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This morning I asked Cursor if I’m prioritizing correctly as a product manager. It gave me a swift kick in the pants. (TLDR: The literal verdict was, “You don’t need to learn more technologies—you need to ship something you’ll use daily and iterate.”) I’m on a quest to find more aspects of my job I can give as context to AI. I already was keeping all of my product strategy documents and user research and code in the same place, so I can use AI as a thinking partner. Recently, I moved my project management also into the same file directory on my computer:
  1. I recently started using Obsidian (free, Notion-style pretty viewer for markdown files on my hard drive)
  2. I installed the free kanban community plugin (the main one with 1M+ installs)
  3. I access the same markdown files using Cursor (sometimes Claude Code, or Codex, etc. doesn’t matter)
Now, AI can see the entire picture and coach me. Regardless of AI, I like to start my day by reviewing my initiatives board and making sure I’m not stuck in a rut. Now, I can pair on that with AI. For example, this morning I asked: Given @opportunity assessment what do you think of this @kanban order? AI called me out. It helped me snap out of my pattern of researching to delay building. It also pointed out my MVP spec was pretty ready, and wouldn’t really benefit from more research. It then suggested a re-order, which I partly agreed with. I could have switched to “agent mode” and asked it to rearrange things, but instead, I did that manually so that I would personally engage with the prioritization. (Then, I asked again for it to review and ask what it thought.) I do a version of this every morning. I don’t blindly follow what it says, and often I disagree. But it’s always thought-provoking and gives me a lot of peace of mind. ➡️ I keep learning the same lesson over again: The more of my PM life I include in AI context, the more it can help me.

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