How AI Can Speed Up Your Product Development

The past few months have been filled with more and more news about AI. Maybe a little bit too much even. But whether you believe AI to be the next fad and put it in line with crypto and NFTs or think that it is the biggest invention and threat in human history: It is here to stay.

So while students have been using it to write their thesis (and got in trouble for it), a lot of builders out there have started to utilize AI to kickstart their ideas. Effectively using AI to quickly ideate, build, and iterate.

The speed at which this is happening would have been absolutely unimaginable just mere months ago. Now, all of it is possible. And just one click away.

However, leveraging AI for product development and management brings both benefits and potential drawbacks. With thousands of new products surfacing in just the past months, it is also easy to get lost, lose track, and be overwhelmed with the given options.

But there are some tools and use cases that you should definitely spend some time on.

Using AI to Build a New Business

You want to start a company, but don’t have an idea? Well, not anymore. AI serves as a powerful tool for entrepreneurs looking to ideate and create new products. And especially for someone going through the product life cycle from start to finish for the first time, AI can provide a lot of step-by-step guides to get started.

1. Use ChatGPT as a Starting Point for Your Ideation:

It’s always hard to start with a blank canvas, especially when you have no idea what type of product you even want to build. ChatGPT can be a good starting point when you know how to use it.

In order to find interesting niches and markets, you could ask what types of markets have been growing in the past years. It will immediately generate a list and you can just keep the conversation going from there.

Pick a market, then ask ChatGPT to provide some niche ideas and target groups, and it will come up with some ideas for you.

For example, I prompted ChatGPT to give me some niches in the e-commerce space and include a potential target group. It came up with the idea for handcrafted artisanal pet products.

It specifically proposed pet beds or personalized pet accessories, which it wants to be targeted at affluent pet owners that are looking for something unique.

While not every idea will be a good one, ChatGPT is very helpful to just get you started with brainstorming within seconds. You should see it as a very quick ideation partner and play idea ping pong with it for a while until you find something you like.

It will not come up with the most unique idea for sure, but it definitely helps you get one.

2. Analyze Market Trends and Consumer Preferences.

With just one more prompt, you can quickly ask ChatGPT to give you some candid market insights and even analyze them for you.

I prompted ChatGPT to provide me with data on the current social media market and urged it to include data points like “time spent on social media”, arrange the data in a table chart from oldest to newest, and include data from the past 3 years.

And I wasn’t disappointed. I have spent many hours in the past to gain as much insight into the social media market as possible. So, I can tell you the data was arranged perfectly, was correct and most importantly it only took me one minute to get it. Instead of hours.

No more spending a lot of time pulling together data from different sources. ChatGPT did it all in seconds.

It’s the golden key to be precise with your prompts. ChatGPT is only as good as your prompts are. Well, and as good as the data is. This leads us to one of the biggest problems with using ChatGPT based on GPT 3.5 for market research and trends. The data only dates back to the end of 2021.

So if you are looking to find some current trends, ChatGPT is not the door you want to knock at (yet). Additionally, it’s important to always balance out the AI-generated insights with direct customer feedback to ensure you get to product-market fit.

After all, ChatGPT is just a more convenient way to conduct secondary research and can be biased. Don’t skip the primary research.

If you want to research current trends, then you might want to look at some other AI-powered tools like explodingtopics.com.

3. Product Research

Now if you’re a product manager you will have heard about frameworks like “Jobs to be Done”, “Blue Ocean”, “AARRR” and others. They are very helpful in assessing what your product should do, how you can differentiate it from competitors, and what value it provides to the customer.

No matter whether you want to prepare one of those frameworks, or draft up your business canvas or value proposition: ChatGPT is a good starting point - yet again.

Requesting a specific framework will save you a lot of time and details on your prompt writing because ChatGPT, of course, already knows how a “Jobs to be Done” framework works.

As long as you provide a precise description of your product it can quickly give you a great overview. It will often be helpful to add the way you want the information to be presented.

I personally often request the data to be presented in a table chart because I find that the most easy to scan.

superusapp.com is also a very good AI tool for quickly brainstorming anything around your product.

4. Creating Your Brand

ChatGPT is a good option here as well, although I can also confidently recommend Notion AI. The latter is especially great if you like to keep your knowledge managed in one place.

Both of them are good starting points but can’t cover all aspects of creating your brand. They can easily create a full guide for how to set up your brand identity, but when it comes to the more graphic part of it they’re not the right tools to use.

But let’s take it step by step.

Finding a name for your brand can be a very challenging process. Over the course of my career, I’ve come up with many product names that ended up making it as the final name. Almost all of them took me more than just one or two brainstorming sessions to come up with.

So far, I have used AI only once or twice to come up with a name. I wouldn’t say that those were the best names I’ve ever come up with, but I would say that they’re pretty solid. Definitely, a quick way to find a good enough name to get started with.

There are many different ways to go about brainstorming a business name with AI. You can just straight up ask the software to come up with a name that fits your product description. Or you can give it some example words, tell it to mix and match or even make some fantasy names up.

You might be wary that most of the names could be already trademarked, and so was I. But instead, I was actually able to find many good names that weren’t trademarked anywhere and were indeed completely new ideas the AI came up with.

As for the corporate identity, ChatGPT won’t be helpful with your Logo or color scheme, but it can give you some ideas on which colors might fit your brand. You might have seen the cactus dog toy on social media that has a second dog toy (a sad cactus) inside.

When the dog destroys the cactus toy, you still end up with a second sad cactus toy.

I asked ChatGPT to come up with a brand identity for a product like this. It gave me a comprehensive guide and recommended using joyful and happy colors like yellow and orange to highlight the brand’s playful character.

If you want to create your own logo, try Adobe’s Firefly tool or other logo-targeted AI tools instead. I find the prompting with Adobe’s Firefly to be very intuitive. However, it also strongly depends on what you want to use the logo for; if you’re looking for a logo to put outside a brick-and-mortar store, then you might actually get some really good first drafts or even “good enough for now” logos through Firefly.

If your goal is to create a logo for a mobile app, then it will only be helpful to collect the very first ideas to act on. The main reason for that is that almost all of the proposed logos will be too elaborate to be used for a small favicon or app icon

5. Creating a Prototype

To create a prototype you can use tools like GitHub’s Copilot to craft up the first code you need or use it together with a low-code tool to tweak your prototype. You will be able to create simple applications, but of course, this doesn’t come without drawbacks.

In most cases, it won’t save you from designing your prototypes through more traditional software tools like Adobe XD or Figma. The upside is that it will provide you with a higher range of options to lead the user around your application.

On the other hand, prototypes done with design software like Figma result in a lot of dead ends.

Personally, I still prefer to just build the designs and prototype using Figma - but that might also be due to my UI/UX background.

There are also AI tools like uizard.io out there that will really speed up the design process for you, by allowing you to convert screenshots or paper sketches

into fully-fledged mockups.

If you want to go down the rabbit hole of using AI to create a technical prototype, there are many great guides available to dive deeper into it.

6. Marketing Your Product

There are many aspects to great product marketing. But whether you’re looking for data analysis or content creation, AI has your back.

From Lovo.ai’s hyperrealistic voiceovers, Midjourney’s beautifully generated graphics, or Invideo.io’s quick video creation tool: There are a lot of convenient tools out there that you can use to easily generate marketing graphics, copy, videos, and voiceovers.

While Midjourney was known to generate hands with 8 fingers and other interesting visuals just a blink of an eye ago, that’s no longer quite the case.

AI tools have improved in quality tremendously in the past few months and while they’re not perfect yet, some tools have reached a very high level already.

All of the above (and many more) are easy tools that can help you create content for your ads or social media channels and start testing what you’ve built during the steps before.

Conclusion

To wrap it all up nicely: I don’t believe that AI is just a fad. And even if you think so - it is most likely still worth it to spend an afternoon testing some of the tools listed in this article.

While some tools can seem more like nice “toys”, many of them already deliver frighteningly good results at this point.

If we picture those tools in more of a lean startup context, then the steps I’ve mentioned so far are going to give you an idea, basic market analysis and research, name, logo, and color scheme in a day’s time.

Maybe not in perfect quality, but in a “good enough for now” type of quality, that will be sufficient to test whether your idea can work out.

But most importantly, one phrase always remains true. Execution is everything. AI tools can support you during almost every step of your journey to build your own product (or someone else’s): Critical thinking, quality evaluation, and execution are still in your hands.

Make sure to second-guess the results AI is going to give you, dread carefully and have fun exploring and building.