In this episode of Product Mastery Now, Katie Trauth Taylor, PhD, CEO and co-founder of Narratize AI, joins me to discuss how AI is transforming product innovation processes. She shares insights from working with Fortune 500 companies like NASA, Boeing, and Comcast, and dives into research showing that product and R&D teams spend up to 70% of their time on documentation and communication rather than true innovation. Katie outlines four best practices for leveraging AI, including the use of knowledge hubs, AI agents, and robust documentation processes, to unlock productivity, capture tribal knowledge, and speed up time to market by as much as 46%. The conversation also highlights the importance of storytelling in gaining buy-in for new ideas and the potential for AI to revolutionize knowledge management and portfolio intelligence.

 Product teams waste a lot of their time doing things that don’t help get to the heart of product innovation. We need to flip the script on that so that we can be more productive with our innovation efforts. In this discussion, you’re going to learn how companies like Boeing, Comcast, and others are accomplishing this. We’re going to talk about four specific approaches for unleashing AI for product innovation.

To help us with that is our guest, Dr. Katie Trauth Taylor. She is the CEO and co-founder of Narratize AI, and she helps R&D transform their scattered knowledge into a competitive advantage. She has worked with NASA, Boeing, and other Fortune 500 companies to cut documentation time and speed products to market. Katie discovered that innovators are spending too much of their time just trying to communicate their ideas, and she built an AI platform to improve this. She holds a PhD from Purdue University and has published peer-reviewed research on innovation storytelling that’s reshaping how teams work.

Find out more about the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) and next year’s innovation conference.

The Problem with Documentation:
Product teams spend roughly 70% of their time on documentation, reporting, and knowledge lookup instead of direct innovation. This significantly slows time to market.

AI as a Knowledge Capture Tool:
Katie turned to large language models to transform how product teams do documentation. AI can systematically prompt and capture insights, store tribal knowledge, and automate documentation customized to roles and project phases.

The Power of Storytelling:
Successful innovation relies on crafting compelling narratives, not just data. Five drivers for effective storytelling are empathy, engagement, alignment, evidence, and impact.

Best Practices for Leveraging AI in Product Teams:

Knowledge Management Revolution:
Capturing lessons learned and even past failures allows organizations to prevent repeating mistakes and leverage prior discoveries, especially as a significant portion of the workforce retires.

Actionable Insights for Product Managers:

“If it’s a truly disruptive innovation from a company, you can almost guarantee it wasn’t a straight A-to-B path that delivered the results. So as you recognize the success, recognize also the journey that got you there.” – Joel Schall

Katie Trauth Taylor is CEO and Cofounder of Narratize AI, a product intelligence and innovation platform empowering teams to bring products and discoveries to market faster, smarter, and with greater impact by eliminating inefficiencies, aligning teams, and preserving institutional knowledge. Katie is a growth-focused entrepreneur executive with 10+ years experience inspiring teams to design and deliver magnetic products, memorable experiences, and groundbreaking impacts. She has led strategic innovation narratives and served as a senior content strategist within fast-growth tech startups and the Fortune 500, including Boeing, NASA, Hershey, Sunoco, AAA, IFF, Dupont, Edgewell, Cincinnati Children’s, Argonne National Lab, Crossover Health, Parsley Health, Omada, Physera, US Dept of Veterans Affairs, Millennium Challenge Corporation, World Food Forum, and the United Nations. She believes that everyone can be an innovator–when empowered to share their bold ideas.

Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below.

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