Building with AI - The Distance Between Demos and Products
The Distance Beteween Demos and Products
Over the past several weeks, I’ve gotten excited about all these new AI tools that have been coming out. As a product manager with some knowledge, but ultimately fairly limited technical skills, it’s unlocked a whole range of new technologies and technologies that are not just for the realm of productivity that I couldn’t have done otherwise.
what’s really been interesting, however, hasn’t been the new things that I’ve discovered, but it’s instead been the old truths that I’ve always known that have only been further highlighted by these new AI tools
the first lesson that’s been reinforced for me is the huge distance that exists between demos and full products. You see a lot of cool demos of these new AI tools. People create new products from scratch in minutes, it seems. I found the reality to be a lot more complex than that. Yes, it’s easy to get something running in a day, but there’s a huge gulf between that and getting it to scale - something that’s actually releasable to a customer
It reminded me of hackathons I’ve participated in at companies: someone makes something really cool in a day or two, and then the executives go, “Oh, it just took you a day or two to make that? How soon can you have this in production?” The answer: Months. Years. And no one wants to hear that.
With AI, I think we’ve figured out the zero-to-demo workflow. But the demo-to-product workflow still seems to be a challenge, something that’s in flux.
