Product managers juggle countless responsibilities while steering products toward market success. From prioritizing features to analyzing customer data, the demands can quickly become overwhelming without the right tools.
With AI, organizations are discovering real value in redesigning how work gets done. New research from McKinsey indicates that workflow redesign has the strongest impact on achieving measurable financial returns from generative AI – more than any other factor studied. At the core of this workflow redesign is the effective use of AI prompts.
Planview Copilot integrates powerful AI capabilities directly into Planview AgilePlace and Planview Viz, enabling you to optimize your product management workflow through well-crafted prompts that both increase personal efficiency and drive organizational results
Mastering specific prompting techniques will unlock insights, automate routine tasks, and help you make more informed decisions.
In this article, we’ll show you exactly how to create effective AI prompts for product management and provide 25 ready-to-use examples for weaving Planview Copilot into your daily work.
How AI Prompts Transform Product Management
When properly leveraged, AI prompts in Planview Copilot deliver significant benefits to product managers across several key areas:
Time Savings and Efficiency
Product managers often spend hours gathering and analyzing data from multiple sources. With Planview Copilot, you can instantly surface insights that would typically require significant manual effort. This allows you to redirect your time to higher-value activities like strategic planning and stakeholder engagement.
Data-Driven Decision Making
By quickly accessing and analyzing data from AgilePlace and Viz, product managers can make more informed decisions based on real-time information rather than intuition alone. This leads to better prioritization, more accurate forecasting, and increased confidence in strategic choices.
Improved Visibility and Communication
Planview Copilot can generate visualizations and summaries that make complex data accessible to all stakeholders. This improves transparency across the organization and facilitates more productive conversations about priorities, team allocation, and strategic alignment.
Proactive Issue Identification
Rather than waiting for problems to escalate, you can use Copilot to proactively identify potential issues like bottlenecks, team overloading, or misaligned priorities. This allows you to address challenges before they impact delivery.
Now that you understand the strategic advantages of AI-powered product management, let’s explore how to craft prompts that will help you achieve these benefits in your daily work.
Tips for Effective AI Prompting in Planview Copilot
Crafting effective AI prompts is an essential skill that will help you get the most out of Planview Copilot – or any other AI assistant. Follow these key principles to create prompts that deliver consistent, high-quality results:
Be specific and clear: Provide context and specify exactly what you need. Instead of asking, “Show me work items,” try “Analyze all high-priority items that haven’t moved in the last week.”
Use actionable language: Start with verbs that clearly communicate the desired action. For example, “Identify all blockers across teams” or “Summarize progress on our Q3 initiatives.”
Include relevant parameters: Specify any time frames, team names, or other parameters that will help Copilot understand the scope of your request. For example, “Show the distribution of work items by type across all active project boards.”
Build complexity gradually: If you need complex analysis, consider breaking it into multiple, simpler prompts rather than one complex query.
Iterate and refine: If the initial results aren’t exactly what you need, refine your prompt based on the response to get closer to your desired outcome. The tips in this article as just as helpful for refining prompts as they are for beginning them.
How to Structure Complex Prompts
For more sophisticated analyses, structure your prompts with these elements:
Role: Tell Copilot what perspective to adopt (e.g., “As a product manager concerned with delivery timelines…” or “As an agile coach analyzing team efficiency…”)
Context: Provide relevant background information (e.g., “We’re preparing for our quarterly planning session and need to understand current workload distribution.”)
Goals: Clearly state what you’re trying to achieve (e.g., “My goal is to identify potential bottlenecks in our delivery process.”)
Formatting preferences: Specify how you want the information presented (e.g., “Present your analysis as bullet points with visual charts where applicable.”)
Putting this structure into practice, your complete prompt might look like:
“Role: As an experienced product manager preparing for our stakeholder review
Context: We’re halfway through Q2 and need to assess our progress across all active initiatives
Goal: I need to identify at-risk items and understand root causes of delays
Format: Provide a concise executive summary followed by data visualizations and specific recommendations”
AI Prompts for Product Managers Using AgilePlace
AgilePlace helps product managers visualize work, identify bottlenecks, and keep teams aligned. Here are prompts that will help you maximize its capabilities with Planview Copilot:
Work Item Distribution and Team Analysis
- “As a team coach, analyze the current distribution of work items across team members. Identify any team members who may be overloaded and suggest potential rebalancing opportunities.”
- “Show me the distribution of work items by priority and current status across all active boards. Highlight any concerning imbalances.”
- “Compare the number of items completed by each team member over the last two weeks and identify any support needs.”
- “As a scrum master concerned with team health, identify team members who might be taking on too much work simultaneously and provide suggestions for better work distribution.”
Flow and Bottleneck Identification
- “Identify all cards without any lane changes in more than 7 days. Group them by assignee and card type.”
- “As an agile coach, analyze our current board to identify bottlenecks in our workflow. Where are items getting stuck, and what patterns do you see?”
- “Show me all blocked items across teams and categorize them by blocker type. Who has the most blocked items, and what common patterns emerge?”
Customer Feedback Analysis
- “Review all cards with customer feedback tags and synthesize the top 5 recurring themes that should influence our product roadmap priorities.”
- “As a product manager preparing for our quarterly planning, identify the top customer-requested features based on frequency and business impact scores.”
- “Compare the customer feedback themes from the last quarter with our current roadmap. Are we addressing the most frequently mentioned pain points?”
- “Identify patterns in customer feedback by market segment or customer size. Are enterprise customers requesting different features than small business customers?”
Roadmapping and Prioritization
- “As a product manager planning our next quarter, analyze our roadmap items by business value, effort, and dependencies to suggest an optimal sequencing.”
- “Review our current roadmap and identify items that might be at risk due to dependencies or resource constraints.”
- “Compare our roadmap’s alignment with our strategic objectives. Are we prioritizing the right initiatives to deliver on our key business goals?”
- “Analyze the distribution of roadmap items by strategic pillar and identify any gaps or imbalances in our focus areas.”
- “As a product leader preparing for an executive review, create a summary of our roadmap progress, key accomplishments, and upcoming priorities with visual representations.”
Watch the on-demand Copilot AgilePlace Demo to see how it works.
AI Prompts for Product Managers Using Viz
Planview Viz helps product managers visualize strategic relationships, dependencies, and flow metrics. Here are prompts to help you get the most from Viz with Planview Copilot:
Flow Metrics, Prediction, and Forecasting
- “Based on our historical delivery data, what’s a realistic capacity plan for the upcoming quarter? How many features, defects, and maintenance items should we expect to complete?”
- “As a product leader planning for our next release, analyze our flow efficiency over the past three months. Where are the biggest opportunities to reduce wait time?”
- “Calculate our average cycle time for different work item types and predict delivery dates for in-progress work based on historical patterns.”
- “Analyze throughput trends over the last quarter and forecast our expected delivery capacity for the next three months.”
- Based on our historical delivery data in Viz, what’s a realistic capacity plan for the upcoming quarter? How many features, defects, risk, debt, and supporting artifacts should I plan?
- Using our Flow Metrics, analyze our average cycle time trends over the past three quarters, broken down by work item type and size. Then forecast how changes to our WIP limits would likely impact our delivery predictability for the upcoming product release. Present this as both a visual trend analysis and specific recommendations for optimal WIP settings.
Portfolio Visualization and Analysis
- “Create a visualization showing the relationship between our strategic objectives and current initiatives. Where do we have gaps or overlapping efforts?”
- “Identify initiatives with the highest risk scores and summarize key contributing factors. Present this as an executive dashboard.”
- “As a portfolio manager preparing for executive review, visualize our current investment allocation across product areas compared to our strategic priorities.”
Check out the on-demand Copilot Viz Demo to learn more.
Transform Your Product Management Workflow with Planview Copilot
Planview Copilot represents a significant evolution in how product managers can leverage data to drive better outcomes. By mastering the art of effective AI prompts, you can transform your product management workflow – saving time, making better decisions, and keeping your teams and stakeholders aligned around what matters most.
The prompts shared in this article provide a starting point, but the true power comes from adapting these approaches to your specific context and challenges. As you become more familiar with Planview Copilot, you’ll discover new ways to leverage AI to enhance your product management capabilities.
Remember that AgilePlace excels at team-level visualization and work management, while Viz provides powerful flow metrics and portfolio-level insights. By leveraging the right tool for the right purpose and crafting thoughtful, structured prompts, you’ll unlock the full potential of Planview Copilot to support your product management journey.
Ready to transform your product management approach with Planview Copilot? Start with these prompts and watch how quickly you can elevate your decision-making and team alignment.
See Copilot in Action
Right now, you can leverage the benefits of Planview Copilot in four of our products – AdaptiveWork, AgilePlace, Portfolios, and Viz. See what you can do with AI-powered insights in Planview by choosing the on-demand demo that matches your interest below.
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Jon leads product management for AgilePlace, bringing close to a decade of experience in the product management space to drive product strategy and innovation. With three years at AgilePlace and seven years across the broader Planview organization, he combines deep curiosity and customer empathy to translate complex enterprise needs into delightful product experiences. Jon’s leadership by example fosters a culture of customer obsession, ensuring AgilePlace continues to solve customer problems in meaningful and delightful ways.
Jon High
Sr. Product Manager | AgilePlace
