Prompt engineering has been framed as a technical skill. We think that's wrong. At its core, prompt engineering is about understanding what you want and communicating it clearly—which is exactly what product managers do every day.
Why PMs Should Care
If your product uses an LLM, the prompts are part of the product. They shape the user experience just as much as the UI does. A beautifully designed interface backed by poor prompts will still feel broken to users.
PMs who understand prompt engineering make better product decisions. They can evaluate tradeoffs between response quality and latency, understand why certain features are harder than others, and write better specs for their engineering teams.
The Basics
Effective prompts share four qualities: they're specific about the desired output format, they provide relevant context, they include examples of good and bad responses, and they set clear boundaries.
Think of it like writing a creative brief. You wouldn't hand a designer a one-line description and expect a perfect result. The same principle applies to AI models.
Common PM Mistakes
The biggest mistake we see PMs make is treating prompts as static. Prompts should be versioned, tested, and iterated on just like any other product feature. The best teams maintain a "prompt library" with performance metrics for each variant.
The second mistake is optimizing for the happy path. Real users will input unexpected things. Robust prompt engineering accounts for edge cases, adversarial inputs, and graceful failure modes.