Between Christmas and New Years, I started doing some 2025 planning for my personal and professional goals. While watching Beyonce's "Beyonce Bowl" performance on Netflix, I was noticing how all the marketing for her recent album leveraged partnerships so well - she didn't pay for the key promo elements. I thought to myself, I wish I had her marketing and partnerships team. Then I realized, the next best thing would be to ask AI to pretend to be her marketing and partnerships team for me.
I created a prompt, refined it, and then opened a new project in Claude, saving the prompt as the permanent prompt to that project. I designed the prompt so it would always talk to me as a business partnerships and marketing persona. When I shared some early plans I drafted on my Remarkable notebook in the chat, it gave me some pretty insightful advice, even if all of it wasn't usable.
Then I realized, I could have an advisor for a lot of different areas I was planning for. My current AI advisory board includes:
A financial advisor based on my fav real life advisors
A business/marketing advisor
A product sense practice companion and advisor
A performance coach to help maximize my effort and impact
Some of these projects have multiple personas that bounce off of each other when I ask them to give feedback on a plan or piece of writing I've created.
My goal isn't to have AI make decisions for me, but to get different perspectives to enhance my own thinking. While I've gotten some great ideas I wouldn't have thought of on my own, I've also received some advice that when I checked with trusted mentors, coaches, and friends, they had suggestions that improved upon the initial feedback the AI gave me:
The investment categories I considered investing in were pretty spot on, but the specific ETFs they suggested turned out not to be on a growth trajectory when I researched them. So I did more research and found better ETFs within the same category.
I wrote up a proposal that overall was pretty good, but my own Product Coach had several suggestions, and even told me some of the language I edited with the help of AI was a bit too "aggressive."
These are examples of why taste matters, and why we can't let AI do all the thinking for us, and why even if we have good taste, it's still good to connect with resources and people who have taste and wisdom to help us with the final refinement before we make decisions or send things to coworkers or clients.
As a product leader and coach, I've found this approach incredibly valuable for getting specialized feedback while maintaining control of the decision-making process. I still work with two coaches, but I can get so much further between my sessions with them with my AI advisory board.
Stay curious.
P.S.: I help ambitious product managers transform from overwhelmed to confident super ICs through focused 1:1 coaching. If you’re interested in working together, please reach out.
P.S.S.: Also, the fifth live rendition of Jumpstart Your AI Career on Pearson/O’Reilly will be February 24. Register here.
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