Scale Manager Expertise with AI
Summary
A mental model for how managers should think about AI adoption: the goal isn’t to replace yourself but to automate the “0-to-60%” layer of repetitive feedback so you can spend your limited time on the work that only you can do — deep strategic thinking, personal mentorship, and novel judgment calls. Managers who evaluate the same types of work repeatedly (slide reviews, code reviews, writing feedback) can encode their standards into reusable AI tools, creating coaching artifacts that scale infinitely while preserving the manager’s time for higher-leverage activities.
This reframes the question from “can AI do my job?” to “which parts of my job are repetitive enough to encode, and which require my unique judgment?”
How to Apply
When to use: When deciding how to invest your time as a manager or leader using AI.
The framework:
- Encode: Identify recurring evaluation tasks where you apply consistent standards. Build these into custom GPTs, agents, or automated workflows. Examples: slide deck evaluation, code review checklists, writing quality standards.
- Elevate: Use the time recovered to do work that can’t be automated — building relationships, navigating organizational ambiguity, making strategic bets, mentoring on judgment (not just technique).
- Enable: Deploy your encoded expertise to your team so they can self-serve the “first pass” feedback and come to you with the hard questions.
For AI PMs: This model applies both to how you manage your own team and to how you design AI products. The best AI features often follow this same pattern — they don’t replace the user, they handle the routine work so the user can focus on judgment.
Sources
From: 2026-02-07 Hilary Gridley Scaling Yourself Custom GPTs
Key quote: “The goal isn’t to replace managers but to give them superpowers — automating repetitive feedback so you can spend time on deep strategic thinking and personal mentorship.” Attribution: Hilary Gridley What this source adds: Gridley demonstrates this model concretely through two workflows — a “Deck Doctor” GPT for slide evaluation and an AI writing coach. Both follow the same pattern: encode your standards into a reusable tool, deploy it to your team, and reclaim time for high-leverage work. The Custom GPT approach means the encoded expertise is shareable, not just a prompt in one person’s chat history. Links: Original | Archive