Just recently I was looking into the next best tool to use for capturing customer demand. It needed to be a tool that allows our customer facing people from a lot of different departments, to provide new customer demand or plus-one existing ones. It needs to work at scale with many people as input providers and it must allow to provide feedback to these people from the product team, so that they are able to provide feedback to customers and manage expectations.
I identified a tool that already exists in the company. It may not be perfect and the processes around it seem a bit overloaded, but it will serve the case. The tool is well accepted in the sales and support organizations and so there is not too much headwinds here. BUT, it is another tool, a different tool. For managing the backlog items, user journeys and all the use cases we want to implement in the development teams, we us another tool. So, tool A for customer facing demand management (we call it raw demands) and tool B for actual work planning and refined and prioritized input for the teams. Now there was the unavoidable question: „should we automate the creation of items in tool B when there is new stuff in tool A?“
It is amazing, how many people asked me that question. Some even expressed it as a must have and otherwise it would be completely insane to introduce yet another tool. There will be so many demands when we start scaling, without automation we will never be able to process all the information. These were the arguments.
Yes, there will be a massive amount of information flowing in, when we have enough people onboarded to the new tool and we start to scale marketing and sales activities. But I firmly believe that there is zero value in automation of item-creation and linking here. Why?
All the new wishes and demand that will be brought to us, no matter if I myself will talk to customers, or any of my colleagues, need to run through the brains of our Product Owners. I am convinced that it needs an active, cautious information processing here, where we try to understand the input (it will be vague), respond with questions to the originator, map it to existing and known demands, consolidate and break down. We have so many user journeys and user outcomes in our development system B, that it needs some mental energy to do the mapping, find gaps and build the links. Sometimes you need to split a raw demand into multiple user journeys, some new, some existing. Sometimes you need to just map A to B, sometimes you have a small feature that is easy to add as a line item of things already in the backlog.
How would automation help here – specifically when we need to understand what the customers really need, instead of just consuming what they are asking for? Can AI to the trick? I don‘t think so yet. In either case, it is about learning and understanding my customer and no tool should take that away from me.
Unless there is no AI agent yet, who can look behind the curtain of words people use, to understand which problems are there to solve, I think this is a product owner brain‘s type of work, and it should be.