#183: How AI Is Reshaping Product Ownership with Lance Dacy

What we wanted to talk about for this episode is really kind of trying to focus in a little bit about how AI is changing things in the product area.

So specifically for product owners and the work of what product owners do.

There's a lot here.

[laughs] We, we were trying to narrow down our scope and what it is we might wanna focus on here, but-

Like a good product person

... like a good product person, right.

That's a good place to start is, is how are they using AI and what's the good uses of AI in just the normal routine things that product owners do, like backlog, maintenance, creation of items, refinement of items.

Where is that actually useful and where is it just fluff that's, you know, like a, it'd be easier for me to just do this on my own?

Man, I tell you, I was thinking the other day, we often say even in our classes when we're trying to get people to learn something, and we do what's called a teach back, right?

Yeah.

And we think the best way to learn something is teaching it.

And I can't tell you how happy I've been the last, well, I'll say the last six months I've worked on a course for AI and product management, but I've delivered it, let's see, three times.

And it's like the most exciting one.

Not that they're not all exciting in their own way, but this one's really cool 'cause I'm learning so much.

But more importantly, I'm learning how it applies.

'Cause you can't, you can't interact with every product group you see out there, right? So when you get these people to your classes, you're like, "Hey, that does connect there," or, "That doesn't connect there." And I was actually surprised, Brian, how many people show up and really don't know what this thing is.

Which is okay, I'm not condemning them for that.

But their organizations are telling them, "Hey, you need to start using more AI." Now, development, when you see that thing write code for 'em and stuff, that's easily translatable.

And yes, you can get into the debate, is it good code or not? But if you think, like some of these people come in thinking AI is intelligence, artificial intelligence is what, what we're calling it.

And I'm like, if you think AI intelligence is intelligent, I guess you would say, and you just feed it a whole bunch of information, like they're just loading up an LLM or something, then I find you're gonna be dangerous to yourself and to the organization.

So what I kick off the class with is like, if you can learn how it actually works, which is really, I kinda just call it the world's best auto-complete right now.

[laughs]

So you can feed it something and it'll auto-complete.

But when you start realizing where it's going to do a probability analysis of what it's gonna come back and tell you, you get really scary, I think, because it's like it's going out to the world.

Who knows where it's getting its information f- from.