It feels like every product leader is under immense pressure from their board and exec team to “add AI” to the roadmap. The hype is deafening, and the FOMO is real. But in this gold rush, are we forgetting the hard-won lessons from the last decade?
We all fought to move our teams away from being “feature factories” — just shipping stuff without a clear ‘why’. We learned to anchor ourselves in user problems and focus on driving outcomes. Now, the directive is often a solution, not a problem: “Build an AI-powered X.”
This top-down push risks dragging us right back into the factory mindset. Instead of starting with user research and discovery, teams are starting with a technology and hunting for a problem to solve. This leads to shiny, but often useless, features that don’t move the needle on key metrics.
Before committing resources, we need to rigorously validate the underlying user need. A tool that helps synthesize and quantify customer feedback, like what we’re building at https://leera.io, can provide the evidence needed to ground your AI strategy in reality, not just hype. It helps you answer: is this a genuine problem, or are we just following the trend?
How are you balancing the executive pressure for AI features with a genuine, outcome-driven product strategy?