#77. Nero’s Weekly
Week 10: AI-powered UX design, strategic marketing, alternative product career paths, and a framework for impactful work
Hello friends 👋,
Happy Friday and welcome to our 1st issue of ‘Nero’s Weekly’ in 2025. Past editions.
The goal of this newsletter is to enable you to be better informed and effective in your work and enterprise.
We are still celebrating the 4-year anniversary 🎉✨ of this newsletter.
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Reader Survey: The Future of Business Notes by Nero Okwa
Let's get to it.
In this edition:
How to use AI for UX to create user persona and journey maps.
How to select your first marketing channel, and get your software pricing strategy right.
Alternative product management career paths: Freelance and Product Consulting.
A framework for prioritising impactful work.
And much more. Enjoy😊.
Nero’s Pick – My latest article - Davos 2025: The Intelligent Age Begins – highlighted AI's $20 trillion potential economic impact, Africa's demographic dividend, green corridors preserving our planet's lungs, and a reimagined workforce development. These all point to a future where human ingenuity, augmented by technology, can solve our most pressing challenges.
🤖AI
Anthropic - Anthropic’s new AI Tools - Anthropic released two new tools: Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code. Sonnet is a “hybrid reasoning model” that switches between instant answers and taking time to think (reason) for complex problems. Claude Code is a coding assistant that helps developers with coding tasks. A key benefit is that it integrates directly with a developer’s terminal. Here is a great review by the team at Every.
UX Collective - How I’m using AI to streamline persona and journey map creation - UX Collective’s Kyle Soucy explores the question - is possible to use AI to help craft user personas and journey maps? The short answer is Yes. During product development there is a user/UX research process which involves a user persona and journey map. A user persona is a fictional character that represents your target audience based on real data, and journey maps are a visualisation that showcases the steps a user takes to accomplish a goal. Kyle shows how using a mix of prompts in GenAI tools can help you create your persona and journey map from your data.
🏭Business
Marketing - How to Select Your First Marketing Channel – There are dozens of marketing channels to choose from and hundreds of products and services you could use to help you execute on each one well. But only a few will make the most sense for you right now. The two most essential constraints are understanding where your customers are and what comes naturally to you. You want to operate at the intersection. Goodluck!
OnlyCFO - The Future of Software Pricing – This is a useful read on how software pricing is evolving. Pricing has evolved from the seat-based pricing of SaaS companies to several options, thanks to AI. Rather than an afterthought, the author recommends that pricing should become a core part of a company’s strategy. I like the image below on these options:
📱Technology & Product Management
SVPG – A Vision for Product Teams - Marty Cagan explores how GenAI tools would automate the process of product delivery, enabling the product team to focus on discovery - determining which solutions best solve customer problems. The implication of this are smaller efficient teams and companies downsizing for cost saving reasons. This smaller team would consist of the product manager, product designer, and engineer.
Based on that I thought it would be interesting to include alternative options for Product Managers beyond full time roles.
Product Career – What I learned from my journey into freelance product management – This article reveals that freelance product managers typically work on specific problems requiring specialized skills over longer engagements (3+ months). Companies hire them to address specific issues or when not ready for full-time hires. To succeed requires developing expertise in something, effectively positioning your profile, and staying informed on the latest market opportunities.
Product Career - What does a product management consultant do anyway? - Lisa Murkin explains the contrast between product management consulting and in-house roles such as the need for greater flexibility across varied project timelines. Unlike in-house product managers that focus on incremental product improvements within established processes, consultants have to navigate with limited context. Their advantage is cross-industry knowledge, and a capacity for strategic work. A similarity across both roles is the core product management principles – aligning user needs, business goals and technical feasibility.
A key similarity across both articles is the emphasis on flexibility and adaptability in modern product roles.
As AI increasingly automates delivery tasks, product professionals—whether freelancers, consultants, or in-house—will need to excel at discovery work, applying core product fundamentals to determine which solutions best solve customer problems. This would drive meaningful user value and business outcomes.
🌍Africa
Africa at Davos - Davos 2025: The Intelligent Age Begins – In our latest article on Davos, 3 sessions —"Africa's Economy: Young and Fast," " Defending Earth's Largest Lung," and " Reinventing Digital Inclusion" — highlighted how Africa stands at a critical intersection of economic development, environmental stewardship, and technological transformation.
Sumaila Zubairu of Africa Finance Corporation, explained how capital can be mobilised through economic transformation:
Higher quality jobs produce taxes (that can be used to build schools), savings (that can be used for loans by the banking system), and pensions (that can be used by pension managers for infrastructure investments and providing Venture Capital). He recommends, harnessing this chain.
🚀Career Corner
Work prioritisation - Sorting Your Work By Impact - Shreyas Doshi provides a useful framework on how to prioritise our work so that we don’t spend time doing “urgent” things and quick win at the expense of impactful work. The LNO framework would help you separate your tasks into Leverage, Neutral, and Overhead tasks.
Are you currently spending most of your time on leverage tasks?
“When it's over, I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.”
— Mary Oliver, Poet
There you have it.
Nero
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