How AI is changing product management and what you need to know

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A product management expert shares how artificial intelligence is affecting the process for the tech and startup worlds. Photo via Getty Images

For the past 14 months, everyone has been talking about ways artificial intelligence is changing the world, and product management is not an exception. The challenge, as with every new technology, is not only adopting it but understanding what old habits, workflows, and processes are affected by it.

Product managers — as well as startup founders leading a product function — more than any other role, face a challenge of bringing new life-changing products to market that may or may not be received well by their users. A product manager’s goal is complex — bring value, stay ahead of the competition, be innovative. Yet, the "behind the scenes" grind requires endless decision making and trade offs to inspire stakeholders to move forward and deliver.

As we dive into 2024, it is obvious that AI tools do not only transform the way we work but also help product managers create products that exceed customer expectation and drive businesses forward.

Market research and trends analysis

As product managers, we process enormous amounts of market data — from reviewing global and industry trend analysis, to social media posts, predictions, competition, and company goals. AI, however, can now replace hours, if not days, of analyzing massive amounts of data in an instant, revealing market trends, anticipating needs, and foreseeing what's coming next. As a result, it is easier to make effective product decisions and identify new market opportunities.

Competitive analysis

Constantly following competitors, reviewing their new releases, product updates, or monitoring reviews to identify competitor strengths and weaknesses is an overwhelming and time consuming task. With AI, you can quickly analyze competitors’ products, pricing, promotions, and feedback. You can easily compare multiple attributes, including metrics, and identify gaps and areas for improvement — all the insights that are otherwise much harder to reveal quickly and efficiently.

Customer and product discovery

Of course, the most intuitive use case that comes to mind is the adoption of AI in product and customer discovery. For example:

  • Use AI for customer segmentation and persona creation to help visualize personas, prioritize user motivations and expectations, and uncover hidden behavior and needs. You can then create and simplify customer questionnaires for interviews and user groups and target customers more accurately.
  • Analyze quantitative and qualitative data from surveys, support tickets, reviews, and in-person interviews to identify pain points and unmet user needs and help prioritize features for future updates and releases.

Roadmap and sprint management

AI provides value in simplifying roadmap planning and sprint management. Resource optimization is often a gruesome task and AI can help with feature prioritization and resource allocation. It helps teams focus on critical work and increase their productivity. You can even analyze and manage dependencies and improve results across multiple sprints months in advance.

Prototyping and mockup generation

There is no product manager’s routine without multiple mockups, wireframes, and prototypes that explain concepts and collect feedback among stakeholders. AI has become a critical tool in simplifying this process and bringing ideas to life from concept to visualization.

Today, you can use textual or voice descriptions to instantly create multiple visuals with slight variations, run A/B tests and gather valuable feedback at the earliest stage of a product life cycle.

Job search and job interviews

Consider it as a bonus but one of the less obvious but crucial advantages of AI is using it in job search. With the vulnerable and unstable job market, especially for product roles, AI is a valuable assistant. From getting the latest news and updates on a company you want to join, to summarizing insights on the executive team, or company goals, compiling lists of interview questions, and running mock interviews, AI has become a non-judgmental assistant in a distressing and often discouraging job search process.

Use AI to draft cold emails to recruiters and hiring managers, compare your skills to open positions’ requirements, identify gaps, and outline ideas for test assignments.

We already know that AI is not a hype; it is here to stay. However, remember that customers do not consume AI, they consume your product for its value. Customers care whether your product gets their need, solves their problem, and makes their lives easier. The goal of a product manager is to create magic combining human brain capabilities and latest technology. And the best result is with a human at the core of any product.

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Natasha Gorodetsky is the founder and CEO of Product Pursuits, a Houston company that helps early stage and venture-backed startups build products and create impact.

Liu Idea Lab's Carol Tyger shares her experience on product managing for a tech startup. Getty Images

Houston expert reflects on why product management and user experience are key for tech startups

Houston voices

Consider planning a wedding. An impossible task of delivering a grand, completely personal event for all sorts of guests at a minimal cost.

At first, my fiance and I were freaking out because we heard that wedding planning is full of hidden costs and impossible expectations. But then the light bulb went off: that sounds a lot like my job as a product manager (PM). I can be the PM of my own wedding! I knew I wanted to provide a kick-ass party (great experience) for every guest (users) with limited resources (efficiently maximizing value).

Relying on my product manager skills, my fiancé and I started off by considering our goals and removing assumptions. I even conducted some user interviews by asking my friends what they value in weddings. Then we defined the "Wedding Minimum Viable Product (MVP)" and organized ourselves like a software team with a backlog and kanban board.

In the end, the wedding was a huge success. It felt just like a major software product release…from the planning to the execution. Product management is all about making a great user experience, maximizing value and working efficiently. In other words, it is a foundation for getting things done that can be applied to almost any situation.

Ultimately, as a product manager, you build an entrepreneurial mindset that can be applied to any future role. At the bare minimum, the PM is responsible for providing detailed requests for the tech team to build. But to be a great PM, it takes a lot more.

You rely on empathy. Product managers are the voice of the user for both the business and the tech team. To understand the user, you conduct user interviews, gather market analysis and collaborate with internal groups – exploring all corners of the organization – to determine user needs. Skilled product managers don't directly ask users what they want, but instead, understand through observation. You will be using various types of user data before and after software releases to forecast and measure the impact of innovations made.

You strengthen soft skills. It doesn't matter how technical you are if you don't have good rapport within the organization. The basics begin with communicating effectively, remaining flexible, acknowledging bad decisions and being comfortable with the unknown. The best product managers have built enough trust throughout the organization to lead at a senior level despite not having direct authority.

You strategize. You must understand the users, software cycle, and business needs well enough to plan months – even years – ahead while listening to and setting expectations with everyone involved. You will be blazing trails and solving new problems. The company will rely on you to operate with integrity while continuously innovating. Your entrepreneurial mindset will make setting the strategy second nature.

The entrepreneurial mindset and product management responsibilities hone skills that are not only transferable to future roles, but to your life in general. Whether you are preparing for a major software release or planning a fantastic party, your entrepreneurial mindset and product management skills will help you succeed.

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Carol Tyger is Lilie's product management expert-in-residence and was head of product at Spruce, a Houston-founded managed marketplace for apartment residents to book services such as housekeeping.

This article originally appeared on Liu Idea Lab for Innovation & Entrepreneurship's blog.

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Houston medtech startup clears FDA approval for new surgical tool

precision surgery

Houston-based Prana Surgical will soon bring a new electrosurgical tool to operating rooms around the country. The Prana System officially cleared U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval earlier this month.

"Receiving FDA clearance for the Prana System represents a defining milestone for our company," Joanna Nathan, CEO and co-founder of Prana Surgical, said in a news release. "Surgeons today are increasingly focused on achieving precise outcomes while minimizing disruption to healthy tissue. The Prana System was designed to support that shift by integrating targeting and excision into a single, streamlined tool."

Prana Surgical began as Prana Thoracic in 2022. Back then, the company primarily focused on developing screening tools for lung cancer diagnosis. It raised $6 million in series A funding rounds in 2023 and 2024 before transitioning to broader surgical needs in 2025.

The Prana System is a minimally invasive, image-guided, single-use tissue extraction tool designed to retrieve samples without damaging healthy tissue. The tool is still designed with the respiratory system in mind, helping Prana in the fight against lung cancer and other thoracic diseases.

Reducing the impact of tissue extraction via electrosurgery and enhanced image scanning can significantly reduce complications. The Prana System combines localization and tissue-cutting capabilities in one, which keeps surgeons from having to swap out components during a procedure, making for a smoother process. It can core, cut and feel blood vessels on the way toward the intended target, giving surgeons greater control over tissue preservation.

"Electrosurgery is foundational to modern surgery, but there is still opportunity to improve how energy-based tools are applied in minimally invasive settings," Nathan added. "Our goal is to introduce a new class of image-guided surgical tools that enable more precise intervention across a range of procedures."

The company projects sales of $7.5 billion from the Prana System in the United States, estimating that 2.5 million surgical modules will be able to use the new tool. While starting out focused on biopsies, the company plans to evolve the system into other procedures, such as ablation, in the future. It is also planning for a controlled U.S. clinical rollout as it moves toward commercialization

Texas still ranks as No. 1 in U.S. for inbound moves, but growth dips

by the numbers

Texas continues to be the country’s No. 1 magnet for newcomers from other states, giving a boost to the state’s economy. However, Texas’ appeal weakened in 2024 compared with the previous year, due in large part to spiking home prices.

An analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data by self-storage platform StorageCafe shows Texas saw net interstate migration of 76,000 people in 2024. Texas’ net interstate migration dropped nearly 50 percent from 2023, according to the analysis. Net migration refers to the number of incoming residents minus the number of outgoing residents.

California remained the top source of newcomers for Texas, sending nearly 77,000 residents to the Lone Star State in 2024, the analysis says. Florida ranked second, followed by New York, Colorado and Illinois.

“These trends reveal Texas’ continued pull from both high-cost coastal markets and other large Sun Belt states, resulting in a mix of affordability-driven and job-driven relocation,” StorageCafe says.

Putting a damper on the influx of new residents: a roughly 124 percent surge in Texas home prices over the past decade, according to StorageCafe.

“While the state remains significantly more affordable than California, its top feeder state, the once-wide pricing gap has narrowed,” says StorageCafe. “For many movers, Texas is still a relative bargain, but no longer an undisputed one.”

Nonetheless, Texas keeps attracting young, highly educated people, which bodes well for the state’s long-term economic outlook, StorageCafe says. More than half of new arrivals to Texas in 2024 held at least a bachelor’s degree, and the age of newcomers averaged 32.

Where are most of these young, highly educated newcomers settling?

Lloyd Potter, former Texas state demographer, tells StorageCafe that population growth in Texas is happening most rapidly in suburban “ring counties” at the expense of slowing growth in urban cores. Ring counties are on the outskirts of major metro areas.

“Many people are moving from urban cores to suburban rings seeking lower costs, newer housing, better schools, and more space,” Potter says. “Typically, a move to a suburban county will be within commuting or hybrid‑commuting distance of major metro economies.”

Artemis II makes historic call to space station with help from Houston Mission Control

History in the making

Still aglow from their triumphant lunar flyby, the Artemis II astronauts made more history Tuesday, April 7: calling their friends aboard the International Space Station hundreds of thousands of miles away as they headed home from the moon.

It was the first moonship-to-spaceship radio linkup ever. NASA's Apollo crews had no off-the-planet company back in the 1960s and 1970s, the last time humanity set sail for deep space.

"We have been waiting for this like you can’t imagine,” Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman called out.

For Christina Koch on Artemis II and Jessica Meir aboard the space station, it marked a joyous space reunion despite being 230,000 miles (370,000 kilometers) apart. The two teamed up for the world's first all-female spacewalk in 2019 outside the orbiting lab.

Koch told her “astro-sister” that she'd hoped to meet up with her again in space “but I never thought it would be like this — it's amazing.”

“I'm so happy that we are back in space together,” Meir replied, “even if we are a few miles apart.”

Houston's Mission Control arranged the cosmic chitchat between the four lunar travelers and the space station's three NASA and one French residents.

Koch described being awe-struck by not just the beauty of Earth, “but how much blackness there was around it.”

“It just made it even more special. It truly emphasized how alike we are, how the same thing keeps every single person on planet Earth alive,” she told the space station crew. “The specialness and preciousness of that really is emphasized” when viewing the home planet from the moon.

By late Tuesday afternoon, the Artemis II astronauts had beamed back more than 50 gigabytes' worth of pictures and other data from the previous day's lunar rendezvous, which set a new distance record for humanity. The highlight: an Earthset photo reminiscent of Apollo 8's Earthrise shot from 1968.

"While they are inspirational and, I think, allow all of us to really feel a little bit of what they were feeling, there's also a lot of science hidden inside of those images," said Mission Control's lead lunar scientist Kelsey Young. “The conversations and the science lessons learned are just beginning."

During a debriefing with Young, the astronauts recounted how they spotted a cascade of pinpricks of light on the lunar surface from impacting cosmic debris. The flashes lasted mere milliseconds and coincided by chance with Monday evening's total solar eclipse.

Young said it was too soon to know whether the crew witnessed an actual meteor shower or more random, run-of-the-mill micrometeoroid hits. Either way, there were “audible screams of delight” in the science operations center, she said.

Koch described being awe-struck by not just the beauty of Earth, “but how much blackness there was around it.”

“It just made it even more special. It truly emphasized how alike we are, how the same thing keeps every single person on planet Earth alive,” she told the space station crew. “The specialness and preciousness of that really is emphasized” when viewing the home planet from the moon.

The first lunar explorers since Apollo 17 in 1972, Wiseman and his crew are aiming for a splashdown off the San Diego coast on Friday to wrap up the nearly 10-day test flight. The recovery ship USS John P. Murtha left port Tuesday for the target zone.

It sets the stage for next year's Artemis III, a lunar lander docking demo in orbit around Earth. Artemis IV will follow in 2028 with two astronauts attempting to land near the lunar south pole.

As for the Orion capsule’s pesky potty, Mission Control assured the astronauts that no maintenance was required Tuesday. The toilet has been on-and-off limits to the crew ever since last week’s launch, prompting them to rely on a backup bag-and-funnel system for urinating.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told the crew following the lunar flyby Monday night: “We definitely have to fix some of the plumbing” ahead of the next Artemis mission. Engineers suspect a clogged filter in the overboard flushing system.

Aside from the toilet and other relatively minor matters, the mission has gone well, Isaacman noted at a news conference Tuesday, “but I'll breathe easier when we get through reentry and everybody's under chutes and in the water.”

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