Product Management for AI

Chapter 3. Bringing an AI Product to Market

The Core Responsibilities of the AI Product Manager

Product managers are responsible for the successful development, testing, release, and adoption of a product, and for leading the team that implements those milestones. Product managers for AI must satisfy these same responsibilities, tuned for the AI lifecycle. In the first two chapters, we suggested that AI PMs are responsible for:

• Deciding on the core function, audience, and desired use of the AI product

• Evaluating the input data pipelines and ensuring that they are maintained throughout the entire AI product lifecycle

• Orchestrating the cross-functional team (data engineering, research science, data science, machine learning engineering, and software engineering)

• Deciding on key interfaces and designs: UI/UX and feature engineering

• Integrating the model and server infrastructure with existing software products

• Working with ML engineers and data scientists on tech stack design and decision making

• Shipping the AI product and managing it after release

• Coordinating with the engineering, infrastructure, and site reliability teams to ensure that all shipped features can be supported at scale

If you’re an AI product manager (or about to become one), that’s what you’re signing up for. In this chapter, we turn our attention to the process itself: how do you bring a product to market?

Identifying the Problem

The first step in building an AI solution is identifying the problem ...