5 Product Management Tasks You Can Automate in Minutes to Save Time Every Day
I recently went through a job change where I moved from a large, legacy brand to a startup. Many PMs who have made a move like this know that the lack of firm processes in a startup can be a culture shock to those coming from a big company mindset.
I was excited to dive in and embrace the chaos. The last thing I wanted to do was prevent this lean, mean value creation machine from delivering features to their customers quickly. Having worked for (and written about) startups throughout my career, I knew that startups required less dedicated operational talent than large companies. Speed was a major competitive advantage.
I began experimenting with automation to help provide just the right amount of operations support and still keep the product innovation engine running.
Once I had a few successful automations under my belt, I realized that many of the less-savory components of product management could be automated away—and, in my opinion, PMs would largely be better off for it. The fact is, due to the many stakeholders PMs are responsible for corralling, the role can quickly descend into a game of reminding, collecting, circulating, updating, and following up.
Don't let these tasks take over all your creative "product" time! Here are five simple automations to remove repetitiveness from your day, support internal operations, and help you get back to the business of making (and breaking) things.
5 Time-Saving Workflow Automations for Product Managers
1. Create Jira Tickets in Slack
Building a company culture where all team members are empowered to submit product ideas is no small feat. One way to accomplish this is to reduce the effort required by each team member to submit those ideas.
To facilitate this participation amongst our team, we decided to utilize two spaces where our team members were already active and comfortable—Jira and Slack. Slack has rolled out a number of automation options that allow teams to integrate easily with other commonly used product management tools.
This automation allows teams to submit issues to a Jira board without leaving Slack. We used this automation to track incoming product ideas in a Jira project entitled the “Product Ideas Backlog.”
A Step-by-Step Guide to Setting Up This Automation
Step 1. Ensure that your company’s Jira instance is integrated with Slack. You can do this by searching for Jira in the Slack library and signing into your Jira account via Slack’s SSO (depending on permissions, you may need an administrator to help you with this).
Step 2. Create or Select a Slack channel where this automation will be enabled. Slack automations cannot be enabled for groups chats and can only be deployed in official #channels.
Step 3. Invite Jira to the channel by typing @Jira and sending a message to the chat.
Step 4. In order to connect a project to the Slack channel, type /jira connect, which connects a new Jira project. A modal containing a guide should appear above the message bar as you type. A message visible only to you should appear instructing you to select a project from your company’s Jira account. Hit Enter or Send.
Step 5. Once you’ve connected a project, you’re ready to start adding issues. To add an issue to a project via Slack, type /jira create into the message bar. The same containing the guide should appear. Hit Enter or Send.
Step 6. This time, a modal should appear that allows the user to enter all the fields required to add an issue to a project in Jira. Simply fill that out, hit Submit, and check the Jira project to see your issue!
2. Submit Forms to Google Sheets via Slack
We’ve also made use of a second Slack automation to aid in our feedback collection from customer-facing teams. This automation involves the use of Slack’s internal Form submission feature and an integration with Google Sheets.
The output of this automation is the structured submission of content into a Google Form. While our team uses this to streamline the submission of customer feedback in a way that’s easy to analyze and action, this automation could be used in any scenario where there’s a need to get data from Slack into a Google Sheet.
To recreate this automation, follow these steps:
A Step-by-Step Guide to Setting Up This Automation
Step 1. Select the channel where you’d like to implement this automation. Select the + button in the channel navigation bar and select Workflows from the dropdown. Once the Add Workflow modal appears, select “Create a Workflow.”
Step 2. At this point, a new window will open where you’ll have the ability to design your custom workflow. In this step, you’ll define the name of the workflow, as well as the trigger event and the outcome.
Step 3. To replicate this particular workflow, select “Starts from a Link in Slack” as your trigger event. This means that the workflow will begin whenever the user clicks a specific link (more on how to make this more obvious to your team members later).
Step 4. In the “Then do these things” field, scroll through the margin on the right-hand side and select “Collect Info in a Form.” Once selected, a modal will appear where you’ll define the content of your form.
Step 5. From there, you’ll be prompted to add an additional step to save your form responses somewhere. Either select Google Sheets from the Prompt or scroll down to select it.
You can either select a pre-created sheet to save the responses or create a new sheet.
3. Let Google's Gemini or Zoom's AI Companion Handle Your Meeting Note-Taking
Zoom’s AI Companion and the Gemini-based note-taking feature within the Google Meet app are perfect for your everyday, run-of-the-mill notetaking needs. The functionalities are accessible to anyone with access to a Zoom Business or G-Suite account through their organization and are very easy to use.
The best part is you don’t have to think about it beforehand.
The only step is clicking on the AI Companion at any point in a Zoom call or on the starburst-and-pencil icon in Google Meet, and the tools will begin listening to the call in the background. You can also adjust your settings so that this feature is turned on by default (this is what I do). At the end of the call, the host will receive an email with the AI-generated summary of the conversation. The host can adjust the settings to allow all meeting participants to receive that summary as well, though there is also the option to share the summary after the fact.
It's important to note when using this feature that the AI note-takers, while very articulate, should not be relied upon to comprehend and contextualize highly technical or otherwise complex information. I’ve found that, especially in calls where the speakers are using visual aids, the AI sometimes misses them and the summary lacks some of that context.
The tool excels, however, in identifying the key takeaways from a call and any steps articulated, making it a great option for confirming past decisions. This tool can also be sneakily helpful in catching up if you stroll into a meeting a few minutes late.
4. Use Otter.ai for Even Smarter Meeting Management
Anyone looking for a more advanced option with broader functionality might want to consider my other top choice, Otter.ai. Otter.ai is a SaaS platform designed specifically for bringing the power of AI into your meetings.
While I got a taste of the robust premium offering during my free trial, the free option is fairly limited. My company does not have a corporate subscription to this tool and I imagine that most of yours won’t either, but Otter.ai is a great option if you have some say in your company’s tech stack or if you want to invest in it yourself.
Otter.ai works by first syncing with your calendar—most enterprise calendar tools (i.e., Gmail, Outlook), will do. Otter.ai employs a freemium pricing strategy, meaning that you have access to most features on a basic account, but your usage of these features is limited.
From there, you’re able to invite Otter.ai’s notetaker to the meetings you’d like it to listen to. This is one way to manage the cap of 300 minutes of call time per month on the basic plan. Otter.ai’s meeting tooling provides both a summary and a transcript, though both are cut off after 30 minutes in the Basic plan. In addition, each summary includes screenshots from each call, which is helpful context when reviewing meetings that made use of visual aids.
I appreciated that Otter.ai provides both a summary and a transcript along with an in-app editing capability which allows me to edit the summary with direct access to what was actually said. This is a simple UX difference that really improves my experience of using the app.
Additional features include:
- The ability to import recorded clips and generate a summary and transcript (available in the Basic plan but capped at 3 imports).
- An outline of each call with key points (Otter Business plan)
- An AI assistant which can complete follow-up action, such as drafting follow-up emails. This feature appears to be available in the free plan while in beta but I have a hunch that usage will be capped once the beta testing is complete.
- Ability to post meeting summaries to Slack and share with other team members.
At $20/month or $240/year, it’s a bit too steep for most people to consider it worth it to invest in the Business plan without access to a corporate account. The Pro account is more reasonable for individuals, at approximately $8 per month with an annual subscription. I have been leveraging both the Zoom AI Companion and Otter.ai by using Zoom for general calls that require less follow-up and cover less complicated subject matter, while relying on Otter.ai for more nuanced calls which require access to visual aids to understand the conversation.
5. Publish to Confluence via Zapier
It wouldn’t be an article about automation if I didn’t mention Zapier. Zapier is one of my favourite automation tools to play with because, even on the free version, the capabilities and the integrations are vast.
It would be impossible to cover all the ways PMs could leverage Zapier to improve their workflow, so I’m going to focus on just one that has removed a specific inefficiency from my day. Anyone who’s worked in a meeting-heavy environment, as almost all corporate environments are, know the value in taking and publishing meeting notes for everyone to reference.
While there are many AI tools available for taking meeting notes, there are fewer options for actually surfacing those notes in a location where they’re accessible and useful.
A Step-by-Step Guide to Setting Up This Automation
Before you get started, fire up Zapier and enter the Email <> Zapier <> Confluence integration, which is ultimately how I managed to get meeting notes delivered to my email inbox via the Zoom AI Companion published to Confluence automatically. You can recreate this automation using these steps!
Step 1. Assuming you’ve already set up a Zapier account, the first step is to log into your Zapier account and hit the Create button in the top left-hand corner of the profile page.
Step 2. From there, click Zap, and you’ll be taken to the Zap editor, where you can configure your automation.
Step 3. Here, you can choose to use the Zap AI Copilot to help you craft your Zap, or you can enter the trigger and subsequent action manually. Below are the steps to manually configure. Start by selecting the Trigger modal and then choosing Gmail as your initiating tool.
Step 4. Next, choose a New Email Matching Search as the specified trigger event.
Step 5. In the next window, provide the subject line from the AI Summary emails you receive from the Zoom AI Companion. It will look something like this: “Meeting Summary for Design / Product Sync Meeting.” Once you enter the subject line of the email, Zapier will test this trigger by searching your inbox for emails that match this
Step 6. Assuming the test is successful, Zapier will now search your email inbox for emails matching the search terms you previously entered. The search may return multiple emails, but select the one that reflects the Meeting Summary
Step 7. You’ll then have the option to select the Confluence Cloud as your action event. Once Zapier has tested this integration, you’ll be asked to choose the action that takes place. Select “Create a new Page.”
Step 8. At this point, Zapier will guide you to define where in your company’s Confluence instance you’d like this new page to land. You can choose a location as granular as a specific space within the larger Confluence instance, which may not be specific enough for some of you who have many meetings with many subfolders for each.
Step 9. The last step is to map the content to ensure that Zapier is collecting the desired content from your email and publishing it to Confluence in the right format. For those of you unfamiliar with Zapier, mapping fields is a common practice across most workflow automations. Lastly, map the Subject line of the email to the Title of the Confluence page and the Body of the email to the body of the Confluence page.
There you have it—five simple, no-code automation workflows that have added creative time back to my day!
There is a world of opportunity in AI, particularly when leveraged as a tool for eliminating efficiencies.
More importantly though, my hope is that you leverage these AI-powered product management hacks, smart tools, and others to leave busy work (mostly) in the past, and get back to the critical work of making things, breaking things, and building great products.
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