Product Pulse: Sales Enablement, AI Evals, and UX Polish

Product managers are juggling evolving responsibilities. From crafting robust sales strategies to navigating the complexities of AI evaluations and optimizing user experiences, the landscape is constantly shifting. This digest explores key challenges and insights across these domains, offering practical takeaways for staying ahead.

Key Stories

• Sales Playbooks are essential: A recent Product Management IRL article highlights the importance of proactive sales enablement. Instead of just responding to sales inquiries, product managers should actively participate in training, track the pipeline, and, most importantly, develop sales playbooks tailored to specific use cases.

  • Why it matters: This proactive approach ensures sales teams are equipped to effectively communicate the product's value and address customer pain points, leading to increased adoption and revenue.

• Debugging Human AI Evaluations: UX Collective discusses common pitfalls in running human evaluations for AI models. Ambiguous results (low inter-rater reliability) and misalignment with actual user preferences are major concerns. The solution involves rigorous eval design, clear instructions for raters, and a focus on aligning evals with product goals.

  • Why it matters: Flawed evals can lead to misguided product decisions. Product teams need to carefully scrutinize and iterate on their evaluation processes to ensure they accurately reflect user needs and deliver valuable, safe, and aligned AI experiences.

• Notion's Invite UX: UX Collective calls out Notion for nailing the invite experience. While the article is brief, it serves as a reminder to pay attention to seemingly small details in the user journey. Every touchpoint matters.

  • Why it matters: A seamless invite process can significantly impact user adoption and overall satisfaction. It highlights the importance of focusing on every stage of the user journey.

• ChatGPT Goes Shopping: OpenAI has integrated a shopping feature into ChatGPT, enabling users to receive personalized product recommendations. DeepSeek, meanwhile, is hiring product people, signaling a potential shift in focus. (Mind the Product)

  • Why it matters: This demonstrates the increasing integration of AI into everyday tasks and the growing importance of product expertise in AI-driven companies. Product managers need to understand how AI can enhance user experiences and drive business value.

Quick hits

• The Product Management IRL article also mentions the importance of defining product messaging aligned with customer pain points and tracking sales enablement progress with measurable benchmarks.
• Remember those benchmarks for your product launch, discussed in UX Collective? Revisit your previous benchmarks to make sure that they are still relevant to your goals.