How to use Perplexity in your PM work
27 examples (with actual prompts) of how product managers are using the AI-powered search engine today
👋 Hey, Lenny here! Welcome to this month’s ✨ free edition ✨ of Lenny’s Newsletter. Each week I tackle reader questions about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career.
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Chatbot tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity are quickly becoming de facto co-pilots for product managers. I ran this poll on X and LinkedIn, and holy shit, over 50% of PMs who responded are now using a chatbot daily. And 85% are using one weekly 🤯
Robert Bye, a PM at Figma, shared a common sentiment:
When was the last time a new tool went from non-existent to daily use for the majority of product managers? Things are changing fast.
Interestingly, Perplexity was the second most mentioned chatbot, behind ChatGPT. I’m not surprised. I recently did a deep dive on how Perplexity builds product, and while working on that piece, I got to talking to their team about how product managers use Perplexity to do their work. The conversation led to an in-depth survey, which received more than 300 responses, which led to 30 follow-up calls and, finally, to the post you’re reading now.
Sourced from hundreds of product managers who filled out our survey and hopped on calls, I put together a comprehensive collection of ways PMs are using Perplexity to do their work, including:
Understanding and crafting growth strategy
Finding benchmarks
Doing market research
Learning best practices
Evaluating popular tools
Understanding technical jargon
This collection builds on How PMs use ChatGPT to do their work (currently my fourth most viewed post) and expands on my collection of advice for integrating AI into your PM workflows. Whether all this change scares you or gets you excited, you should be carving out time to play around with these tools. Here’s a bunch of stuff to try.
27 ways PMs are using Perplexity in their day-to-day work
Actual prompts shared by readers, including links to try out the prompt and screenshots of some of the results:
a. Understanding and crafting growth strategy
1. Explain growth accounting to a product manager
2. Walk through the evolution of Dropbox’s referral program. Why did it work?
3. How are the app store top charts calculated?
4. Give me examples of a reverse trial that led to an increase in conversion rate
5. Incrementality test designs for advertising campaigns
6. Google Play and Apple App Store optimization techniques
b. Finding benchmarks
7. What is the average open rate for push notifications on Android and iOS?
8. Using Lenny’s Newsletter research, what is good retention for a consumer product?
9. What is CSAT and how is it calculated? Include CSAT scores from top technology companies.
11. Explain the product-market-fit survey by Rahul Vohra
c. Doing market research
12. Notion’s AI go-to-market strategy
13. Provide a detailed overview of Deel’s go-to-market strategy
14. How many rides does the average ridesharing user take per month?
15. How does Airtable upsell users to an Enterprise plan?
d. Learning best practices
16. List of brainstorming techniques for product managers
17. How did Spotify use the Jobs to Be Done framework?
18. Walk through the evolution of Slack’s personalized user onboarding experience
e. Evaluating popular tools
21. What is the difference between Segment and Freshpaint?
22. Weather APIs by developer preference
23. Most popular tools for in-app localization
f. Understanding technical jargon
24. Explain what DAU/MAU means
26. What is the difference between GraphQL and REST?
27. What is the difference between follow and no follow backlinks?
For more, check out this slick landing page the Perplexity team put up.
I’d love to hear in the comments about how else you use Perplexity, or other AI tools, in your day-to-day work.👇
As I’ve said before, the best way to prepare for this fast-approaching future is to get your hands dirty. So go try one of these prompts for yourself.
Have a fulfilling and productive week 🙏
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Sincerely,
Lenny 👋
to help me prompt it.
Create a collection and steal my prompt 👇
"You are an expert at prompting perplexity in specific. You have been working on perplexity since its launch and deeply understand its capabilities and limitations, you research this using perplexity documentation, reddit and other high quality sources and are extremely capable at recommending the best prompts to write to get the best results from perplexity - both the free and pro versions and leveraging different LLM models knowing their strengths and weaknesses and better and worse ways to use their features. "
There's a surprising number of white collar professionals who do daily research and must keep up with trends.
With Perplexity Enterprise Pro and Pages it seems to be building products to help us in our search, curiosity and research. Here is a guide we recently came up with for more general use:
https://www.ai-supremacy.com/p/how-to-use-perplexity-in-your-daily