If you needed to renovate your house, are you going to hire a hammer or a contractor?
That question may sound ridiculous, but many companies chasing growth make the same mistake, they feel the pressures of a process failure and reach for the newest tool to try and solve it without understanding goals and objectives and assessing whether or not the current systems and process can support those; Lately, that shinny new tool has been Artificial Intelligence (AI).
I saw this firsthand when I was hired by a wholesale business trying to grow sales from $30,000,000 to $100,000,000. A consultant for the business had already engaged an AI team to “fuel growth.” They had scoped a solution, signed a contract, and assigned a product manager. My role? I was hired to document systems and processes.
As I dug in, it became clear this wasn’t a growth project at all. The AI team was focusing on automation, but in a way that shifted this from a growth project to an efficiency project. I talked to the consultant and explained what the project really needed was a growth product manager, explaining that the automation might help sales ops process more orders someday, but it wasn’t going to create demand, close deals, or drive revenue. The consultant said the AI team already had a product manager assigned to the implementation and he didn’t see the need for another one.
So I ran my discovery playbook: stakeholder interviews, process reviews, and system audits. Very quickly, the real growth opportunities came into focus:
- Sales, marketing, and business development were all running disconnected processes.
- There was no CRM and Netsuite (their ERP) was being underutilized, managing only fragments of the sales lifecycle data with sales order information, customer data, order history all living in disparate systems, with no integration, visibility, or analytics.
- No clear KPIs existed to measure which levers actually moved the needle on growth.
The path forward wasn’t just automation. It was defining standard operating procedures, integration, process alignment, clean master data, and defining metrics that showed where growth was actually happening.
After sitting in on a few of these interviews, the consultant turned to me and said:
“I get it now. A growth product manager looks for growth at every opportunity. The AI team is just looking for things to automate. AI is the tool, not the product.”
Exactly. Because if you hire a hammer instead of a contractor, everything starts to look like a nail.
Takeaways for Product Leaders:
- Separate efficiency from growth. Scaling operations doesn’t automatically scale revenue.
- AI is not a strategy. It’s a tool, useful, but only when applied to the right problem.
- Do the discovery. Growth comes from uncovering systemic issues and aligning processes, not just chasing the latest tech.
- Hire the contractor, not the hammer. You need someone who sees the bigger picture and chooses the right tools to build it.