The philosophy of using AI for PMs

The golden rule of using AI chatbots for your work is: you get out what you put in.

A prompt can only be considered “good” if it produces the kind of outputs you want.

That’s obvious, but it means that all those short GPT prompt databases with “500 prompts” are BS.

Instead, you need to give AI a LOT of context for it to be able to work its magic. Otherwise it will just make stuff up randomly and none of what it writes for you will be usable as anything more than an outline.

Enter: the concept of “megaprompts”

Megaprompts help guide you toward including all the information you need to include for a prompt to be legitimately helpful.

<aside> 💡 Giving credit where credit is due, I believe @thatroblennon first came up with the idea and name of megaprompts.

</aside>

Structure of a megaprompt

Persona > Action > Context > Format > Example (optional)

  1. Persona: Who would be the absolute best kind of person to handle your request? If you could ask anyone in the world? Ask the AI to role-play them. Hugely important for the overall quality of your answer.
  2. Action: What do want to the AI to do? The most specific you can be here, the better.
  3. Context: What information does the AI need to fill this action? Remember, AI only knows general, generic information. If you want it to be able to take your action with any kinds of specifics as all, you need to give it those specifics. Otherwise you’ll get generic answers.
  4. Format: How do you want the output formatted? Do you want it as a doc in a specific template, as a Tweet thread, like a poem? Hugely important for getting usable answers.
  5. Example: AI can mimic examples extremely well. While not always necessary, can be extremeley helpful if you’re having trouble getting the AI to output in the correct format.

Here’s an example of one of these in action:

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If that looks like a lot of work… it is! That’s the point of using AI – it can’t do your thinking for you. It will still save you time overall, but don’t expect it to be able to do everything.