Before the AI Product, There’s Belief

A letter to my younger self about internal AI Product Management

Dear Little Jaser,

It’s been a while since I last wrote to you. I wasn’t planning to write again so soon. But I believe it’s time. The world you’re walking into still isn’t quite ready for your role. And yet—somehow—it needs you more than it thinks it does.

This letter isn’t about certainty. It won’t offer you a playbook. But it will give you perspective, and maybe a bit of peace. These are not instructions. They’re observations, shaped over years of quiet work in spaces that reward clarity, trust, and persistence more than they do noise or speed. I’m writing to help you walk in with your eyes open, your spine straight, and your convictions intact.

You’re stepping into a role that will challenge how you think about influence, impact, and even the definition of a product. It won’t look like what you studied. It won’t behave like the case studies you admired. And it won’t reward you with the kind of visibility people usually associate with success. What it will give you, if you let it, is something much deeper. A chance to shape systems from the inside out. Slowly. Quietly. Meaningfully.

But only if you learn to see the real game being played.

Belief Comes First

You’re not here to manage a product—not in the way most people imagine it. You’re here to manage belief. Not belief in the technology, but belief in the problem, in the opportunity, in the idea that something could work better than it does today.

Your first real delivery won’t be a working prototype. It’ll be a conversation that shifts someone’s thinking. A slide that reframes a loose ambition into something concrete. A sentence that helps a team see their situation differently.

You’ll be building trust before you build anything else. And trust is a product of its own—it’s slow to earn, impossible to fake, and constantly under review.

So yes, you may not be managing a product on day one. But you are creating the conditions for one to exist. And that’s the deeper truth: belief is what precedes the product. It’s the foundation.

Eventually, yes—there will be a product. Something visible. Usable. Valuable. But it will only come into being because people believed enough to invest. To participate. To take a risk.

That’s what you manage first.

And ironically, it’s the most product-like thing you’ll ever handle—because if belief doesn’t get adopted, nothing else ever will.

Direction Over Speed

There will be pressure to ship fast. To stay visible. To justify your presence with features, demos, and deadlines. And while it’s true that real success in this role is about direction—not just velocity—that doesn’t mean speed doesn’t matter. It does. But you need to understand what kind of speed actually moves things forward.

Speed, in your world, isn’t about rushing. It’s about rhythm. It’s about knowing when to show something early—not to prove that it’s finished, but to prove that you and your team can be trusted. A fast prototype is rarely about the solution itself. It’s about keeping belief alive. It’s about showing that you understood the problem well enough to reflect it back, even in rough form.

A well-timed prototype builds credibility. It shows momentum. And when done right, it serves two purposes at once: it validates that you heard the problem correctly, and it earns you the permission to keep going.

So don’t fall into the trap of saying “we’re still aligning” for too long. Find small ways to materialize progress. Give people something to react to. Use prototypes not just to test ideas, but to test alignment.

You’ll spend more time aligning than building. That’s true. You’ll negotiate expectations more than APIs. You’ll be asked to simplify without oversimplifying. And yes, it will often feel slow.

But don’t confuse slowness with stagnation. And don’t assume that speed means shallowness. Done right, speed builds trust. Momentum keeps attention. And both will help you earn the space to do the deeper, more lasting work.

That’s your value. Not speed for its own sake—but speed with purpose. Prototypes with intention. Direction with momentum.

Navigating the Tension

You’ll live in a space no one quite mapped out for you. A space between the promise of AI and the weight of everything that came before it, the legacy. Between what’s technically achievable on paper and what’s actually permitted within the realities of enterprise policy, procurement, compliance, and regulation.

You’ll see that the pace of innovation—what you read about in articles and GitHub threads—doesn’t match the pace of production in your organization. Even when the solution is clear, you’ll hit walls: fragmented ownership, risk-averse sponsors, outdated infrastructure, unclear decision rights.

And at first, that tension will frustrate you. It will feel like a series of blockades, like a test of your patience. But over time, you’ll learn that this friction isn’t an accident. It’s the operating environment. And it’s where your role actually begins.

Because this tension is more than bureaucracy—it’s a map. It reveals where things stall, where handoffs fail, where no one ever quite took responsibility. It shows you which teams don’t talk to each other. Which tools don’t integrate. Which incentives are misaligned.

And all of that? That’s where you’re needed most.

AI in the enterprise is not just about the model. It’s about the path the model has to travel—from idea to integration to actual use. That path crosses technical systems, business processes, cultural resistance, and institutional memory. Your job is not to bulldoze through the tension. It’s to navigate it. To make it visible. To stitch together a way forward.

Sometimes that means asking the uncomfortable question. Sometimes it means slowing down just enough to bring the right people into the room. Sometimes it means offering a version one that works within constraints—so you earn the right to unlock version two.

You’re not here to erase the tension. You’re here to read it like a roadmap. Because that’s where the work is. That’s where the opportunity hides. And that’s where you’ll build real leverage—not just in the product, but in the system around it.

Define the Problem First

One of the hardest parts of your job won’t be building the solution. It will be getting people to agree on what the problem actually is.

You’ll be handed symptoms disguised as requirements. Neatly packaged requests that sound urgent but fall apart the moment you ask, “What happens if we do nothing?” You’ll see wishlists passed off as strategy decks. You’ll hear phrases like “We need an AI for that,” without clarity on what “that” even is.

And you won’t be handed a clean brief. Don’t expect one. In internal environments, real pain often lives in the handoffs, in the grey zones between departments, in the quiet workarounds people invent when processes no longer serve them. These frictions rarely make it into Jira tickets. They live in side comments. In hallway chats. In the Slack threads that keep getting reopened.

Your job is to sit with that ambiguity longer than most people are willing to. Not to panic. Not to solve it too quickly. But to stay in the discomfort long enough to understand what’s underneath.

Because what’s real is usually not loud. It rarely announces itself in numbers. It shows up in context—how someone describes their day, what they pause before saying, how three stakeholders give three versions of the same process.

That’s where your work really begins.

Because once you name the thing that no one could quite articulate—but everyone silently felt—you shift from being someone who “does AI” to someone who can actually fix things.

And that trust, more than the tech, is what earns you the right to build.

So yes—stay in the ambiguity.

Sit with it.

Map it.

Respect it.

But also—don’t get stuck there.

And I know I told you: build the prototype as early as possible.

And I still mean it.

Because sometimes the fastest way to test whether you’ve understood the problem is to show someone a rough version of the solution. A sketch. A simulation. A flow. Something they can point to and say, “Yes, but not like that.”

Do both. Stay in the problem long enough to see it clearly.

And then build something—anything—that lets others see what you’ve begun to understand.

That’s how momentum begins.

That’s how alignment forms.

That’s how trust grows.

Build What Actually Works

Your users won’t act like startup users. They’re not early adopters looking for the next big thing. They’re not customers to win over with feature launches or branding campaigns.

They are survivors of broken systems. They’ve seen tools arrive with fanfare and leave without a trace. They’ve onboarded to platforms that made their lives harder. They’ve wasted time clicking through interfaces that solved nothing. And quietly, they’ve stopped expecting that the next solution will be any different.

That’s the emotional landscape you’re walking into. You’re not just up against complexity—you’re up against disappointment.

So don’t try to impress them. Don’t sell them on the latest AI model or show off a slick UI just to get their attention. What they really want is something that finally works. Something that makes their job easier without asking them to rethink everything. Something that fits into the way they already get things done—only smoother, simpler, quieter.

And if you can give them that, you’ll earn something more valuable than praise. You’ll earn trust.

Trust that this solution will stick around. Trust that it won’t make their day harder. Trust that you understand how their world really operates.

That’s the bar.

Not innovation for innovation’s sake. Not flashy features that no one asked for.

Build the thing that makes the workflow disappear.

If you can do that, you’ve already won.

Adoption Beats Accuracy

You’ll build brilliant models no one uses.

You’ll run evaluations that hit every metric—precision, recall, F1 score—all green. You’ll have dashboards and charts that prove, objectively, that the model is right. And still, no one will use it.

Then one day, you’ll build something small. A quick automation. A simple tool that answers just one question. It won’t feel like much at first. But people will love it. They’ll start relying on it. You’ll hear things like, “I just use that now,” or “This saves me two hours every time.”

And that’s when it will click.

Accuracy alone doesn’t create value. Adoption does.

The model that gets used will always outperform the one that gets ignored—no matter how brilliant the math behind it is. Because in enterprise environments, the challenge is rarely technical. It’s behavioral. It’s emotional. It’s organizational.

People don’t adopt a tool just because it’s accurate.

They adopt it because it feels safe. Because it fits into their already overloaded day. Because it doesn’t create more friction, more questions, more need for explanations.

And here’s something you really need to understand: most AI products—at least today—are optimization tools. They’re not existential parts of the process. They’re not like the billing system, the CRM, the approval chain—systems that people have to use, whether they like it or not.

Those systems, even when poorly designed, don’t have to earn their place. They’re mandatory.

But your AI product? It’s optional.

You will have to earn every user.

So build with real-world friction in mind. Build for people who are tired, busy, skeptical. Build for the actual pace and pressure of operations—not for the clean conditions of a test environment or the assumptions in your design doc.

Know the Value, Show the Value

If you say your product creates efficiency, you’d better know how.

It’s not enough to throw the word into a slide or a stakeholder update. In enterprise environments, efficiency isn’t a concept—it’s a conversion. So ask yourself: what does it actually unlock? Does it allow revenue to come in earlier? Does it increase total revenue potential? Does it reduce costs in a measurable way? Or does it free up internal capacity that’s already overstretched?

Trace the impact, end to end. From model output to business outcome. From screen interaction to savings. From faster workflows to tangible decisions made in less time, with fewer errors.

Because if you can’t trace the value, don’t pretend it’s there.

And don’t expect others to believe in it either.

Now here’s something just as important: every product that creates value has a benefit owner. Someone inside the business who gains when your product works. A team that hits its KPIs more easily. A department that meets its targets with less stress. A leader who can finally report progress with confidence.

Find that person. Name them. Build with them—not for them. When it’s time to defend the product, you’ll want their voice in the room. Because when you speak, it’s seen as advocacy. When they speak, it’s seen as proof.

Value doesn’t speak for itself—not in companies this size.

You have to name it, translate it, and socialize it.

And if you do that well, your product won’t just survive.

It will spread.

Measure What Matters

Yes—you must measure it. Even if it’s inconvenient. Even if it’s messy. Even if the dashboards don’t exist yet and the systems don’t speak to each other. Measure anyway.

Because what you don’t measure, you can’t protect.

And what you don’t protect, you’ll eventually lose.

Measuring isn’t just a reporting task. It’s a declaration of value. It tells others that what you’re building deserves to be monitored, improved, and resourced. And it tells you—honestly—whether you’re solving a real problem or just building something interesting.

But I won’t tell you exactly how to measure. And I don’t think anyone should. Because the process of figuring it out—of chasing the signal through broken systems, of having uncomfortable conversations with finance, of getting alignment on what “impact” even means—will reveal more about your company than any training or template ever will.

You’ll learn how decisions are made. How money flows. How KPIs are chosen. What gets attention and what quietly dies.

Measurement is where product management becomes political. Strategic. Real. It’s where you stop being the person who “supports” the business and become the one who helps shape it.

And yes, it will be hard.

Understand the Power Structures

A brilliant idea can die in the wrong room.

Not because it wasn’t viable. Not because it didn’t create value.

But because the timing was off.

Because someone influential wasn’t informed early enough.

Because someone else needed to be the one to introduce it.

Because the political current wasn’t flowing in your direction that day.

This isn’t cynicism. This is structure.

In large organizations, decision-making isn’t always linear or logical. It’s relational. It’s layered. It’s shaped by past projects, previous battles, personal credibility, and invisible lines of influence that don’t show up in the org chart—but define what gets greenlit and what quietly dies.

Your job is to read the system. Learn who really owns what. Learn which departments set direction, and which ones follow. Understand who speaks in meetings, and who people look at before nodding.

And most of all, know when to push and when to pause.

Don’t waste energy trying to force alignment too early. Build it.

Don’t manipulate. Navigate.

Be the one who sees the landscape clearly, who anticipates the question before it’s asked, who gives others the space to come to the idea on their own—even if it was yours.

Influence is not earned through brilliance alone. It’s earned through clarity, patience, consistency—and knowing when to let others lead the conversation you started.

That’s how things move forward in the enterprise.

Not just because the idea is good. But because the conditions are ready.

Make Governance Your Ally

Legal, compliance, risk—these are not blockers. They’re not the people you “deal with at the end.” They’re part of the system. And if your product is meant to last, if it’s meant to scale, they need to be part of it from the beginning.

Too often, teams treat governance as a final checkpoint. A phase that starts after the product is “done.” But if you wait until then, you’re not asking for input—you’re asking for forgiveness. And in most enterprise environments, that’s not a risk you can afford to take.

So bring them in early. Treat them like partners, not gatekeepers. Ask how they think about risk. Ask what they’ve seen go wrong before. Ask what success looks like to them. Because governance is not just about preventing harm—it’s about building confidence. And confidence is what lets good products move faster.

Speak their language. If they care about audit trails, show them how you’re logging decisions. If they care about model explainability, invite them into how it’s being approached—not once it’s finished, but while it’s still being designed.

If you build that trust early, something powerful happens. Governance stops being a slowdown. It becomes a multiplier. It becomes the reason your product doesn’t just get approved—it gets championed.

Because in the enterprise, moving fast doesn’t mean skipping steps.

It means designing with every step in mind, from day one.

Your Words Will Build the Future

You’ll build more decks than prototypes. And at first, that might feel like a failure. Like you’re not doing enough of the “real work.” But it’s not a failure. It’s the job.

Because inside an enterprise, storytelling is not a soft skill. It’s a product skill.

It’s how you earn buy-in from people who’ve seen a hundred ideas come and go. It’s how you help someone far removed from the problem understand why it matters. It’s how you unlock budget, secure resources, align teams, and get one more shot to keep going.

And when it’s done well, your words become infrastructure. They shape how people talk about the problem when you’re not in the room. They turn ambiguity into something actionable. They turn scattered opinions into shared understanding.

So take your words seriously. Don’t just document—design your communication like you design your product.

Write like a business analyst. Be specific. Structured. Clear. Anticipate the questions.

Talk like a founder. With belief. With conviction. With the quiet urgency of someone who knows what this could become.

Be clear in the doc.

Be convincing in the room.

Because in the enterprise, your slides might travel further than your code.

And your words—if you use them well—will open doors your prototype never could.

You Won’t Like Everyone—And That’s Fine

Some of the most important people you’ll need to work with will frustrate you. They might be overly political. They might move too fast or too slow. They might operate from ego, from fear, from habit. They might not listen the way you want them to. And truthfully, you won’t like how they work.

And still—you will need them.

Because they’ll have access. To decision-makers. To funding. To influence that you, at this point, simply don’t have. They might be the only ones who can get your product in front of the board. The only ones who know the quiet context behind a “no” that no one explained to you. The only ones who can open the door when you’ve already knocked three times.

So do yourself a favor: don’t waste energy trying to change them. Don’t turn your frustration into resistance.

Put your ego aside.

This isn’t about admiration. It’s about progress.

You don’t have to like everyone.

They don’t all have to like you.

But you do need to find a way to work with them.

You can draw a boundary without burning a bridge. You can collaborate without compromising your values. And you can be respected, even by people who’ll never fully understand what you do—if you show up consistently, deliver what you promise, and make it easy for them to move forward with you.

That’s not selling out.

That’s strategy.

And sometimes, that’s what makes the difference between your product staying stuck and actually making it out into the world.

Start With Their Story, Not Your Tech

When you sit down with someone about a potential AI project, resist the urge to pitch. Don’t start with architecture. Don’t show slides. Don’t talk about accuracy or use cases from other departments.

Start with their story.

Ask about their world. How their day actually starts. What they check first. What slows them down. What drains their team. What decisions take longer than they should. What keeps breaking. What’s been broken for so long they’ve stopped bringing it up.

And then—just listen.

Because if you listen long enough, you’ll hear something no system or dataset can tell you. You’ll hear context. You’ll hear history. You’ll hear how this team works around the tools they were given, and how they’d work with something if it finally understood them.

And when someone feels heard—genuinely heard—they open up. They stop performing. They stop pitching back. They start trusting you.

That’s when you can introduce AI.

Not as the shiny solution.

Not as a disruptive force.

But as a quiet helper. A tool to make the pain smaller. A way to make the work smoother.

You’re not selling intelligence.

You’re offering relief.

And if you start with their story, the tech will follow—because now, it has somewhere real to land.

Slides Are Your Craft

I already told you that you’ll build more slides than prototypes. Now let me tell you why that’s not a limitation—it’s a power tool.

Slides are your programming language.

What code is to a developer, slides are to you.

They’re how you shape the narrative. How you translate complexity into clarity. How you make the invisible work visible—so people can rally behind it.

But to use them well, you need to treat them like craft. You need to learn to build for different audiences. What makes a data team nod with interest might completely miss the mark with leadership. What excites your product squad may raise red flags for legal or compliance. One message doesn’t fit all.

So learn the mechanics. Learn to use color intentionally—not to decorate, but to direct attention. Learn the basics of visual hierarchy. Learn what it means when something feels too dense, too fast, too unstructured. Understand how whitespace creates rhythm. How font size can shape priority. How structure creates trust.

Your slides aren’t just supporting materials.

They are thinking tools. Alignment tools. Influence tools.

They are how you open a conversation with someone new.

They are how you guide a room that’s halfway bought in.

They are how you follow up when you’re not in the room to speak for yourself.

You’re not building to impress.

You’re building to align.

So don’t outsource this.

Own it.

Get better at it.

And treat your slides with the same intentionality you give to your product.

Because sometimes, the right slide will do what no prototype ever could:

It will get people to believe.

Give Credit Generously

You’ll work with people who care deeply about being seen—sometimes more deeply than you’ll ever know. Even if they never say it. Even if they act like it doesn’t matter.

Don’t underestimate how far a thank-you can go. A name mentioned in a meeting. A quiet message to their manager. A sentence in a deck that says, “This happened because of their work.”

It’s easy to focus only on outcomes. On roadmaps, metrics, and prototypes. But behind every milestone, there are people solving things in the background—removing blockers, catching edge cases, smoothing tensions you never even saw.

Learn to give credit to whom it belongs. Not just because it’s the polite thing to do. But because it builds trust. It tells your team: “I see you. I know what you made possible.”

And in a world where uncertainty is high and visibility is low, that acknowledgment matters.

It creates safety.

It creates loyalty.

It creates momentum that doesn’t show up in KPIs, but absolutely shows up in what you can build together.

Even if you don’t care much about being recognized, remember this: for someone else, it might mean everything.

Your words could be the reason someone believes they belong here.

And that kind of belief is what keeps great people from walking away.

Accept Credit With Clarity

And while you give credit to others—freely, frequently, and with care—don’t forget to accept it for yourself. Not with ego. With clarity.

Because in enterprise settings, product management is often misunderstood. It’s not like in startups or product-native companies, where everyone knows what it means to define a roadmap, validate a need, or align tech and business.

Here, much of your work happens in the background. Quietly. In pre-reads, in workshops, in Slack threads, in unglamorous decisions that prevent future chaos.

So when your product succeeds, the impact won’t always trace back to you. People might thank the data science team. The sponsor. The delivery lead. And they wouldn’t be wrong—but they wouldn’t be seeing the full picture either.

Unless you help them see it.

Be clear about your contribution. Not as a claim to ownership, but as a thread in the story. Say, “Here’s how I helped move this forward.” Say, “This was where product decisions made the difference.”

Make your role visible. Especially across departments. Especially when the org doesn’t quite know what product management actually means in an AI context.

This isn’t self-promotion.

It’s context.

It ensures that your role is valued, resourced, and included when it matters most—next time.

So yes—give credit to others. And also give it to yourself.

Because this is how you make sure you—and your work—don’t stay invisible.

Find the Right Spotlights

Don’t wait for the perfect moment to show your product. Don’t wait until the first use case is finished, polished, and ready for a showcase. If you wait for perfect, you’ll miss momentum.

Start earlier.

Build visibility into your workflow—not just at the end, but all the way through. Share what’s in motion, what you’re learning, what questions you’re wrestling with. Let people follow the journey, not just the result. Because when people see something grow, they’re far more likely to care when it arrives.

And make sure you’re showing up in the right rooms. Find the spotlights that match your moment:

Brown bags. Cross-functional communities. Weekly leadership calls. Internal demos. Product forums. Use them to build narrative capital—quietly, steadily.

Don’t limit yourself to your immediate team. Speak to adjacent departments. Drop your name into spaces where curiosity outweighs urgency. Connect with people who may not need your product today but might influence its path tomorrow.

Because this is how internal awareness grows.

This is how you create optionality.

This is how scale begins—long before it’s formally requested.

You’re not marketing to the outside world. But make no mistake: inside an enterprise, you still need to market.

Because no one supports what they don’t know exists.

And no one funds what they haven’t seen for themselves.

When the World Isn’t Ready—But You Are

I’ve told you a lot, Little Jaser. Maybe more than you liked to read. Maybe not yet as much as I wanted to say. But here’s what I know for sure: the role you’re stepping into still isn’t widely understood. Not by every team. Not by every decision-maker. Not even by every product leader.

You’ll walk into rooms where people won’t know exactly what you do—or why it matters—until they’ve seen it play out. And even then, they might not be able to name it.

That’s the reality.

But it’s not the limit.

Because this job—this quiet, persistent, often invisible work of making AI real inside complex organizations—isn’t about being recognized. It’s about recognizing what’s needed before others do. It’s about holding the shape of a solution long enough for others to step into it. It’s about building trust before traction, belief before buy-in, and alignment before action.

And that’s something I know you’re built for.

Because the truth is, I trust you. Deeply.

You’ll figure it out—just like I did.

You’ll find your own rhythm. Your own way of moving between teams, shaping conversations, navigating the fog, and turning it into something real. Something useful. Something that works.

After all, it’s you writing to you.

Only with 25 more years of doing the work.

Of asking the second question.

Of learning when to wait, and when to act.

Of making mistakes that felt big at the time—and learning, with time, that they were just part of discovering what really matters.

You already carry what you need.

Even if you can’t name it yet.

Even if the world isn’t ready to recognize it just yet.

So go use it.

Go build the things that won’t exist unless you do.

Go be the one who sees what’s possible, even when the systems around you are still operating like it’s not.

And when it feels like no one sees what you’re really building—read this again.

And remember: I see you.

Elder Jaser

JBK 🕊️