6 Tools to Become a 10x Product Manager—Yes, They’re All AI!
As AI becomes ubiquitous, supercharge your product management skills with these essential AI tools.
Here is the podcast version of the post generated by NotebookLLM. If you’re not much of a reader, feel free to listen to the audio below:
I still remember back in January 2023 when I was excessively using ChatGPT to craft my PRDs, summary notes, insights, and whatnot. Back then, it wasn’t the ChatGPT of today—a super productive tool. But now we have countless great tools, and my productivity has gone through the roof, and I mean it when I say this.
In this post, we will dive into the tools I personally use to 10x my productivity as Head of Product and produce new artifacts, content, and whatnot. Let’s go through my categories of items:
Tools That Can Help You Become 10x
These are the must-use tools for product managers across all levels of seniority and career stages. If you start using these—even if you are just beginning as a product manager—they will help you learn and improve your skills faster too. Let’s start with the first one:
Text2SQL.ai
Text2SQL.ai is an essential tool for product managers because it bridges the gap between technical and non-technical team members. In today’s data-first business environment, having the ability to quickly access and analyze data is crucial for product managers who need to make informed decisions about product development, user experience, and market strategies
Why It’s Important:
Data Accessibility: It has become almost a requirement for any data-driven role where product managers are expected to at least understand and generate SQL queries. Leveraging this tool allows you to generate SQL queries in natural language, making it easier to analyze data without requiring deep technical expertise in SQL.
Cross-Functional Collaboration with Engineers: When you know how to make sense of the data, generating SQL queries to extract insights without relying on engineering teams makes you look good and breaks down barriers of communication, thereby enhancing effective communication with technical teams.
Perplexity.ai
Perplexity.ai is probably the most familiar tool to many. It’s great for conducting thorough research and fact-checking, leveraging its ability to use multiple AI models and agents to enhance search performance. It provides product managers with precise, conversational, and verifiable answers, making it an indispensable resource for accessing reliable information quickly. Whether you need to understand complex concepts, evaluate tools, or conduct market research, Perplexity.ai streamlines the process by delivering comprehensive insights from authoritative sources.
Lenny Rachitsky did an excellent deep dive on how you, as a product manager, can use Perplexity. Here’s a quick note on its impact:
Crafting Growth Strategies: Product managers can use it to explain complex concepts like cohort analysis, CLV analysis, growth accounting and analyze successful strategies such as Dropbox’s referral program.
Market Research and Benchmarking: The tool helps PMs find benchmarks and conduct thorough market research, providing a competitive edge in product planning.
Learning Best Practices: Perplexity aids in understanding industry best practices, ensuring that product managers stay informed about the latest trends and methodologies.
Evaluating Popular Tools: It assists in assessing various tools and technologies, helping PMs make informed decisions about integrating new solutions into their workflows.
Understanding Technical Jargon: For those less familiar with technical terms, Perplexity offers clear explanations of concepts like DAU/MAU ratios or differences between GraphQL and REST APIs.
Visily.ai
Visily.ai is a fantastic tool for transforming your design process, leveraging AI to turn ideas into high-fidelity wireframes and prototypes effortlessly. It empowers product managers to create professional-grade designs without needing extensive design expertise, making it an indispensable asset for quickly visualizing concepts and gathering feedback.
AI-Powered Design Conversion: Visily’s “Screenshot to Design” and “Sketch to Design” features automatically convert images or sketches into editable designs, allowing you to bring your ideas to life swiftly.
Magic Images and Themes: With “Magic Images” and “Magic Themes,” you can seamlessly find stunning visuals and redesign themes, ensuring consistent branding across your projects.
Text to Diagram: Transform text prompts into detailed diagrams like flowcharts, streamlining the visualization of complex ideas.
Design Assistant: The AI acts as a virtual assistant, spotting and fixing design inconsistencies to ensure professional outputs.By reducing time on manual tasks, it allows you to focus on strategic decisions and align with cross-functional teams. Whether you're refining user interfaces or brainstorming new features, Visily.ai streamlines the process by providing intuitive tools that enhance creativity and productivity.
ChatPRD
This product is founded by LaunchDarkly’s CPO, Claire Vo. Here’s why this product is useful for you as a Product Manager;
It simplifies the process of drafting PRDs by automating sections of the document creation. We all know it takes a ton of time to draft PRDs, and before that, you need to conduct heavy product discovery even prior to drafting them. So the fact that you, as a Product Manager, can provide the insights, data, learnings, metrics, goals, objectives, and specification requirements—it really accelerates productivity.
This allows you to spend time where it’s more important, such as strategic initiatives, getting buy-in from your stakeholders, talking to customers, and managing up with your executives.
Zeda.io
This one is personal. I have spent countless hours going through customer notes, Slack channels, personal notes—connecting the dots to make sense of it all.
Zeda.io is a tool I have personally used, and it puts data-driven product planning at the core. It collects data from Intercom, Zendesk, HubSpot, Slack, and every tool out there to ensure there is a centralized method to prioritize your product roadmap, which has the biggest impact on your customers and revenue.
The AI capabilities of Zeda.io streamline this process by automatically analyzing feedback to identify critical issues and uncover new opportunities. It segments customers based on behavior and needs, providing targeted insights that guide strategic decisions.
It also offers predictive analytics that forecast the potential revenue impact of changes, ensuring that development efforts are aligned with business objectives.
By automating the collection and analysis of data, Zeda.io not only saves time but also enhances decision-making, enabling product managers to focus on developing products that truly resonate with users and drive substantial growth.
Canva
We all know Canva, and I’ll be honest—it’s a fantastic tool. It has helped me get the green light on multi-million-dollar projects, secure funding for my startup, scale my marketing efforts, and so much more.
For product managers, it’s an indispensable resource for streamlining the design process and enhancing presentations. With AI integrated into its platform, Canva lets you create visually compelling content quickly and efficiently, even if you’re not a design expert.
Key AI Features of Canva for Product Managers:
Magic Design: Automatically generates design suggestions based on your input, allowing you to create polished presentations, reports, and marketing materials in no time. It provides templates that fit your project needs, ensuring a professional look with minimal effort.
Magic Write: An AI-powered text tool that helps you craft content in your brand’s voice. Great for drafting product updates, strategic documents, or engaging content for stakeholder presentations.
Magic Media: Transforms your text descriptions into eye-catching visuals and videos with Text to Image and Text to Video features. Ideal for creating dynamic presentations or promotional materials that capture attention and convey ideas effectively.
Background Remover and Magic Eraser: Let you refine images by removing backgrounds or unwanted elements effortlessly—perfect for tailoring visuals to fit specific presentation themes or marketing campaigns.
This is an invaluable tool for creating impactful presentations and marketing materials to effectively communicate your product vision and strategy. Being able to generate high-quality visuals quickly means you can spend more time on strategic planning and decision-making rather than getting bogged down in design details.
Wrapping Up
These are not the only tools. Firstly, Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, and Meta’s Llama (available on Perplexity.ai) can be used as a way to be productive by building charts, coding, designing prototypes, converting text to SQL, and more. Then there are Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai, Amplitude, among others.
The reason I picked these tools and curated them carefully is because they collectively empower you to overcome common hurdles in product management. They help you work smarter, not harder, enabling you to focus on what truly matters.