2026-06-22

Becoming an AI-Era PM 03 | Treat AI as a Colleague, Not a Tool

Start with how most people use AI.

You open a fresh chat, type “write me a user-growth plan,” and get back something safe and generic that anyone could’ve gotten. Not happy with it? Type again. Next time there’s a new task, you open another fresh chat and explain the whole thing from scratch: what our product is, who the users are, what we decided last time. Someone put it perfectly: every new conversation, you’re onboarding an employee with amnesia — your project structure, explained again; your team’s priorities, explained again; the call you made last week, explained again.

Jacob Bank, CEO of Relay.app, said something at the 2026 AI Product Leaders Summit: stop treating AI as a tool, treat it like a colleague you hired. On its own that’s a slogan, and slogans aren’t useful. What’s useful is the management muscle behind it — the way you’d onboard a new junior teammate is the way you should onboard AI. Here are four things you can actually do.

1. Write it a handoff doc — stop explaining from zero every time

On a new hire’s first day, you don’t expect them to know everything. You hand them something: what product we build, who it’s for, where the code and docs live, the unwritten rules everyone follows. The CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md files that have shown up in AI engineering over the last couple of years do exactly this — onboarding docs for a colleague who has zero memory between conversations. They get injected automatically at the start of each chat, so you don’t have to repeat yourself.

A product manager should have one of these too. Write this down once and for all:

Product: a bookkeeping mini-app for small shop owners. Users: people running bubble-tea shops and convenience stores, no finance background, mostly on their phones. Our conventions: store all amounts in cents, never in dollars; every feature ships first as a version configurable from the admin panel; don’t use jargon like “accounts receivable” in copy — say “money other people owe you.” What we’re building this round: a simple end-of-month report that shows “how much did I make this month.”

Drop that into the doc, and from then on every task it does carries these assumptions. How big a difference does it make? Say “build me a monthly report” cold, and it’ll most likely hand you a finance table with “receivables / payables / gross margin” — a disaster for a corner-shop owner. It’s not that it can’t do better; you never told it the boundaries, so it falls back to the most generic default.

2. Hand it a whole task — and nail down the boundaries and “done”

The worst way to delegate is to toss out half a sentence: “Go figure out some kind of coupon feature.” A junior will either freeze up or hand you something three times bigger than you wanted, full of stuff you never asked for. Same with AI. Hand it a whole chunk at once, but nail down three things: what to do, what not to do, and what counts as done.

This round: a first-order coupon for new users. Out of scope this round: returning-user coupons, share-to-unlock referrals, stacking multiple coupons — those come later, don’t touch them at all this time. Definition of done: the admin panel can set the coupon’s value and expiry; it applies correctly on a new user’s first order; returning users don’t see this coupon.

That “out of scope” line is the one people drop most often, and it’s the most valuable. AI won’t infer boundaries from your silence — if you don’t write “no returning-user coupons this round,” nine times out of ten it’ll helpfully bolt on the returning-user logic too, because it’s “thinking ahead for you.” Spelling out what not to do matters more than spelling out what to do.

3. Review its output the way you’d review a junior’s PR

It hands you something, and the most dangerous move is to click “accept” right away. You’d review a junior’s code; you should review AI’s even harder — it’s better than a junior at talking its way around things, and it can dress up something half-finished to look done.

When you review, don’t just look at the result — make it show its work first:

Don’t give me the final version yet. Walk me through what you did: which assumptions did I never state that you filled in yourself? Flag the three things you’re least sure about. What did you add on top of what I actually asked for?

Ask this, and the stuff it quietly filled in for you surfaces — “I assumed the coupon works storewide,” “I assumed a 7-day expiry,” “I threw in a share-to-earn-a-coupon thing since that’s usually how it’s done.” If even one of those assumptions doesn’t match what you had in mind, the final version is wrong. Letting it say these out loud is far faster than reading its output line by line, and it’s the habit you most want when managing a junior: hear how they thought about it first, then check whether what they built is right.

4. Write every correction back into the handoff doc

Anyone who’s managed people knows the most grinding thing is correcting the same mistake three times and still seeing it. AI has no memory — if you don’t write it down, it’ll make the same mistake fresh every time. So every time you correct it, write that correction back into the doc from step one.

It did the amounts in dollars again. After you fix it, go back to CLAUDE.md and add a line: “To reiterate: store and compute all amounts internally in cents; convert to dollars only when displaying to the user.” Next time it won’t slip. It used “accounts receivable” again? Add a line to the copy conventions. That’s how the doc grows, week by week, into a colleague that understands you better the more you use it — and that’s the most concrete difference between treating AI as a colleague versus a tool: a tool is disposable, a colleague gets better because of your feedback.

One reminder that cuts the other way

There’s another rule for managing teammates: not every task should be delegated. The things you can’t take back once you press them — actually issuing the coupons, deleting the data, moving the money — leave that final click to a person. AI can prep the coupon plan, the config, and the copy for you, but the “blast it to 100,000 users” button, you press yourself. Same logic as with a new hire: you’ll let them draft the email, but you won’t hand them “send to everyone” permissions on day one.

One thing you can do today: open the AI you’re already using and write your product’s background, your users, and the three most important conventions into a twenty-line handoff doc, and save it. Next time you delegate, paste it in first, then see how different the output is from before.