Will AI Be the Swift End or a New Beginning for Product Teams?

Here’s how I’m preparing for a hybrid future.

Are product teams a dying breed?

Imagine a future not too distant from now. One with teams of AI agents trained at an expert level and operating with autonomy to achieve a goal.

If you are on a product team, this should grab your attention.

Can AI do your job? It’s getting close. And its usage is growing every day at an alarming rate. 93% of young Gen Z professionals and 79% of Millennials use AI weekly to do aspects of their jobs for them, according to a Google Workspace study released in November.¹

And if AI can do your job, will collaboration die? Will real teamwork end? Will the human team end?

It will unless we can figure out how to form a hybrid future. One where humans and AI coexist on teams. But first, we humans on teams need to start acting like a team again.

Let me explain, and then let’s see how to use AI to emerge more powerful teams.

Today, many product teams have team members who work solo, as if they are preparing for AI to step in and take over.

I’ve seen an alarming downward trend in the product space.

Most product team members spend their days working alone. They gather once daily to check in on a video call (often with no cameras turned on). But this is only a drab status report on individual, disconnected tasks. It’s a lifeless meeting.

Collaboration has disappeared. Everyone works solo on different things. We have devolved into a task-driven culture, instead of a team culture. This void of teamwork is costing teams and products.

• Quality suffers.
• Errors proliferate.
• Decisions weaken.
• Cohesiveness dips.
• Coherence crumbles.
• Innovation plummets.
• Relationships dwindle.
• Misinterpretation spreads.

The situation is ripe for an AI takeover.

Think about it. Is a collection of individuals working on tasks in silos any better than a collection of robots? Nope. You could argue that the robots would be better at producing quality output.

Let’s face it, AI is better than all of us at non-teaming, monotonous task work. Now, imagine AI seeping into these teams who aren’t working as a team. Your teammates start using AI to speed up their solo work. They grow more confident in AI’s abilities (and get lazy). Soon, AI will be doing most of their daily work for them.

And just like that, you have a team of AI robots. AI has taken over your team from the inside out. You didn’t even see it coming.

Your team’s existence was tenuous before. Now, it’s gone.

How long will you stick around if this happens? It won’t be your choice. Most companies will see AI teams good for the bottom line. Why wouldn’t they? They don’t need as many salaries to keep their product running. You would get trimmed and discarded faster than gristle on a juicy steak.

This does not paint a bright future for any of us. And I don’t believe this is how it needs to be.

Here’s our salvation: getting back to real teamwork and the beauty of human judgment.

We are better and stronger together.

I’ve always found teamwork to be a force multiplier. It creates something much greater than the addition of its elements. Most constraints dissolve when teamwork takes over. To avoid extinction, product teams must start acting like a team again.

I was on a team once who faced the impossible task of finishing a product in six months which should have taken us two years. But we put our minds together and engaged daily with our end-users. Through collaboration, we found a hidden path to deliver a lovable product early. Teamwork and human connection became our salvation.

Real teams use collaboration to become unstoppable.

Now, one could argue that a team of robots could collaborate, too. Wouldn’t this have the same effect as humans working together? No, it wouldn’t. AI won’t ever have what we have: human judgment.

It’s about taste. Creation without our judgment is bland and lifeless. It misses the essence of what inspires joy in humanity.

Even with the might of AI capabilities today, it’s not perfect. Far from it. It’s very confident, but it’s often confidently wrong. And its eye for beauty is without life. Without soul.

But we have a soul. We awaken the human spirit with our creations. And to compete with AI, we must stick together and force multiply our human judgment. This will keep us relevant.

But don’t get me wrong, this does not mean AI has no place on a well-functioning team.

Get time back: how AI can give your team more time to collaborate.

The answer to getting back time lies in removing the reason many of us choose to work solo: busywork.

• Testing
• Research
• Forecasting
• Gap analysis
• Trend analysis
• Data cleansing
• Status updates
• Tracking progress
• Repetitive processes

We don’t see value in the whole team doing this type of work, so we elect to do it alone.

Why not add AI to the team to do the busywork?

Now, that’s a great idea. Less human time spent on overhead means more time for meaningful collaborative teamwork. The result of increased human collaboration? Better ideas. Stronger decisions. Coherent solutions. Novel approaches. And a tasteful product curated by us.

My teams are saving time by letting ChatGPT comb through data analytics to answer our questions. For instance, we can prompt queries like, “What usage patterns do you notice with first time product users?” This frees us up to spend more time discussing the data insights and determining our next experiment. We now spend most of our week collaborating instead of analyzing the data.

AI doing the dirty (boring) work makes more room for teamwork and the benefits of it.

Our hybrid future: how to use AI to boost collaboration and innovation.

AI is a great sounding board.

Take a group of humans in a well-functioning product team. The collaboration is strong. Adding AI into the collaboration to gain a new perspective can level the team up a notch.

This does not mean you go the lazy route and have it do all the thinking. Instead, you use it to juice your own thinking. Here are some ways I have done this with my teams:

• What did we miss?
• Help us structure a business case for this.
• Give us novel solution ideas to a problem.
• Make counterarguments against a position.
• What would (some expert) think about this?
• Compare the pros and cons of all these options.
• What is the difference between these two things?

Remember, use your judgment on everything AI tells you. Don’t let its robotic, programmed confidence fool you. AI over-reliance and blind trust can take you down a dangerous alley at night.

Contain AI, and use it as a teamwork enhancer. You will outperform teams that don’t.

---

AI with us, not instead of us. That’s the future we need. This is a call for teams of all types.

In my world, though, a workplace full of AI-only product teams paints a drab existence. I imagine products with no soul. Thanks, but no thanks. Products made without taste won’t last. I have no desire to use a product that doesn’t have the human touch. Would anybody?

The better alternative: AI and teams must come together.

We have to accept AI is here to stay. Product teams must prepare for it. They must become a strong team again that works together. Then, they can use AI to become even stronger.

Start building your hybrid team today. Identify tasks AI can tackle, spark creative collaboration, and infuse every decision with human judgment. Pick one and begin your AI future, with you in the driver’s seat. Teams that combine AI and human strengths won’t just survive - they’ll thrive. Will yours?

How is your team preparing for AI? Share your strategies and ideas in the comments.

---

➡️ Sign up for weekly insights like this on getting back to the fundamentals that underpin unstoppable product teams. Join a community of like-minded professionals committed to achieving outcomes sooner.

---

References

1. The Harris Poll. (2024, November 25). New research from Google Workspace and The Harris Poll shows rising leaders are embracing AI to drive impact at work. Retrieved from https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-research-from-google-workspace-and-the-harris-poll-shows-rising-leaders-are-embracing-ai-to-drive-impact-at-work-301967314.html