Paul Adams on AI Product Strategy and Intercom

Paul Adams on AI Product Strategy and Intercom

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Paul Adams on AI Product Strategy and Intercom

Paul Adams, Chief Product Officer at Intercom, on going all-in on AI, product strategy frameworks, and lessons from Google and Facebook.

Source: Lenny’s Podcast Date: ~2023 Link: Episode

Key ideas

  • Map your product against what AI can do. Start from first principles — what problem does your product solve? Then ask candidly whether AI can do that, partially do it, or replace it outright. Customer support was an obvious target; Intercom ripped up its roadmap after ChatGPT launched and rebuilt around Fin, an AI-first chatbot.
  • Don’t bolt AI on. The mobile-era mistake was treating mobile as a side team. The same pattern is repeating with AI. Adams advocates embedding AI thinking across every product team rather than siloing it in a specialist squad.
  • Differentiation vs. table stakes. Every product roadmap sits on a spectrum between features that attract new customers (differentiation) and the basics required to play in the category (table stakes). Intercom over-indexed on differentiation early, then had to correct. The balance shifts: startups need more differentiation; mature products need both.
  • Swinging the pendulum. When a team notices an undesirable state and over-corrects, the pendulum swings too far. This pattern repeats across roadmap priorities, hiring, and culture. Awareness of the swing is the first step to landing closer to centre.
  • Product-market story fit. Product–market fit has a third leg: the story. A great product in a great market can still fail if the narrative is convoluted or missing. Building and storytelling are equally important disciplines.

Frameworks mentioned

  • Before/after moments — pivotal inflection points that reset assumptions; requires re-learning what customers think post-event.
  • Differentiation vs. table stakes — inspired by the Kano model; used to audit roadmap balance.
  • Swinging the pendulum — observe an undesirable state, correct, but watch for over-correction.
  • Product-market story fit — extends product–market fit with narrative as a first-class variable.
  • Four forces (Jobs to Be Done) — attraction of new solution, push of current situation, habits, and anxieties; used at Intercom since early days.
  • Job stories — a lightweight variant of JTBD user stories that emerged organically from Intercom’s research practice.
  • Horizons 1/2/3 — referenced to frame the tension between near-term AI roadmap and potential obsolescence of that roadmap within two years.

Speaker

Paul Adams — CPO, Intercom. Former global head of brand design at Facebook; user researcher at Google (Google Buzz, Google+, mobile team); product designer at Dyson.