Keeping Track of Projects
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I was a product manager at Bloomberg for 16 years. When I started, we used Word documents and Excel spreadsheets to keep track of projects.
Specialized tools to manage projects were not yet widely used. Arguably the best-known product management application today, Jira, was unveiled by Atlassian in 2002. My team at Bloomberg adopted it over a decade later.
Today, Generative AI is upending project management applications, just like every other industry. Brett Fischler is one of the people behind that change.
Brett is the co-founder of startup Catalist AI, a project management software tool that seeks to use AI to collect and organize information scattered across apps in order to generate meeting notes, status reports and operational insights.
Brett, an engineer, met his co-founder, Samantha Stevens, a product manager, at Google. Before that, Brett had worked at Bloomberg; Samantha spent time at Tinder, and American Express.
At Google, Brett was assigned a project with Sam during his first week. She seemed to know everything. Later, he found out she had joined the week before.
They spent half their time trying to keep track of conversations everyone was having. The notes and communications were spread across a variety of apps. The bemoaned that there had to be a better way.
I found their predicament interesting because it’s something all of us experience in our day-to-day lives. We have information that is stored in applications like emails, calendars, photos, notes and scores of other apps that aren’t connected.
Think of how useful it would be if we could tap into all that information!
That is basically the insight. Brett and Samantha had. They realized that they could leverage Open AI’s ChatGPT to collect and process information from a variety of sources and decided to pursue the opportunity.
The big opportunity for project management software is to leverage AI to pull together disparate threads and anticipate what steps need to be taken next.
Brett and Sam are focusing initially on use cases for tech development. The system could, however, help manage all kinds of tasks.
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BRIEF OBSERVATIONS
AI PRODUCTIVITY: Interesting observation about Generative AI almost two years after it was announced. We may finally be seeing corporate use cases that contribute to the bottom line in a considerable way.
ANALOG: My Mom’s cookbook. It doesn’t get any better.
DEAMS & HOPES: I love this post by Laila. It captures a timeless truth but in a way that seems new.
NEW YORK CITY: When New York doesn’t invent something, it imports it!
KUNG FU FIGHTING: You might have to be of a certain age to get this meme but if you get it, it lands hard.
