You are a copy and paste away from living the good life at work.
ChatGPT is cool and you should totally use it for work. Get over the hump of trying it out and give yourself an amount of free time that feels like you're breaking the rules.
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“I have been hearing all this about ChatGPT, but I have no idea how I can use it to help me at work.”
One of my favorite things about ChatGPT is how quickly you can copy/paste data and find something useful from the output. I imagine many people, including myself, realize there are so many different ways to use this power tool but are overwhelmed by the possibilities that they can’t figure out how to get started with something practical.
You don’t need to be an expert in writing prompts to experience some great benefits from ChatGPT - although you can check out this post and the other one million related ones.
Let’s hit on a few quick use cases that anyone can benefit from but are especially useful for us in the product realm.
1. Summarization of user research in seconds.
The first way I have found an easy use of ChatGPT is in the user research space. One of the ways that I have been using ChatGPT is to review large blobs of text with limited formatting instantly and quickly. Copy, paste, and results.
We product folks often collect our thoughts or direct feedback from users on the fly. You may be one of those well-structured product types who are thorough with their notes. Although I’m sure being like that will help better structure your input, you don’t really need it here.
The gist is that I follow this basic approach:
Aggregate notes together with the bodies of text based on focus areas that you want to output results on. This could be breaking up my research by the question, for instance. I’ll usually take notes on free-flowing platforms such as OneNote, which make it easy to move from question to question.
Create a prompt, "Summarize the following text in 5 bullet points.”
Copy/paste all the notes together in one big lump after the basic prompt and press enter.
That’s it. These three steps will show the result almost instantly and kick-start how you can start carving up this blog of text related to your users. I’ll save you the text on 50 million different prompts you could use to refine your data, but you don’t have to look hard to find a 15 tweet 🧵 on these things if you really want to play with it.
2. Competitive analysis.
Another cool way you can quickly tap into ChatGPT value is by leveraging it for some quick competitive analysis.
Although the methodology is quite similar to how you can do your user research analysis in the three steps in section one, the big difference is that you’ll need to be a little more structured going into the analysis. In part, because you’ll be strategically finding information on the competitor first before analyzing the results.
I found this great example in an article by Amy Hebdon on Search Engine Land called, “ChatGPT for PPC marketers: 15 strategic prompts to use today,” in which Amy goes super deep on a handful of different marketing use cases for ChatGPT. I think this one has been an interesting one for me while I’m a bit more focused on the strategy side of the product in my day job. I’ll save you some time logging into the platform with the following visual so that you can wrap your brain around it:
At first glance, the information seems quite basic. The intent of showing this is to help get your gears grinding on the art of the possible over just showing you the hacks here.
Similar to section one, you’ll want to aggregate the information you are attempting to dissect based on the questions you’re trying to have answered. I recommend using your favorite notetaking app to break up each part you’re trying to research, similar to the user research before pumping in all your text and information.
Since many companies present their information in PDFs, you’ll also want to ensure you’re keeping track and mapping those documents to your notes for future reference. Copy/pasting out of that document type is just as easy as using a web page, so feel free to get crazy with it and see what kind of results you can achieve.
3. Manipulating data for presentation(s).
The last use case I have is around using ChatGPT to manipulate all of the information you’re interested in into a format you could use for presentations, emails, etc. This is one of my favorites; I have been using it more and more each week.
I will use an example last week to create a spreadsheet with a list of organizations and their contact information that initially stemmed from a website.
I found a website that had a list of the organizations I wanted to contact on the web in this crazy format:
Find a website with the data you want to use. 2. I copy/pasted all of the text in the groupings as is into ChatGPT and asked to pluck out the e-mail addresses to validate it was possible:
I asked ChatGPT to break up the email addresses and corresponding state org into a 2 column table for easy copy/pasting:
ChatGPT formatting data into tables using prompts.
That was as far as I needed to take this data to drop it into a spreadsheet and start to do some manipulation to it. Nothing crazy fancy, but compared to the alternative way of collecting this data - copy/pasting each blurb off the site into the spreadsheet one by one - this method saves me a ton of time, and spot-checking confirmed the fantastic accuracy.
Final Thoughts
Your newsfeeds, blogs you follow, Twitter feeds, and all of the other ways you consume how to improve your work life at this point are all going to have content about using AI / ChatGPT, but until you put your hands on keys and start to play with it, you may be a little intimated. Hopefully, these 3 ideas are ones you could incorporate into your daily world so you also can get immediate value from tools like ChatGPT.
Have some products you’re using to optimize your workflow? The Product Party and I would love to hear about them, so feel free to comment using this button:
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As founders think about being default alive, strong employees should think about becoming default essential. Not only will this make your and your team job’s safer, but it will also demonstrate that you are a committed leader with a strong strategic sense.
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This AI tool is so powerful, I’ve gone thru interesting ways to decrease my workload but haven’t thought of the competitor analysis option. Really mind blowing, Thanks Mike!
Great Post Mike! Bookmarked. The third point was unique and creative