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

This is a, like, meteor coming towards you. This is going to radically transform society, and I think if people don't explore AI properly, it will leave them behind. I'd start with the thing your product does. What's the core premise behind it? Why do people use it? You know, what problem does it solve for them? That kind of thing. So, go back to basics, and then ask, "Can AI do that?" And for a lot, it's, the answer is gonna be yes, it can. For some, it might be, it can partially do it, and then maybe for others, it, mm, you know, it can't do that, at least not yet. And then, for some of it, it'll be like kind of replacement, AI will replace, it'll just do it. And then, you know, in other places, it'll be augmentation, it'll augment, like it'll help people. But yeah, I think that you gotta map your product and what AI can do, and what it will d- be able to do, and then ask yourself, "Okay, what are we gonna do?"

(instrumental music) Today, my guest is Paul Adams. Paul is chief product officer at Intercom, a role that he's held for over 10 years. Prior to this role, he was global head of brand design at Facebook, a user researcher at Google, a product designer at Dyson, and his first job was an automotive interior designer. In our conversation, Paul shares some amazing stories of failure, including the story of him giving a huge presentation where he froze on stage and had to walk off, and what he learned from these experiences of failure. We then get deep into how to think about AI as a part of your product strategy, including a ton of great examples from Intercom's experience going all in on AI. Paul also shares some of his favorite frameworks, and product lessons, and so much more. This is the first recording I've ever done not from my home studio, instead from a hotel room, so this is a fun experiment for us all. With that, I bring you Paul Adams after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next generation A/B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp, and DraftKings rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth, and for understanding the performance of new features, and Eppo helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform, where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues, and analyze performance all on my own. Eppo does all that and more with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time, an accessible UI for diving deeper into performance, and out-of-the-box reporting that helps you avoid annoying prolonged analytic cycles. Eppo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the A/B testing flywheel. Eppo powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization, and email marketing. Check out Eppo at geteppo.com/lenny and 10X your experiment velocity. That's geteppo.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Hex. If you're a data person, you probably have to jump between different tools to run queries, build visualizations, write Python, and send around a lot of screenshots and CSV files. Hex brings everything together. Its powerful notebook UI lets you analyze data in SQL, Python, or no code, in any combination, and work together with live multiplayer and version control. And now, Hex's AI tools can generate queries and code, create visualizations, and even kickstart a whole analysis for you, all from natural language prompts. It's like having an analytics copilot built right into where you're already doing your work. Then, when you're ready to share, you can use Hex's drag and drop app builder to configure beautiful reports or dashboards that anyone can use. Join the hundreds of data teams like Notion, AllTrails, Loom, Mixpanel, and Algolia using Hex every day to make their work more impactful. Sign up today at hex.tech/lenny to get a 60-day free trial of the Hex team plan. That's hex.tech/lenny. Paul, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.