Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

What AI means for your product strategy | Paul Adams (CPO of Intercom)

October 26, 2023

AI Summary

5 min read

Paul Adams, Intercom's chief product officer, discusses integrating AI into product strategy amid its rapid evolution, drawing from Intercom's pivot and his experiences with failed projects at Google and Facebook. He emphasizes starting with a product's core premise—what problem it solves—and mapping it against AI capabilities like writing, summarizing, querying, scanning, and acting, to identify replacement or augmentation opportunities.

Operating principles from failure Adams learned from fear-driven social projects at Google (Buzz, Plus) that products must solve problems people care about, not just counter competitors. At Intercom, this informs a culture of big bets and "ship fast, ship early, ship often" (evolved from "ship to learn"), balancing high craft standards with rapid iteration. He favors generalists who adapt amid ambiguity over rigid specialists, and stresses talking to customers post-"before/after" moments like rebrands or pricing changes.

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What you'll learn

1 *(00:52) **Guest Intro & Early Career Failures**
2 *(12:32) **Embracing Failure & Intercom Culture**
3 *(15:17) **AI's Transformative Impact & Getting Started**
4 *(21:25) **Mapping Product to AI: Replacement or Augmentation**
5 *(27:05) **Intercom AI Pivot Impacts & Mind-Blowing Capabilities**
6 *(39:27) **AI Pitfalls, Staying Current & Internal Debates**
7 *(50:54) **Key Frameworks: Before/After, Pricing, Differentiation vs. Table Stakes**

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Paul Adams is the longtime chief product officer at Intercom, where he leads the product management, product design, data science, and research teams. Before Intercom, Paul was the global head of brand design at Facebook, a senior user researcher at Google, and a product designer at Dyson. He’s also a best-selling author, a podcast host, and a public speaker. In today’s episode, we discuss:

• Practical advice on integrating AI into your organization

• Tips and tools for learning AI as a PM

• Hilarious stories from Google and Facebook

• How to build conviction with skeptical coworkers

• Lessons learned from pricing at Intercom

• How Intercom implemented JTBD

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Find the full transcript at: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/what-ai-means-for-your-product-strategy-paul-adams-cpo-of-intercom/

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Where to find Paul Adams:

• X: https://twitter.com/Padday

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pauladams/

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Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

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