Presenters
Source
📸 AI: Your Business’s High-Definition Mirror – What Will Yours Reveal?
Ever snapped a selfie using “portrait mode” on your phone? You know, the one that blurs the background, smooths out imperfections, and makes everything look just a little bit better. Then you flip back to normal, and BAM! You’re confronted with the raw, unedited reality in glorious HD. Jessica Hall, a brilliant tech leader, uses this relatable experience to illustrate a powerful truth about artificial intelligence.
AI, she argues, is not just a fancy portrait filter for our businesses. It’s an HD mirror, reflecting the unvarnished truth about our organizations and products. It shows us the reality, the imperfections, and the areas that might not be as great as we’d like to believe. And often, these less-than-perfect spots are filled with something she calls “human glue.”
💡 AI: Your Organization’s High-Definition Mirror
Jessica reveals that when we hold this AI mirror up to our operations, two core truths emerge:
- Technical Debt & Data Silos: We see those persistent problems, the data silos, and the technical debt we’ve been trying to fix forever.
- Avoidance: We also spot our tendency to avoid solving fundamental process problems or getting to the root cause of issues, simply “carrying on” instead.
This “carrying on” was perhaps manageable at “normal human speed,” but with the accelerating pace of AI, it’s no longer sustainable.
🛠️ Unmasking “Human Glue” and Organizational Debt
What exactly is “human glue”? It’s those incredible individuals who act as human APIs, connecting disparate systems and processes, finding workarounds, and holding crucial “tribal knowledge.” Think of Katherine in operations who knows every answer, or David in customer service who understands all personalization logic. While invaluable, this reliance on individual heroics creates significant challenges:
- Scalability Issues: Tribal knowledge is held hostage in individual minds, making it inaccessible to machines and preventing true organizational intelligence.
- Wasted Potential: Talented product managers and teams spend countless hours on “drudgery” – cleaning data, navigating convoluted processes, and being the “human glue” – instead of focusing on creative problem-solving.
- “Ultimate Debt Collector”: AI becomes the ultimate debt collector, exposing every undocumented process and every piece of information not codified. Automating a messy process with AI simply results in a faster, more expensive mess. Jessica emphasizes, “Simplify before you automate.”
🚀 AI’s New Horizon: From Future Tech to Core Strategy
Jessica outlines three horizons for product development:
- Optimizing the Core: Getting more juice out of existing assets.
- Building the New: Launching new features and products.
- Horizon Scanning & Innovation: Looking to the future.
Just a few years ago, AI was largely confined to Horizon 3 – an exciting future prospect or an experimental endeavor. Jessica’s advice then was clear: “Find the problem, solve the problem” before searching for an AI solution.
Fast forward to today, and the landscape has dramatically shifted. Generative AI now permeates every horizon – from optimizing core operations to building innovative new products and shaping the future. This evolution at Just Eat Takeaway taught Jessica a crucial lesson: AI is not just a technology problem. It’s about your entire organization and how you work, focusing on getting the best from the tools, not just the tools themselves.
🎯 The Product Manager’s Evolution: From Creator to Curator
The advent of AI demands a fundamental shift in the product manager’s mindset:
- From Creators of Logic to Curators of Intelligence: We must move away from “worshipping at the altar of the feature,” hard-coding logic, and deterministic outcomes. Instead, we must create space for universal building blocks – reusable, intelligent, generative AI components within our products.
- Speed and Personalization: Just Eat Takeaway, for instance, built a large commerce model that processes hundreds of thousands of inputs to create rich customer profiles, delivering personalized content with real-time feedback. This enables them to run campaigns across all markets in minutes, a task that previously took days or weeks with no additional technical overhead.
- Embrace “Fail Fast”: The concept of “fail fast” has never been more relevant or achievable than it is today, thanks to the unprecedented speed of feedback and change.
Jessica challenges us to identify where we are still manually hard-coding user experiences. These “static features” are ripe for transformation into conversational, dynamic, AI-driven experiences, forming the root of a forward-thinking roadmap.
💾 Data: The Unsung Hero of AI Success
Even with brilliant strategies and shifting mindsets, your AI potential will be “permanently limited” without strong data foundations. Jessica shares Just Eat Takeaway’s experience: they had over 104 petabytes of data and 570 million events hitting their platform daily, yet couldn’t use it meaningfully. Their data was abundant but inaccessible and unstructured.
Their solution involved:
- Auditing and Restructuring: They adjusted their data structuring around intent and business logic, making it far more usable.
- Prioritizing Access: Crucially, they developed an internal AI agent for all product managers and business users. This conversational interface allows them to query vast amounts of data in seconds, eliminating multi-person handoffs and hours of analysis. This empowers product managers to iterate on questions, make decisions rapidly, and take control of their development.
This data transparency and accessibility, Jessica asserts, is the “unlock” for any AI strategy. Without it, you’re “building on quicksand.” Ask yourself: “Is your data foundation designed to provide answers, or do you have a pile of raw material that requires a plumber to navigate it?”
✨ Reclaiming Creativity: The True Promise of AI
Jessica reminds us why most of us entered product management: to solve problems, be curious, creative, and understand how things work – not to do administrative drudgery or clean data. The “human glue” work saps energy and wastes the immense potential of talented teams.
By simplifying processes, automating where possible, addressing root causes, and making data readily available, we can reclaim our bandwidth. This allows product managers to refocus on outcomes, engage in horizon scanning, and truly love their jobs again, moving faster than ever before. This is the “new era of product management,” an exciting space where creativity can flourish.
Jessica poses a final, thought-provoking question: “Are you paying for world-class discovery, or are you just subsidizing the cost of your own organizational debt by making them be the human glue connectors?”
Your Call to Action
AI strategy is critical for ROI, but it extends far beyond just technology and tools. It’s fundamentally about your organization and the way you work.
- Audit Your Human Glue: Identify where processes rely on individual heroics rather than scalable systems. Simplify wherever possible.
- Distinguish Knowledge: Don’t confuse tribal knowledge with true organizational intelligence. Make information and context accessible to machines.
- Shift Your Mindset: Embrace the role of curator of intelligence rather than a creator of rigid logic.
- Prioritize Data: Ensure data transparency and access to build a robust foundation for your strategy.
AI is not just a tool for your product; it’s the high-definition mirror for your business. What it reveals is yours to fix. Thank you!