We’re living in an era where AI tools can generate content, write code, analyse data, and even predict trends more quickly than humans can.
The temptation is to think: “If AI can do all these, what’s left for us as product managers in the workplace?”
As AI reshapes how we work, emotional intelligence and our humanness have become the real competitive edge. It is what remains uniquely ours, and what’s becoming exponentially more valuable.
The Evolution of Product Management
I’d paint a picture of how product management (PM) has evolved. Some years ago, being a great PM meant being the person who documented the roadmaps, comprehensive PRDs, and the sharpest analytical insights, among other things.
Today? Those roadmaps can be auto-generated, PRDs and other written and visual documents are AI-assisted, etc., when given the right contextual prompt, and these things are done at high speed.
Now, Product management has always been part strategy, part execution, and part people leadership.
However, the people aspect is often underestimated, where you must align stakeholders, lead teams, and empathise with customers’ frustrations or desires.
AI can generate many things, but it can’t read the disappointment or excitement in your customer’s voice, irrespective of the words they are using to express themselves, or sense hesitation during a user interview.
AI can’t also raise or solve internal team conflicts or communicate good reasons for alignment to stakeholders to ensure they are satisfied with certain outcomes. That’s where emotional intelligence comes in.
Some Core Dimensions of Emotional Intelligence
Simply put, Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognise, understand, and manage one’s emotions and those of others.
These are some core components:
- Self-awareness: Self-awareness is developing and recognising your own emotional patterns, strengths, triggers, and areas for improvement. It’s recognising when your attachment to a particular solution is clouding your judgment, or when your stress is manifesting as impatience in team meetings.
- Self-regulation: Product management is inherently high-stakes and high-pressure because deadlines shift, priorities change, and stakeholders have conflicting needs. Your ability to remain calm, thoughtful, and solution-oriented in these moments directly impacts your team’s performance and morale. Self-regulation is about choosing your response. When a stakeholder pushes back on a timeline, do you react defensively, or do you pause to understand their concerns? When they challenge your strategy, do you dig in your heels, or do you care about their perspective?
- Empathy: Understanding others’ perspectives. Not just hearing customers’ words, but sensing the frustration behind them. When churn increases, instead of just asking “what happened?” you should ask and want to genuinely know “what did our users experience that led them to leave?” It extends beyond user research and customer interviews; you should also be empathetic towards your internal stakeholders, especially your direct team members.
- Social awareness: Perhaps the most complex part of emotional intelligence is the ability to read social dynamics, build influence, genuine relationships, trust, and collaboration across diverse teams. Every interaction either builds or erodes trust, and that sustainable influence comes from genuine relationships.
Why Emotional Intelligence (EI) Matters More in the AI Age
As AI handles more of the analytical heavy lifting, three trends are making emotional intelligence increasingly critical for product success:
Interpretation: EI helps you ask the right follow-up questions, probe beneath surface-level insights from data, and then piece together various clues to paint a complete picture. As automation increases, the human role shifts from execution to interpretation and connection.
Connection: In our increasingly distributed, hybrid work environment, the ability to build genuine connections across digital channels has become a core competency. Teams that feel connected, understood, and aligned consistently outperform those that don’t, regardless of their technical capabilities.
Authenticity: As AI-generated content is everywhere, audiences crave more authentic human connections. Products that feel genuinely human stand out.
EI in Action: A Practical Example
Let’s think about customer support automation. Chatbots can resolve common issues at lightning speed. Still, when a customer is angry or extremely frustrated because a payment didn’t go through, no script or algorithm can replace a calm, empathetic human who acknowledges their frustration and restores trust.
In fact, the customer gets even more frustrated when they know they are chatting with a bot and the chatbot just doesn’t understand how they feel. The issue often aggravates, and trust might be lost, or the customer may even churn.
The same applies in product management: a data dashboard can tell you churn is up by 10%, but it takes human empathy and EI to sit with customers, hear their frustrations, and rebuild the experience.
How to Sharpen Your EI as a PM
Building emotional intelligence is about developing new habits and practices that, over time, fundamentally change how you show up as a PM.
- Practice active listening: Practice listening to fully understand rather than to respond.
- Ask better questions: Develop emotional curiosity when you encounter resistance, frustration, or conflict. Think about what might be driving this behaviour? What needs aren’t being met? What fears might be present? This curiosity often reveals solutions that pure logic misses.
- Build reflection time: Build regular reflection into your routine. After challenging conversations, ask yourself: How did I show up? What impact did my energy have on others? What would I do differently? This practice accelerates your self-awareness development.
- Seek feedback: Invite trusted colleagues to share how you come across in high-pressure or tough situations. Ask specific questions: “When I’m stressed, how does it affect the team dynamic?” “What do you notice about my communication style when the stakes are high?”
The Human Advantage
On one side are product managers who view AI as competition and try to out-optimise, out-analyse, and out-execute the machines, which is humanly impossible, and that’s not where our strength lies.
On the other side are product managers who embrace AI as a powerful tool while doubling down on their uniquely human capabilities.
They use AI to handle some heavy lifting while they focus more of their time on finding the right problems to solve, building trust, fostering collaboration, inspiring teams, and creating products that resonate on a deeply human level.
The choice before us isn’t to embrace AI or not; I believe that decision has been made for us. It’s more around how we can position ourselves and lean more into our humanity, while using AI to speed up our processes.
Double down on your humanity.
*Princess Akari is a product manager at Africa’s fastest-growing financial institution, Moniepoint Inc.
