A lesson I’ve learnt over the years in product management—but one that I’ll continue to learn for years to come—is to avoid the trap of “technology in search of a problem”.
It’s easy to get excited about new technology and to then go in search of problem to solve with it. A good example is people have talked about Blockchain technology and smart contracts for years, but apart from cryptocurrency—which still has questionable real value in my opinion—very few genuine use cases have emerged that have been adopted at true scale.
On the other hand. ChatGPT—and
More broadly the use of Large Language Models—has been talked about endlessly for the past 6 months, and for good reason. It’s the fastest product in history to hit >100 million users because there is genuine value in using it to rapidly summarise and produce content.
Starting with the problem—one that is either hard, expensive, or tedious—and working from there as a base, is a more reliable way to explore building new products. Technology, tastefully applied to the right, real problem, is much more likely to create magic.