the goal of unlocking more time to spend on your product's user experience.
Meeting Evolving Management Expectations
Senior management will continue to set the bar high for PMs, but expectations regarding the degree to which PMs use AI in their workflows depend on individual organizations. As usual, smaller private organizations can adopt new technology much quicker than large, legacy organizations.
Tips for AI-Forward Organizations
If you work in an organization that already embraces continuous improvement and is interested in implementing AI workflows to increase productivity, here are our top tips from Alan Albert's What Would You Do Leadership Challenge session:
Show, don't tell
Leverage AI to improve your ability to present concepts and opportunities to senior leaders and other stakeholders. Use visualization tools and data-driven narratives to make your case more compelling and easier to understand.Build trust through transparency
Keep colleagues across your organization in the loop on new tools and techniques that you're using, both when things are working and when they aren't. Document your processes and share both successes and learnings from failures to build confidence in your approach.Ask: "How do you know what good looks like?"
This question is an excellent way to ensure that you can align with senior management and uncover assumptions prior to working on deliverables, especially if they are founders. Getting specific criteria for success upfront prevents misalignment and saves valuable development cycles.
Navigating AI Implementation in Legacy Organizations
If you work in a legacy organization such as finance, healthcare, or insurance, here are some of the challenges you can expect to face while implementing AI in your product management workflow, as presented by Khushboo Dodani from WorkSafeBC:
Challenge: Fragmented user journeys
Solution: Project management strategies
Implement structured methodologies like user story mapping and journey orchestration to identify and bridge gaps in the user experience. This creates a holistic view that helps prioritize which segments would benefit most from AI automation.
Challenge: Change resistant, process and compliance heavy
Solution: Socialize ideas, build demand, demo proactively
Create small, controlled pilot programs that demonstrate tangible benefits while addressing compliance concerns. Build a coalition of champions across departments who can advocate for AI adoption within their respective teams.
Challenge: Legacy systems, code and vendor partnerships
Solution: Product development strategies
Develop an incremental approach that identifies integration points between new AI capabilities and existing systems. Create middleware solutions where necessary and establish clear guidelines for vendors on how their products must evolve to support your AI initiatives.
Challenge: Overwhelming information and cognitive load for users
Solution: Invest in design and user research
Conduct regular usability testing with AI-enhanced interfaces to identify pain points. Prioritize progressive disclosure in your designs to prevent overwhelming users, and create personalized experiences that filter information based on user roles and contexts.
Conclusion
AI was the center of attention this year at ProductCamp Vancouver. We enjoyed learning about how PMs are embracing AI in their organizations, and the key advice repeated in various contexts was to embrace and master new tools that support a focus on customer value. Whether that comes from faster prototyping, better data, or the time saved on repetitive tasks, AI enables PMs to get back to what matters most: building connections and understanding your customers.
As you navigate this AI-enhanced product management landscape, consider how consolidating and prioritizing customer feedback becomes even more critical. Modern tools that leverage AI can help you find patterns in feedback that might otherwise be missed, ensuring your product decisions are both data-driven and deeply customer-focused. The most successful product managers will be those who harness these capabilities while maintaining the human touch that truly differentiates exceptional products.
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Visiboard keeps all of your customer feedback in one place.
Our AI platform consolidates and prioritizes customer conversations found in emails, video calls, CRMs, and support tickets, so you can make better product decisions faster with more confidence.
