All you need is intention: Creating purpose in product management

Although it sometimes feels like AI can create almost any content these days, the one thing it cannot create is intention. Intention means envisioning a goal, charting a path toward it, and then persisting down that path. While AI may often appear intentional, it's simply optimizing based on patterns and incentives. AI operates without the fundamental human aspiration that gives our work momentum, meaning, and a bit of magic.

Intention and Product Management

Intention is particularly relevant to me in my role as a startup product manager, where I am constantly addressing existential questions like these:

• What problem are we trying to solve? 
• Whose life will be better with this solution?
• Why does it matter to them?

As a product manager, part of my job is to delve into our customers' environment, psychology, and assumptions to generate a solution that addresses these fundamental questions. This solution is my intention. Then my next step is to manifest that solution, orchestrating whatever resources are needed to bring our intentions to life as a tangible product.

Increasingly, the resources at my disposal are AI-driven systems. For me, AI has become a "Heidi multiplier," assisting me with synthesizing my research, coalescing my ideas, and simplifying my messages. However, I always retain full ownership of the solution and control of the process. If AI is the engine, my intention is the steering wheel.

Intention gives shape to my messy and complex visions that AI can act upon without collapsing into randomness, hallucinations, and slop. Intention signals that there is a human behind the effort and the message. Intention enables products to build emotional connections with other humans that foster trust and loyalty, making human-centric intention vital for any successful tech product.

Intention and attention

In our attention-deficient age, intention must also embrace the effort and courage of simplification. Consider the difference between a 500-word wall of text and a single sentence that's so compelling it might motivate someone to invest years of their lives into a project. The true work of defining one's intention lies in paring it back to its most essential message, whether that message is for humans or AI. Simple, focused messages don't just reach a wider human audience; they also guide AI to produce clearer, more measurable outcomes. A deliberate focus on simplification forces us as the orchestrators to craft an intention that is most impactful in its minimalism.

Intention and purpose

The growing presence of AI drives us toward the most human skill we have: defining what we want to do to improve the world in some small or large way for our fellow humans. For me as a product manager, that might be launching a new platform to revolutionize an industry, or it might simply be adding a handy toggle button to a UI. Regardless of the scope, our job as product managers is to define our intention and then use that to assign meaning to our goals, build trust by inviting others to share in those goals, and ensure that technology always reflects the human experience.

On International Women's Day, I encourage you to take a moment to reflect on your fundamental purpose on this planet. What is your deepest intention for the world? What impact do you aspire toward that will benefit others? Craft your intention, commit to it, and use this commitment as the driving force to orchestrate the AI and other resources that will manifest your unique legacy.