Changing how to work: AI-powered hacks
Inspired by the Microsoft Work Trends report , in addition to the organic adoption of generative AI to change how I work, in the last few weeks, I ran experiments to consciously change some of my core work habits as a product manager.
More effective email processing
With Teams chat becoming the dominant messaging modality, email is falling by the wayside but still remains critical especially for communicating with external parties. My email has a lot of "fyi-s" that obfuscate messages I need to pay attention to. I love using Copilot to stay on top of what I need to attend to.
My two go-to Copilot prompts in Outlook are:
Find all messages that @ mention me
Find all messages that require a response from me
I use these about 3x/day between meetings to stay on top of emails that need my attention.
Designer + Copilot in PowerPoint make deck creation tastefully easy
4pm on a Friday you realize you need to create a short presentation for Monday morning. I like my decks to be easy on the eyes, focused on the most important information with minimal noise from info that should be in the talk track.
My go-to hacks are:
Create great visuals with Designer
Make the text on the slide more concise with Copilot
Use Copilot to find pertinent information from related docs, decks and spreadsheets, add that info to the notes section of the slides
It took me all of 30 mins to produce the short deck late on a Friday
Let Copilot write the proposals
I have to admit, I don't write as many specs as I used to, and when I do, I tend to go back to my old habit of writing them out from scratch. Till this past week. I had an idea that needed to be written out and vetted with market signals and constraints. Using Copilot in Word and a single well-crafted, detailed prompt including a high-level description of the product play, I was able to create a spec in minutes complete with value proposition, market opportunity data, high level user flow, barriers to entry and constraints. Copilot even suggest some useful features to round out the product play.