Member-only story
A product manager’s 24 reflections on 2024
and how to use tarot cards for sprint planning.
2024 felt like another transformative year for product management. Once again, AI continues to operate in the emotional space between pure excitement and existential dread. An LLM company could announce an AI that helps me with my shopping list or a robot that replaces my job tomorrow, and I would be equally unsurprised.
As we continue to reconcile in this odd place, I think it's worth bearing in mind the wise words of tech guru Jaron Lanier that the more sophisticated technology becomes, the more damage we can do with it, and the more we have a ‘responsibility to sanity’. This responsibility to act morally and humanely is a duty we should all uphold. We should demand that those who do not yield this technology for the common good of society should be held accountable for their actions and reminded of those consequences in the real world.
Even the best reasoning models don’t seem smart enough to reason themselves out of an unreasonable scenario.
In my quest to try to understand if LLMs could replace me, I’ve made a curious observation: even the best reasoning models don’t seem smart enough to reason themselves out of an unreasonable scenario. Let me explain. Try asking an LLM, for example, to create a strategy for a product that equally appeals to the extreme cost-cutters who want the absolute cheapest solution and to luxury users who demand the highest possible quality at any price without offering any segmentation or tiering. We know building such a thing is almost impossible, but an LLM will always regress to a mean of generality, ignoring the realities that most of us deal with every day. And such scenarios are prevalent in our line of work.
LLMs assume a world of logical order and reasonably informed decision, but as many of us know, this is not how the world operates, and I assume for a model based on logical predictive token selection, this is especially challenging.
It can’t really help you account for competitors undercutting your pricing, internal work politics diverting funding, new regulations, unexpected challenges or how customers react to your offerings. You can…
