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A Perfect Time to Sharpen Your Product Sense

Wendy-Lynn

In this downturn, a lot of PMs are either out of work or desperately trying to learn more about GenAI to upskill for the future. I have never seen a time before in my career when it was so easy to enage with new products and learn by testing new products. I am currently reviewing the following productivity products.

Product Sense Development

Testing these products lets me hone my product sense in the following ways:

  • Learn what works and doesn’t in the product

  • Observe Customer Success Best (and Worst) Practices

  • Learn what works (and what doesn’t) with GenAI

  • Stay sharp on the newest technology

  • Watching product teams pivot

Products Testing

See link to product and my point of views both as a user and a product leader.

  • Poised*

    • JTBD: Speak with more confidence and clarity at work, with a special focus on slowing down.

    • Product Sense Learning: fun watching them improve and add features to solve different problems as they got feedback

  • TL;DV

    • JTBD: Note-taking and content sharing from online meetings so I can easily share insights with clients.

    • Product Sense Learning: issues with tech as unique summaries with GenAI are difficult and require a lot of training

  • Read.ai

    • JTBD: Note-taking for Zoom to share with clients.

    • Product Sense Learning: Too many features for an early product are overwhelming. And if freemium has nothing to get you hooked, people will not upgrade because they can’t accomplish their aha moment.

  • Heyday

    • JTBD: Note-take for coaching & content creation from meeting insights.

    • Product Sense Learning: to win, GenAI products need to specialize. Currently, they are really kicking the tires but showing real promise. A great example of a product pivot, and they may have another one as they learn from early testers.

  • Augment

    • JTBD: Reducing the work I have to do on repetitive tasks and finding information that is personalized and contextual.

    • Product Sense Learning: Still early on but Customer Onboarding is amazing - like Superhuman email.

  • Reflect*

    • JTBD: Take notes and keep track of recurring clients and easy to share notes and links with clients.

    • Product Sense Learning: They are keeping it simple and clean but it can do so much once you get your use case setup. The onboarding videos are amazing but the email follow up was an nice touch.

  • Owwlish*

    • JTBD: Create courses on my website, keep clients in on my website to increase traffic to website, and thus my brand.

      • Bonus for allowing me to upload videos directly.

    • Product Sense Learning: Early product prioritizations are clear, for example coupons aren’t possible which creates interesting headaches but other features are a win.

  • Sellfy*

    • JTBD: Sell rentals of me answering product case questions.

    • Product Sense Learning: Might be a generational gap in table stakes expectations, for example they expect me to write a Zap or setup a Webhook to get an email confirmation for my sales! They felt looking at my sales in an app was sufficient. Clearly, there is another target user.

*I pay full freight to use these products for my business but I am fairly certain I top the list in frequency of both use and feedback :-)

How to Get Started

I discovered most of these products through newsletters I read that list new products. I look at the product, if it looks interesting, I start using it. Since I am a product person, I know how to give feedback so the vast majority of the teams engage me and appreciate the level of feedback mixed with empathy that I can provide. If you are looking for inspiration and new products, check out the Superhuman AI newsletter (not the email product) here. 5 days a week they share 5 new tools, so that is 25 new products a week you can choose from.

On My List to Investigate

  • Writer Access - Find writers for Backlinks

  • ChatDox - Search your own docs with ChatGPT

  • Ribbo - Customer Support Agent/Chatbot

Tried But Stopped Using

Not Relevant to Me (Right Now)

Big Names

You can also test these products without interacting with the founders and still learn a lot about what works or doesn’t in the world of GenAI.

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