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Automate and Elevate

This is my motto for AI: “Automate and Elevate.” I believe that from a product perspective, the use of AI should be to remove repetitive tasks from someone’s life, giving them focus for a more strategic and thoughtful perspective.

Defining Statements

  • Tasks are small bits of work that we do every day in our life.
  • Jobs are collections of tasks.
  • Workers have jobs that consist of a set of tasks.
  • AI can be used to automate the tasks for the worker.

Automating a task does not eliminate a job—it allows the worker to accomplish the same amount of work in less time, freeing them up for higher-level tasks. That, to me, is the heart of innovation: reducing the cost of a task until it becomes widely adopted. Spreadsheets are a perfect historical example of this principle.

How Does AI Apply to Product Development?

This is where the magic is. Product development is a nebulous job involving communication, organization, problem-solving, and vision. It’s about:

  • Coordinating between stakeholders and developers
  • Learning from customers and translating that knowledge
  • Prioritizing strategic decisions
  • Navigating legacy decisions
  • Visualizing future states

It’s a role that requires adaptability and leadership without authority—“glue work” at its finest. Every product manager role is a little different.

One of our key tools is the Proof of Concept (POC)—a fast, scrappy prototype used to align stakeholders. It’s full of fake data, not meant to scale, and exists only to spark conversation and define direction.

The faster you can build a POC, the better—and this is where AI shines. I can now:

  • Generate concept art
  • Analyze data
  • Brainstorm ideas and names
  • Manage notes
  • Work in parallel

It’s like having an army of assistants that let me focus on product, direction, and team—not curating piles of notes that won’t be read.

The Concierge Strategy… Updated

If you’ve read The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, you might remember the concierge strategy—a method for manually delivering services before building the tech.

Instead of starting with an app, the entrepreneur behind Food on the Table talked to moms and manually helped with meal planning and grocery shopping. This let him understand the user deeply before investing in code.

AI lets me do the same: start manually, understand the need, then automate the tasks and scale. That’s automate and elevate.

The Concierge World

We’re living in a concierge world—scaled up. What if every task in your life were evaluated by skill level, and if low enough, automated?

Examples:

  • Doing laundry and dishes
  • Paying bills and taxes
  • Basic home maintenance

Now scale that thinking to systems—where could we eliminate low-skilled, repetitive work? The challenge is identifying which tasks to automate.

Conclusion: Acceleration = Automation × Elevation

Want to go faster?

  • Identify repetitive tasks
  • Automate them using AI
  • Free yourself (or your users) for higher-level thinking

It’s scary to go upward—we fear that eventually there will be nothing left to do. But I believe we’ll always find new ways to create, play, and complicate the world. You just can’t see them until you get there.