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By Prateek Gupte – Co-Founder at Caimera
Imagine you’re managing a music streaming service. You want to keep users engaged by recommending songs they’ll love, but how do you determine what music to suggest? This is where artificial intelligence (AI) comes into play. By understanding and applying AI, you can transform your product into a personalized experience that keeps users coming back.
Artificial intelligence is changing the way products are designed, built, and managed. For product managers, mastering AI can unlock new opportunities, improve processes, and deliver exceptional value to users and stakeholders. This blog explores five key areas of AI integration: understanding AI terminology, finding the right machine learning (ML) opportunities, defining business outcomes, designing user experiences, and managing expectations.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a broad term that encompasses a wide range of techniques enabling machines to mimic human behavior. This vast field includes multiple disciplines such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA), robotics, and other specialized areas.
Breaking Down AI
Choosing Between Machine Learning and Deep Learning
The decision to use a deep learning model versus a simpler machine learning model is more technical. It’s typically left to the discretion of your engineering team or counterparts, who will decide based on the specific requirements and constraints of the task at hand.
When considering opportunities for machine learning (ML), it’s crucial to approach problem statements from a product outcome or problem perspective rather than a technology perspective. This mindset shift allows you to identify and solve real-world issues effectively using ML techniques. Here, we’ll explore six main categories of problem statements in ML and provide examples to illustrate each one.
1. Ranking
Ranking is a common problem in ML, where the goal is to order a set of results based on relevance to a user’s query. The most familiar example is search engines like Google or Bing, which rank search results according to relevance.
Example: When a user inputs a search term, the engine returns an ordered list of results, with the most relevant at the top. E-commerce sites also use ranking systems to order products based on user preferences and past behaviors, often combined with recommendation systems.
2. Recommendation Systems
Recommendation systems aim to suggest items that a user is likely to be interested in, based on their past behavior and preferences.
Example: Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist curates songs for users based on their listening history and other input. Similarly, Netflix and Twitter recommend movies or friends to follow based on user behavior and interests.
3. Classification
Classification involves sorting items into predefined categories. This is often seen in applications like email spam filters and image recognition.
Example: Google’s spam filter classifies emails as spam or not spam. Image detection systems classify images as containing specific objects or not, such as recognizing whether a photo includes a specific person or not.
4. Regression
Regression is used to predict a continuous outcome based on input data. This is common in pricing models and forecasting.
Example: Kayak uses regression to predict future flight and hotel prices based on historical data. The model forecasts whether prices will rise or fall, helping users decide when to book.
5. Clustering
Clustering is an unsupervised learning technique used to group similar items together without predefined labels.
Example: At Haptech, we built a clustering algorithm to identify groups of similar queries that a chatbot did not understand, such as various types of policy-related questions. The algorithm groups these similar queries together to help improve the chatbot’s responses.
6. Anomaly Detection
Anomaly detection identifies unusual patterns that deviate from the norm. This is widely used in finance and social media.
Example: In finance, anomaly detection can spot irregular trading activities. On Twitter, it identifies trending topics by detecting unusual spikes in conversation rates, highlighting topics growing at an unnatural rate compared to others.
To effectively leverage machine learning (ML) in your projects, it’s crucial to clearly define the business outcomes. These outcomes differ from use cases and focus on the broader impact on your business. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you navigate this process.
Define the Business Outcomes
Business outcomes are the end goals you want to achieve through your ML initiatives. They are not merely the technical use cases but the broader objectives that drive value for your business.
Example:
Quantify the Business Outcome
Before implementing an ML feature, it’s essential to establish a baseline for your key metrics. This helps you measure the impact of the new feature accurately.
Steps:
Example of Quantifying Outcomes:
When Kayak wants to predict flight prices, they start by establishing the current booking rates. After deploying an ML model to predict price trends, they measure if the booking rates increase, indicating user confidence in making purchases.
Model Performance vs. Business Outcomes
A high-performing ML model does not guarantee the desired business outcomes. Sometimes, even a well-functioning model can miss the mark if it doesn’t align with business objectives.
Example:
Start Small and Iterate
Begin with smaller, manageable ML projects that can deliver quick wins and iterative improvements.
Example: Instead of automating the entire stock trading system, start with small recommendations or human-in-the-loop systems. This allows for gradual scaling and refinement based on real-world feedback.
Collecting and Managing Data
Data collection is a critical aspect of ML projects and requires collaboration between product managers, engineering teams, and data scientists.
Steps:
Practical Data Collection Tips
After defining your use case, identifying business outcomes, and gathering data for your model, the next crucial step is to focus on user experience (UX) design for AI products. Often overlooked, this step is vital for addressing the inherent limitations of AI systems, which are inherently probabilistic and not foolproof. By emphasizing good UX design, you can mitigate these limitations and enhance user satisfaction.
Importance of UX in AI Products
AI systems deal with probabilities, and their outcomes can vary. Effective UX design helps manage user expectations and improves the overall interaction with AI-driven features. Understanding and communicating the boundaries of AI systems are crucial in this context.
Understanding AI Boundaries
AI systems have inherent limitations, primarily due to their probabilistic nature. These boundaries must be clearly communicated and managed through effective UX design to ensure users have a realistic understanding of what the AI can and cannot do.
Best Practices and Examples
Emerging Roles in AI Product Design
The role of design in AI products is evolving, leading to the creation of new job titles and skill sets.
Example: The role of “Conversational Designer” blends AI, UX, and copywriting. These designers focus on crafting content that communicates the bot’s capabilities, handles failures gracefully, and guides users effectively.
After developing an AI product, setting clear expectations with customers and internal stakeholders is crucial. AI is inherently probabilistic, meaning outcomes cannot be guaranteed with absolute certainty. This reality often poses challenges in communicating the capabilities and limitations of AI systems. Here are some key considerations and best practices for managing expectations and setting boundaries for AI products.
Understanding AI’s Probabilistic Nature
AI systems, by design, operate on probabilities and cannot offer guaranteed results. This probabilistic nature must be clearly communicated to avoid misunderstandings and unrealistic expectations.
Example: When selling call center automation software or chatbots, it’s essential to clarify that the bot may work correctly around 80% of the time. Highlighting this helps manage expectations about the system’s reliability and sets the stage for realistic performance metrics.
Avoiding Accuracy Guarantees
Promising specific accuracy levels in contracts can lead to complications. AI systems’ real-time accuracy is difficult to measure precisely, as it’s based on dynamic and live data rather than static training data.
Example: If a customer demands an 80% accuracy guarantee in a contract, it can lead to significant manual efforts to validate and ensure this accuracy. It’s more practical to focus on the system’s value and benefits rather than making hard guarantees on accuracy.
Data Ownership and Privacy
Data privacy laws and ownership concerns are critical, especially in B2B and B2C contexts. Ensuring compliance with data privacy regulations and obtaining proper consent for data usage are fundamental.
Example: When deploying AI solutions, make sure to have clear agreements on data ownership and usage rights, especially when dealing with customer data. This helps in maintaining compliance and building trust with users.
Marketing and Positioning
It’s tempting to market AI products by highlighting the use of advanced technologies like deep learning and neural networks. However, focusing on the tangible value and benefits of the product is more effective.
Example: Instead of saying, “We use cutting-edge deep learning technology,” emphasize, “Our solution reduces your customer support costs by 30%.” This approach highlights the practical value and resonates more with potential customers.
Selling to the Right Audience
Understanding who buys your product and their motivations is key. Selling to innovation teams might yield short-term gains, but targeting operational teams ensures long-term value and sustainability.
Example: Innovation teams may be drawn to the AI hype, but operational teams will focus on the product’s practical benefits and ROI. Selling to the latter ensures that the product delivers real value and meets business objectives.
Clear Communication of AI Limitations
Being upfront about what AI cannot do is as important as highlighting its capabilities. This transparency helps build trust and sets realistic expectations.
Example: If voice technology struggles with recognizing names and addresses accurately, make this clear to users. Explain the current limitations and provide alternative methods to achieve the desired outcomes.
Incorporating Services Component
AI products often require ongoing services for data collection, tagging, and model maintenance. This services component should be integrated into the business model.
Example: Continually maintaining and updating AI models to adapt to changing data and user intents is essential. This ongoing effort should be factored into pricing and product strategy to ensure sustainability.
Leveraging AI in product management involves a multidisciplinary approach, combining technical knowledge, UX design, and strategic marketing. By understanding AI nomenclature, identifying ML opportunities, defining clear business outcomes, designing effective user experiences, and managing expectations, product managers can harness the power of AI to deliver exceptional value and drive business success. As AI technology continues to evolve, staying informed and adaptable will be key to maximizing its potential.
About the Author:
Prateek Gupte – Co-Founder at Caimera
Machine learning is a subset of AI that enables machines to make decisions based on data, allowing systems to learn and improve over time without being explicitly programmed.
AI impacts product management by providing tools to analyze data, predict outcomes, automate processes, and personalize user experiences, ultimately leading to better decision-making and enhanced product value.
Examples of AI in everyday life include personalized recommendations on streaming services like Spotify, voice assistants like Siri, predictive text on smartphones, and customer support chatbots.
Companies use AI to enhance customer experiences, improve operational efficiency, predict market trends, personalize marketing efforts, and automate routine tasks, thereby driving business growth and innovation.
Challenges of implementing AI in products include managing user expectations, ensuring data privacy and security, obtaining high-quality data, avoiding overpromising AI capabilities, and integrating AI seamlessly with existing systems.
