☄️ How AI Can Make You A Better Manager

The bottleneck in management is your own judgment.

Your expertise is locked in your head, and your team needs constant guidance on the same issues.

This results in you spending countless hours on low-leverage work.

I studied how the best managers are solving this for themselves with AI — mostly to become a better manager myself.

Here are three approaches worth stealing:

Whoop’s Custom GPT Solution

Hillary Gridley, head of core product at Whoop, built almost a hundred custom GPTs for her team.

She documents her own workflows to codify what “good” looks like.

AI helps turn her taste into a playbook others can follow.

Here’s a simple way you can do it too:

1. Collect before and after examples of work from the team that you reviewed and made changes to. Use a simple two-column format: "left side bad, right side good"

2. Upload the list to AI with the prompt: "Extract MECE criteria I use to determine good vs bad"

To make your own: Collect ten bad / good pairs, feed them in GPT/Projects, share the link with team.

Now they know what you’re going to say before they even send you a draft of a plan.

Marily Nika's Practical AI Framework

Marily Nika, Gen-AI Product Lead at Google and AI course instructor, teaches the most popular AI course on Maven.

Her framework helps PMs avoid the "shiny object trap" of adding AI for AI's sake.

Her golden rule: "Don't do AI for the sake of doing AI. Make sure there's a problem that needs to be solved in a smart way."

Marily’s rules on when to NOT use AI:

• Never for your MVP. "Do not waste time of data scientists training models on powerful machines for weeks. If you want to prove there's a market, fake it. Create a Figma prototype and test with users first."

• When you have insufficient data. If the inputs are bad, the outputs simply won’t be useful.

• When the ROI is unclear. She’s seen teams spend 6 months fine-tuning a 'cool model' when the project ROI turned out to be very low. AI likely wasn’t worth the time investment at all.

When TO use AI:

1. Mission statements: "There's nothing I can write that's going to be as good as what ChatGPT produces. I say 'rewrite this mission statement' and it creates something fantastic that can be understood by everyone - from junior engineers to executives."

2. User segmentation: "It thinks of user segments your mind wouldn't even go to. It provides motivations and pain points that spark new ideas as you read them."

3. Strategic ideation: "I use it after I already have a mission in my head. I'm not making it do my job - I'm asking it to enhance what I've already thought through."

The best managers don't chase every AI trend. They use AI strategically — only when it multiplies their impact.

Skip the shiny objects. Focus on using AI where it genuinely scales your judgment: turning your expertise into repeatable frameworks, automating low-value tasks, and freeing up time for the decisions only you can make.

That's how you become a manager who delivers 10x the output with the same hours in the day.

Tim Moss’s Complete Daily Workflow

Tim Moss, Content Marketing Manager at Simpleshow, decided to test whether AI could handle his entire daily workflow - from email management to data analysis to meeting summaries.

He experimented to see which administrative tasks managers can delegate to AI.

His daily AI workflow:

• Email management: Smart summarization, quick responses, and automatically prioritized messages based on past interactions.

• Task automation: Connected Zapier to Gmail so follow-up emails automatically became to-do items in his project management app. You can use Jace.AI for that as well.

• Smart scheduling: Used AI to find optimal meeting times based on team availability. Workmate is a good option for this, if you want extended capabilities of an AI Executive Assistant.

• Meeting summaries: Otter.ai transcribed everything in real-time and extracted action items before the meeting ended. I personally like using Fathom.video for this use case.

The result: Tim saved hours on routine work and could focus on strategic tasks.

Bottom line

The best managers build systems that scale their judgment.

They turn their expertise into accessible frameworks that their teams can use or interact with that don’t rely on their direct involvement.

Hillary scales her product taste through 100 GPTs. Marily teaches how to use AI only when there's a real problem to solve. Tim saved hours on routine work and could focus on strategic tasks.

The best leaders will squeeze the most leverage out of AI - they’ll be the ones who rise through the ranks and lead their companies forward.

Until Next Time,

David Lobo

Head of Growth, Workmate

P.S. If you’re a manager, how are you using AI to manage your team better? Reply with your best tactic — I read every response.