Product Thinking Leads to Rapid Value Creation With GenAI

The world is buzzing with news about generative AI possibilities and tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and MidJourney. 

As a product leader, are you wondering how this applies to your organization and your teams? If so, read on for some ideas about how you might get started and make real progress—quickly!

In fewer than 12 hours of meetings over a 3-week period, here is how we produced rapid value leveraging GenAI technology. It comes down to creative product leadership teaming with product-minded engineers. 

This is the first in a 3-part blog series about how we achieved a conservative $7k in ROI in less than a month. In a service business, translating that hour into billable time potentially multiplies it. Do you want to get started today? Contact us to find out how a whiteboard session could help.  

Part 1: Discovery

Recently, I was the product lead on a new six-person team focused on GenAI innovation at Ippon Technologies. The team was charged with looking into what sources of data and information we might leverage and make available through a ChatBot interface. 

The goal was to get value from the data we already have in a completely new way for our stakeholders. This is sometimes known as “inside-out thinking"—thinking about how your internal capabilities might drive new value for internal and external stakeholders.

Our team leveraged 2-week iterations on a lean Kanban Board. Rapid progress and success boil down to the right blend of product management and product engineering.

The objectives of the initial two-week discovery phase were:

• Rapid experimentation
• Stakeholder identification
• High-value use case selection 

By the end of the discovery phase, the team demonstrated the capability to leverage Bedrock and prompt the chatbot to retrieve information from medical data tables, internal resumes, and our org. chart. 

We quickly identified the three core groups of stakeholders that we needed to target and zoomed in on their needs. To do so, I conducted  30-minute brainstorming sessions with each group. The agenda was simple: a quick intro, five minutes of brainstorming on a virtual whiteboard (we use Miro), ten minutes of discussion of the ideas, and two minutes to vote on the best ideas with dot voting.

These three brainstorming sessions resulted in 57 total ideas in the form of stickies on a canvas. With each stakeholder group, we used dot voting to narrow down to two to three best opportunities per group.

At that point, we had eight concepts for custom GPTs and it was time to figure out which to tackle first! To do so, we plotted them on a value/effort curve that looks like this. In less than 30 minutes we narrowed down the list to two concepts with (1) the highest value (2) reasonable effort, and (3) no blockers. 

Interested in exploring Generative AI? Connect with Ippon for a whiteboarding session. We’ll use inside-out thinking to pinpoint opportunities within your business for cost reduction or revenue enhancement... Leveraging Ippon's FinTech experience, product leadership, and extensive engineering capabilities, we look forward to uncovering new possibilities and innovative ideas together!