I Taught an AI to Be My Junior PM. Here's the Training Plan

You have ten minutes before your next meeting. You open a document filled with raw customer support tickets, intending to find a few key themes. An hour later, you’ve barely made a dent, your meeting is long over, and your entire morning has been swallowed by tactical grunge work. This isn't strategy. This is admin.

We keep using AI like a glorified search engine. We ask it one-off questions, give it a snippet of text, and hope for a decent result. We re-explain the context of our product, our users, and our goals with every single prompt. It’s like hiring a new intern every five minutes.

Stop prompting. Start training.

Your goal isn't to get better at writing single prompts. Your goal is to build a persistent, context-aware assistant that you can delegate real work to. You need to onboard your AI like it's a new junior product manager. Here’s how.

Phase 1: The Onboarding Packet (Your Custom Instructions)

Most advanced AI models (like ChatGPT or Claude) have a "custom instructions" or "custom prompt" feature. This is the most underutilized tool at a PM’s disposal. Think of it as the orientation packet you’d give a new hire on their first day. It’s the foundational context the AI will bring to every conversation.

Fill it out once, and you’ll never have to explain your product from scratch again.

Here’s what goes in mine:

• My Role & Product: "I am the Senior Product Manager for 'ConnectSphere