Building a profitable product in the age of AI (Janet Bumpas, Product Advisor)

Janet Bumpas, Product Advisor and seasoned entrepreneur with a Silicon Valley background in product, led the closing session at our Pendomium+#mtpcon roadshow in Amsterdam. She offered some practical advice on building a profitable product in the age of AI. Watch the video in full, or read on for our key takeaways from the closing keynote. 

The state of AI on product discovery

Janet opens by discussing the large amount of change that is expected to take place due to advancements in Generative AI. Almost 22 billion dollars is expected to be invested in AI startups this year, and 67% of these companies are expected to be early-stage. 

However, Janet sees AI as a double-edged sword. She explained that many new ideas are out in the world now—it’s never been easier to build with AI. However, many startups will not make it due to the competitive field of building new products. 

“As AI becomes increasingly democratized and underlying models potentially commoditized, applications will need to differentiate on the basis of winning mission-critical workloads,” explained Janet, citing a quote by Sarah Wang, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. 

In other words, customers don’t buy AI; they buy solutions to their problems, Janet said, as she broke down what new solutions could bring to more traditional services that customers regularly consume.

Vision and outcomes

 She explained that building a great AI product always starts with a product vision, which is at the heart of any great product. 

Janet noted that a product vision is NOT:

• A list of features 
• Cool things your product can do 
• Product roadmap 
• Countries operating in 
• Org chart 
• Revenue 
• Market capitalization
• Market share 

The above are outputs or impacts. A product vision is how you will make a customer’s life better. 

She also clarified the difference between outcomes and outputs: 

• Outcome: A change in human behaviour that drives business results. For example, increasing customer satisfaction or increasing the number of leads.
• Output: A tangible deliverable from the project. For example, launching a chatbot to answer customer questions or buying Facebook ads. 

Product teams tend to have an overwhelming number of feature and functionality requests. Janet explained that it’s important to tie these requests all together to create an effective product vision. 

As product people, we tend to overshoot. That opens up a spot for competitors to begin their upward march and disrupt the market with a better product that companies value more, she explained. When a new technology enters the market, it takes a while for us to digest and imagine new experiences. 

Janet explained that incumbent organisations like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft understand innovation and have swiftly embraced AI. They also have distribution on their side, and finally, they have a plethora of data. 

Closing this engaging session, Janet explained that she can’t advise on what the future holds for AI products; however, our best chance is to help customers get their jobs done better. 

With all of the cool things that you can do with GenAI, keep the customer at the centre. 

Read a full recap of the five things we learned at the Pendomonium+#mtpcon roadshow – Amsterdam 2024