3 Automations I actually use as a Product Manager
These no-fluff, simple automations make me faster and smarter.
As a PM, you probably keep hearing about automations and setting up AI agents to do repetitive tasks for you.
But here’s the truth: PM work isn’t repetitive.
Every day looks different. New customer problems. New stakeholder asks. New fires. New features. Very little is “automatable.”
Every day is different, and there’s new problems to solve, new customers to interview, and new features to build.
So over the last three months, I experimented with high-leverage automations: these make me sharper, faster, and more in sync with customers and the market.
Today I’m sharing 3 automations I actually use in my day-to-day. Not sponsored. Not theoretical. These genuinely make me a better PM.
Automation #1: The customer listener
The problem: Reddit is a goldmine for unfiltered customer feedback, but monitoring multiple subreddits is basically a full-time job.
The automation:
I use a simple Relay.app flow to watch for mentions of my company, StackAdapt, across subreddits like r/Programmatic.
When StackAdapt is mentioned:
Relay.app finds the comment
Sends me an email with the thread
Logs the comment into a spreadsheet so I can aggregate everything over time
The results: I now have a continuous pulse on customer confusion points, emerging questions, and recurring themes. Bonus: I’ve surfaced multiple leads from Reddit threads and passed them to the sales team.
The level-up:
Comment directly on posts (transparently!) to answer questions or ask for more context/feedback from customers
Run AI analysis over your Reddit spreadsheet to extract themes
Create an AI agent to triage comments to the right people (e.g., send leads → sales, product bugs/questions → PMs)
Automation #2: weekly competitive report
The problem: PMs must stay close to competitors, but tracking every launch, feature update, and press release is incredibly time-consuming.
The automation (I made some tweaks to the Monthly Competitive Report template)
Every Monday morning, Relay.app delivers a competitive intelligence report summarizing:
Top LinkedIn posts from competitors
New feature launches
Press releases and announcements
Thought leadership worth reading
I start my week reading the report and updating my mental model of the market.
The results: I feel more informed, more aware of where the market is heading, and better equipped to guide internal discussions. It’s also surfaced excellent thought leadership I wouldn’t have found on my own.
The level-up:
Turn this into an internal competitive newsletter
PMMs can mine it for content ideas
PMs can push any relevant feature ideas into a backlog spreadsheet
Automation #3: The User Research Library
The problem: PMs do tons of customer interviews… but insights often die inside someone’s Miro board or Figma file. There’s rarely a shared, searchable memory for customer learnings.
The automation:
Use Gemini Notes (or any note-taker) for each research call
Create a trigger for emails titled “research session” (or your naming convention)
Relay.app listens for that email
The notes get appended into a spreadsheet called “User Research Library”
This becomes a searchable research database accessible by PMs, designers, and researchers.
The results: I can instantly Ctrl+F across months of research notes to pull quotes, validate assumptions, or see patterns. I’ve also run Gemini over the entire database to synthesize themes and generate recommendations.
The level up:
Turn the library into a shared team asset
Use AI agents to analyze the full dataset, surface opportunities, and spot surprising patterns over time
Final thoughts
These aren’t complicated automations. Most took <15 minutes to set up, but they’ve meaningfully improved the way I operate.
A quick note on tools: I’ve become a fan of Relay.app for setting up these workflows.
Why Relay.app over Zapier?
Relay.app has role-specific templates (PM, PMM, Ops, etc.)
The AI agent features are extremely easy to use
Zapier is still excellent for general “move this data here” automations and a good all-around integrations tool
Relay.app just feels more purpose-built for the way PMs work.
💬 Comment below: What are some automations you’ve tried, or which ones would you like to try?