The Big Pivot to Reinvent Product Management (with Yana Welinder, Founder & CEO @ Kraftful)

Yana Welinder is the CEO of Kraftful. We spoke a year ago on this podcast about her mission to help solve usability in IoT startups, but she's since gone all-in with a hard pivot to build an AI-powered product co-pilot. The company's growing like crazy and we caught up to talk about what's changed since our last interview.

Episode highlights:

1. Pivoting was hard but the time (and tech) was right

Yana was solving a problem she deeply cared about, but when ChatGPT hit primetime she realised she could solve an even more important problem. She dreaded sending the email to existing users, but everyone was super-positive.

2. It's important to validate your pivot ahead of time

Yana did some background research by stealthily positioning herself at conferences as the founder of a startup solving the new problem. People were super-keen to share feedback and this gave her confidence in the pivot.

3. Kraftful will replace a lot of PM tasks, but not PMs

There's still plenty of room for product managers in an AI-powered world. The best PMs will use smart technology to automate away necessary, but ultimately lower leverage tasks, and enable PMs to concentrate on strategy.

4. There is a possibility of dependency on AI-powered tools, but that's OK

Is there a danger that people forget how to do PM work without AI tools? Sure, but Yana likens the situation to using Google Maps. How many people know how to get where they're going without assistance?

5. Hallucinations are going away soon

There are well-known issues with inaccurate text coming out of LLMs, but the tech is developing fast. It's possible to mitigate the worst of the effects by including deep context & narrowing focus rather than using LLMs as a Swiss Army Knife.