/

Automate What You Can, Optimize What Matters: The AI Product Strategy

Automate What You Can, Optimize What Matters: The AI Product Strategy

May 4, 2025

Recently, I was staring at my overflowing inbox, a familiar dread creeping in. Dozens of emails, all needing a quick reply, a customer query, or a team update. I thought, "There has to be a better way to tackle these repetitive tasks." As a product manager, I'm always looking for efficiency, and AI promised exactly that. So, I started experimenting, just like many of us are doing now, trying to figure out where AI truly fits. Yet, when I chatted with a product leader at a Series A SaaS company, they excitedly shared their new AI customer support tool. A few weeks later, I checked back in. Their shoulders slumped. "Honestly," they admitted, "it's just automating terrible answers faster."It was a classic example of what I see all the time: chasing the shiny new AI thing without a clear strategy. Remember those early AI copywriting tools? They often generated generic, lifeless text. Our focus on "automation" sometimes overlooked the "why." While those tools were a starting point, real change happens when we move beyond simply automating tasks and start strategically optimizing for what truly matters to our users. Many teams get excited about the latest AI model, apply it to every problem, and end up with automated mediocrity. The key isn't just to use AI; it's to use it smartly. It's about identifying which parts of your product experience are suited for AI-driven automation, and which require a human touch, deep focus, and intentional optimization.#### The Automation Sweet Spot: Where AI Really ShinesWhere should automation efforts be focused? Consider repetitive tasks that consume your team's time. These often keep product managers focused on operations instead of developing new features. This is where AI excels. Examples include:- Personalized content generation: Tailoring email subject lines, push notifications, or in-app messages based on user behavior. This was once a time-consuming manual process; now, AI can handle it, allowing marketing and content teams to focus on strategy and high-impact campaigns.- Data analysis and reporting: Sifting through product analytics to find trends, predict churn, or spot new opportunities. AI can surface these insights quickly, giving your team more time to act on them rather than just finding them.- Customer support triage: Routing queries, answering FAQs, and drafting initial responses. This isn't about replacing human support; it's about augmenting it, enabling your support team to focus on complex, high-value interactions that require human empathy. I recently worked with a B2B SaaS startup struggling with low onboarding engagement. They manually segmented users and sent generic follow-up emails. We implemented an AI tool to dynamically generate personalized onboarding tips based on initial product usage. This resulted in a 20% increase in activation rates. Their customer success team spent less time chasing inactive users and more time building relationships.#### Optimization: The Human ElementOnce you've automated what's feasible, you need to be deliberate about optimizing what truly impacts your users and business. This is where human insight, creativity, and empathy are essential:- Deep user empathy and problem discovery: AI can tell you what users are doing, but it can't tell you why or how they feel. This still requires conversations, observations, and genuine human curiosity. Understanding user pain points remains a fundamentally human task.- Strategic product vision and roadmap: While AI can analyze market trends, it cannot invent the future. It can't create a compelling product narrative or make the strategic decisions that differentiate a good product. That's the product leader's role.- Designing delightful user experiences: AI can generate UI components, but the art of crafting an intuitive, beautiful, and emotionally resonant user experience is still deeply human. It involves understanding psychological principles, visual hierarchy, and the subtle nuances that create a truly positive experience. Think about the best marketing emails you've seen. They likely had a certain flair, a human touch, a story—something AI can't fully replicate today. AI can get you most of the way there, but the last part—creating genuine connection and loyalty—is about intentional human optimization.#### The Balancing ActThe most successful product teams master this balancing act. They intelligently integrate AI to enhance human capabilities, not replace them. They view AI as a co-pilot, a partner, rather than a fully autonomous driver. This creates a powerful loop: AI identifies patterns and automates initial responses, then human teams use those insights to refine strategies, discover new problems, and design better solutions. This feedback loop makes both AI and human teams more effective and connected over time. So, when considering a new AI tool or automation, ask yourself:- What specific, repetitive task can this AI genuinely take off my plate?- How will automating this allow my team to focus more deeply on a high-impact, human-centric problem?- Am I building a shortcut to mediocrity, or a launchpad for innovation? The goal isn't just to do more with AI. It's to do better things, the right things, and to free up your team's ingenuity to truly optimize what matters most. That's where the real wins happen.#### Related Articles- The AI Product Manager: Redefining the Role in the Age of Intelligent Automation- Product Managers: Stop Being Scribes, Start Being Strategists with AI- Automate the Mundane, Master the Strategic: The AI-Enabled PM