Artificial intelligence has been advancing at a rapid clip, especially over the last three years. The potential for these advances to transform enterprise business processes is substantial, for example, in areas such as personalized customer experience, real-time fraud detection and developer productivity. But unlocking this potential in a beneficial, safe, and user-centric way requires more than technological innovation—it demands strategic foresight, customer understanding and solutions orientation. This is where product management comes in.
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As AI application architectures evolve, our potential to revolutionize the way businesses interact with their customers is becoming increasingly clear. Product managers are uniquely positioned to guide AI-driven products from concept to reality, ensuring they meet the needs of both the business and the end-user. As the bridge between technical teams and customer-facing functions, product managers play a critical role in shaping the future of AI by defining user needs, setting strategic priorities, and aligning stakeholders around a common vision. In an era where AI can make or break customer trust, sound product management is not just important—it’s essential.
During my time at Google, I had the opportunity to be part of the Kubernetes team, collaborating with many brilliant inventors in a deeply technical domain that was rooted in research and open-source development. This experience and others throughout my career provided exhilarating opportunities to work on cutting-edge technology and help shape its evolution while also illuminating the opportunity to ensure that these innovations were closely aligned with the needs and expectations of the users we served. That’s why I was drawn to Capital One: because of its commitment to leveraging AI in ways that genuinely enhance customer experiences while maintaining a strong focus on well-managed approaches, responsibility, and real-world impact.
AI represents one of the most significant technological advancements of our time, with the potential to revolutionize industries by automating processes, enhancing decision-making, and creating personalized customer experiences. However, despite its promise, AI is still in its early stages, and the path to harnessing it in a safe, accurate, and efficient way that delivers true business value is a challenge I find most exciting. It is important to fully understand the latent needs of our primary and secondary users for this technology in the financial services industry. The potential for AI to serve a much broader set of these needs is higher than any technology before. This is where sound product management comes into play—guiding AI from a nascent technology to a strategic tool that drives real outcomes and customer delight.
What Defines Sound Product Management?
There are 3 principles that need to be applied for sound product management in order to deliver on high-impact AI products and experiences:
1. Put the user first.
- Understanding users through market identification and segmentation is core to a sound product strategy. Product managers must understand user problems in each segment and the value of solving them relative to current solutions. Prioritizing user segments and specific user needs is the key to finding product market fit. Market trumps everything—the product must help users in fundamentally tangible ways, such as letting them do things 10X faster, more efficiently, or maybe enabling them to do what they could not before.
2. Shaping the technical roadmap.
- The technical roadmap defines what to build, when to build it, and how to sequence it. This is shaped by user input and independently by technical innovation, which moves at its own pace. Product managers must understand the innovation, and extrapolate with engineering where the technology will be in a few years. And marry that information with latent users who need to envision and create products. What is the Minimum Viable Product (MVP), future milestones and enhancements that will follow? This is important to plan so that users have a smooth path through the adoption process.
3. Cross functional alignment.
- In order to be successful, product managers have to engage teams across multiple functions and lines of business. This is important for creating a full solution for users, enabling adoption. Product should gather alignment from engineers, risk, design, finance, and other stakeholders. Once the product is built, there also needs to be a way to sell it and train users on it. Plus, a feedback loop with analytics and KPIs helps ensure expectations are met. If all of the different stakeholders and teams who play a role in the success of a product are aligned from the beginning, the whole process is a lot smoother and results are more likely to meet expectations.
This is where product management really shines. It’s critical to use best practices like developing a product strategy, roadmapping, and Product Requirements Documents (PRD) to stick to the above principles for sound product management. An overall product strategy blueprint can identify customer segmentation, market value estimation, and prioritization. Roadmapping leads to solution creation and various iterations to follow, as well as the user journey for launch. A PRD can be called many things across different industries, but it’s a basic specification that defines a set of features and the user interactions for those features. At Capital One, our product managers work collaboratively with engineering, designers, users, and other stakeholders to create and follow all of these practices and gain alignment on building and releasing the product.
How Product Management Is Bringing New AI To Life At Capital One
At Capital One, we rely heavily on data-driven decision-making, and AI has the power to significantly enhance these processes. For example, take fraud detection, risk management, and customer service. AI can analyze transaction patterns to detect fraudulent activities in real-time, allowing bad actors to be stopped faster. However, balancing innovation with accountability requires careful oversight to avoid false positives and ensure compliance with regulatory standards. Product management is an essential way to maintain that oversight.
One example here is our proprietary generative AI agent servicing tool is helping our agents get access to information to resolve customer questions more quickly and efficiently. In the past, agents would be presented with numerous knowledge articles that would require them to read each one to find an answer for a customer. With this tool, hundreds of our agents are finding more than 95% search results highly relevant and are able to more quickly get helpful information to our customers. Product management was one of the central components of success here because it ensured we understood our users (service agents) and built a product tailored to their needs. This understanding helped inform the development of a practical tool that significantly enhances our agents’ efficiency and customer service.
These innovations are just a glimpse of how AI is transforming industries and reshaping customer experiences. It is truly an exciting time to be at the frontier of AI, exploring new ways to harness its potential for the benefit of our customers. For us at Capital One, utilizing state-of-the-art technology, with humans at the center, is key to how we Change Banking for Good. A product management approach is essential in translating these innovations into practical solutions that drive our mission forward.