Social Media AI gossip & Reality
No AI won't kill you. Hopefully.
I posted earlier today a piece on how social media gossip is really just that… gossip. The trigger was the unreflected social media reaction that Product Management gets canceled at Airbnb:
Read it here:
AI deserves a special sub-treatment for this topic though because we have many claims going around for it:
“AI will take away all our jobs”
While no one including me can know what’s going to happen in the future to our jobs we can claim certain things with more certainty than others.
I’m almost certain that AI will fundamentally change our jobs. But let us be specific here.
With “our” I mean people in tech because that’s where I’m working and where AI is having it’s first big swooping impact.
With “Jobs” I mean predominantly all functions of a company that are directly involved in a product experience. Meaning Product Management, Marketing, Sales, Support, Customer Experience and all Ops functions.
If you believe that your job has a lot of annoying busy work like filling out PRDs or creating content from scratch as a marketeer then yes, AI will definitely make you more efficient in these functions.
And yes, efficiency is a different word for fewer people doing the same that more people did. But it allows you also to do much more that you have not been able to do before.
I still think that ultimately AI will not only drive efficiency but also allow us to do things we were not able to do before. We just don’t see them yet this clearly. Every new technological jump is first seen in its effects on existing methods of work.
That’s nothing new and a good example is how agriculture was modernized and one farmer can now produce not only more per acre but also manage more of them. Some studies talk about a 75-fold increase in productivity just from 100 years ago.
But to look at this just from the perspective of how many farmers were used before and now is just shortsighted. It unlocked so much more for us as a society and created completely new job types and wealth.
Change in Product
Let’s be real here, there is change coming and we need to adapt. It’s especially scary since no one can tell you how it exactly looks. Unfortunately, fear-mongering is always a distillation of simple statements because we understand them.
Let me try to counteract it with one simple prediction myself which I’m fairly certain will actually happen:
“The game will be about retention.”
You may have seen all the logical claims from people saying that due to the looming recession, companies have to become efficient again and that solution is usually in optimizing your products for retention.
Retention means more lifetime value per customer, which means less money spent per acquired customer. That’s true but there is something else at play here as well: AI
Let’s look at Marketing and Product
Marketing
If you think away the bad climate for VC funding and the popping of our occasional little tech bubble you’re still left with one distinct effect from AI which is how we acquire users into our products.
In order to acquire users, as in getting our message out, we employ traditional marketing strategies.
Branding, SEO, content… we spend a lot of money to make sure that our messaging is convincing, without flaw… looking perfect so it matches the product experience as much as possible.
Except that now has gotten a lot easier in the past decade and is now supercharged.
Big companies had a certain “look” to their campaigns. They were able to afford professional photographers, the best copy writers the best distribution methods, designers and so forth.
It was really hard to copy that quality in any way except with a ton of money. Due to AI all of this becomes incredibly affordable. You can still stand out, but it’s harder.
The messaging is starting to become “perfect”, no more spelling mistakes. No differentiation through obvious quality.
We are getting close to “solving” the part of marketing that is “promising” something before “proving” it.
Does that mean Marketing is dead? No, not at all, it means what we were trying to say with product-led growth all along. We all have to care much more about the actual value of the customer because that’s how we differentiate ourselves going forward.
No more bullshit. You will be punished for false claims because your customers won’t pay. They have a choice. And they will start to go where the value is. Locking them in with false promises is getting harder and harder.
A very practical effect of this is that Marketing leads will be measured not just on quantity (MQLs) but also quality (PQLs). Whether they convert into good, sustainable revenue.
Marketers can finally start to take care of what matters. Finding the right users and being measured on them instead of chasing vanity metrics.
Finding those users who have a high potential for superior retention.
Product
Product is following the same conclusion, if Marketing is being pushed to care about Product then the same conclusion applies to Product functions:
You have to start to care about where your users are coming from and build your product for the best users and how it is ultimately being sold (Sales). Sounds nice but what does that mean effectively?
It means that “Product” is now including what happens before the core product and also what happens afterward.
A good example is how support was handled in classical companies. It was an afterthought, something they had to do.
But if you really want to make sure that users retain you can’t just cut costs all the time and replace support agents with shitty chatbots. You need to really think about how you integrate it into your product so it drives retention and recommendations.
A great support experience is fast and effective. No two ways about it, AI will help with that a lot arguably but it is ultimately up to the product teams to make sure they have access to the correct support and form when they need it.
A good example will be that we need to predict that users are in trouble before they actually click on “Support”
Another thing is that some of the strongest retention drivers are based on AI: recommendations on what to do next, and what to watch/listen next. Netflix and Spotify are great examples of this even though it has little to do with their core offering.
We’re going from
“Watch TV online”
to
“Watch what you want to see without looking for it”
Summary
So what does it now mean? Aside from learning how to learn and not be married too much with your own ideas you need to learn about retention in some way.
There is tons of content out there about how to perfect acquisition because it’s so easy to analyze and criticize. Acquisition funnels are in the end what users and critics can analyze easily. Retention is hidden away behind closed doors and harder to do.
My recommendation is to learn about user retention and engagement… essentially what drives really good products, not just their distribution.