Product, business & communication
Communicate AI trade-offs to stakeholders
Write and present clearly about risk, cost, timelines and limitations; run demos and reviews.
~8 focused hours·beginner
Tools: Slides/decks, Loom (async demo recording), Notion/Confluence (decision docs), DACI/RACI templates
Market relevance — share of job ads asking for this
What employers mean
You should be able to…
- Write a one-page trade-off memo comparing build options with cost/risk/timeline
- Run a demo or review that lands the message with both engineers and executives
- Make a decision-making framework (e.g. DACI) explicit so debates don't stall a launch
- Communicate model limitations honestly without undermining stakeholder confidence
- Handle pushback on timelines or scope in a live meeting without over-promising
- Summarize a technical postmortem for a non-technical audience
Learn — free, link-checked
The few resources that matter
Read · beginner · 15 min · atlassian.com
DACI decision-making framework
A ready-to-use framework for making who-decides-what explicit when engineers and execs disagree on AI trade-offs. — Atlassian
Read · beginner · 30 min · atlassian.com
Team Playbook: plays library
A library of facilitation exercises for running the reviews/retros/health-checks you'll lead as a PM. — Atlassian
Course · beginner · 120 min · academy.hubspot.com
Inbound Sales
Free, certified course on discovery calls, tailored demos and objection handling — the exact loop a POC needs. — HubSpot Academy
Practice
Trade-off memo + recorded stakeholder update for a delayed AI launch
Take a real or hypothetical AI feature (e.g. an automated KYC document checker) that's 3 weeks behind schedule because accuracy on regional-language documents is below bar. Write a one-page trade-off memo comparing 3 options (ship with human review fallback, delay for more training data, narrow scope to English-only documents first) with cost/risk/timeline for each, using a DACI to name who decides. Record a 5-minute Loom-style update as if presenting to leadership.
Done when
- Memo presents exactly 3 options with an explicit recommendation and reasoning
- A DACI or equivalent framework names who decides, who's consulted, who's informed
- Recorded update is under 6 minutes and avoids technical jargon a non-engineer wouldn't know
- Memo and recording are consistent with each other in the recommendation given
Prove it
Evidence a recruiter can check
- Public trade-off memo document
- Recorded stakeholder-update video (Loom or similar), linked and viewable
- A DACI/RACI artifact for the decision
Interview
Questions you'll get asked
- Tell me about a time you had to explain an AI feature's limitations to a skeptical stakeholder.
- How do you communicate a timeline slip on an AI project without losing trust?
- Walk me through how you'd run a review meeting where engineers and executives disagree on a trade-off.
- Give an example of a decision you made explicit (who decides, who's consulted) to avoid a stalled debate.
- How do you tailor the same AI project update for an engineering audience vs a leadership audience?