How AI Can Help Product Managers Drive Revenue Growth

Product Management and AI

If I were sitting down with a group of product managers right now discussing the future of the discipline, I’d say this:

I’m definitely worried about AI, but I’m worried about it in the opposite way from most people. I’m not worried it will take our job away, which it definitely will, by the way. I’m worried we are not prepared to take advantage of it to do our jobs – which is create more value in the world.

And whether it makes us indispensable or irrelevant depends on how we use it.

How AI Can Help Product Managers Drive Revenue Growth

We risk losing our edge not because AI is smarter but because we aren’t leveraging it as the smart assistant and guide it can be.

It has the potential to make us more efficient and effective, especially in doing the things we should already be doing but often can’t prioritize because of time constraints.

Let’s talk about how we can use AI to focus on what matters most—creating value that drives revenue growth.

The Five Ways to Increase Revenue

There are essentially five levers we can manipulate to grow revenue:

1. Increase the win rate: Beat competitors more often.
2. Accelerate sales velocity: Shorten the time it takes to close a deal.
3. Expand deal size: Sell more to each customer.
4. Enter new markets: Open up new segments or geographies.
5. Reduce churn: Keep customers longer.

Product has always had influence over these levers. But AI can make us faster, smarter, and more effective at doing so.

For each lever there are short term – improving go-to-market – and long-term – changing and improving the product itself – plays.

In the short term our option is to influence sales and marketing to position the product better, fine-tune the marketing funnel, and reduce friction in the sales process.

In the longer term, we can improve the product to do things like address competitive gaps, make it more delightful and satisfying to use, and enable it to handle more use cases.

We’ve always been able to do all those things. And if we are doing those things, then we’re helping revenue, profitable revenue, increase.

So, how can AI help us do this better, with more impact?

Quick Wins Without Changing the Product

AI is great for accelerating high-impact tasks that don’t require product changes. Here are some examples of how you might use it (and how your competitors probably are using it):

• Win rates: Competitive positioning is a great example. AI can help you analyze competitors, prompt you to address key questions, and even generate competitive battle cards. Instead of spending hours formatting hit sheets, you can focus on crafting responses to objections and sharpening your messaging.
• Sales velocity: AI can analyze sales call transcripts to identify common objections, highlight friction points in the funnel, and suggest targeted improvements. It can also generate onboarding guides – based on your knowledge and what you learn from customers – to help new customers see value faster.
• Deal size: By surfacing usage patterns or unmet needs, AI can help you identify upsell opportunities and create targeted materials to support larger deals.

These are tasks PMs already know how to do, but AI acts as a smart assistant, reducing the drudgery and speeding up the process.

Driving Growth With Product Changes

Beyond quick wins, AI can help product managers deliver impactful product changes faster, further expanding revenue potential:

• Closing competitive gaps. Definitely an early win that many teams are having with AI is speeding up the development process. By reducing capacity constraints, AI enables your team to deliver high-value features more quickly. Whether it’s catching up to competitors or launching game-changing innovations, AI can help product team prioritize better and deliver faster.
• Reducing time to value: By analyzing customer feedback and product usage data, AI tools can pinpoint friction in onboarding that might not be apparent to a human observing the data. Combined with productivity gains, this allows PMs to create more seamless onboarding experiences that accelerate customer ROI and boost satisfaction.
• Reducing churn: Using its data analysis abilities, AI tools can flag at-risk customers and suggest targeted interventions. With insights from usage patterns and feedback, PMs can make proactive changes to keep customers engaged.

These aren’t just theoretical. They’re the kinds of opportunities PMs often can’t take advantage of today because of limited capacity.

Adding AI to the toolbox makes us faster, but also can help us focus on the right things by removing some of the less valuable things from our task list. Or at least accelerating them.

The Opportunity (and Risk) Ahead

If you’re not using AI to amplify your impact, you’re falling behind. But here’s the challenge: It’s not just about doing more – it’s about doing more of what matters. AI can:

• Reduce time spent on tedious tasks.
• Free you to focus on high-value strategic work.
• Help you close gaps faster, whether in competitive positioning or product delivery.

The risk? If we only use AI to be more efficient at what we’re already doing, we miss the bigger opportunity: Using it to unlock new ways of creating value.

Our Challenge

Think about your role in driving revenue. Are you focusing enough on the activities that make a difference? And how can AI help you do them faster and better?

Start with one area—maybe win rates. Let AI guide you through the process of sharpening your competitive positioning. Use it to reduce drudgery, amplify insights, and focus your energy where it counts.

Because here’s the truth: AI won’t replace product managers. But it will make the best ones indispensable.

What’s your take? How are you using AI to create value? Hit reply—I’d love to hear from you.