Onil Gunawardana’s 5Ps of Product Explains What Must Come Before AI Automation

As more organizations turn to AI automation to speed product development, many are finding that faster execution does not resolve underlying strategy problems. According to Onil Gunawardana’s 5Ps of Product, teams that automate without first establishing clarity often amplify misalignment rather than eliminate it.

“Automation increases velocity, but it doesn’t create direction,” said Gunawardana. “If teams haven’t aligned on the problem they are solving or the user they are serving, speed becomes a liability.”

5Ps of Product is a product management framework built around five pillars—Problem, Persona, Product, Platform, and Promotion—designed to help teams connect strategy to execution. The framework emphasizes that foundational decisions must be made before introducing tools or processes to accelerate delivery.

Across organizations, 5Ps of Product point to recurring issues that emerge when automation is applied prematurely, including unclear problem definitions, misaligned priorities, and a lack of ownership over key tradeoffs. In these cases, teams move quickly but struggle to explain why a product exists, who it is for, or how success should be measured.

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Within the 5Ps of Product framework, tools and automation are positioned as enablers of execution, not substitutes for judgment. Decisions around scope, prioritization, and success criteria remain the responsibility of product leaders.

“The evergreen hard work of product management happens before anything is built,” Gunawardana added. “Once that work is done, automation can be helpful. Without it, teams are simply moving faster without alignment.”

Gunawardana has led product teams at Google, Snowflake, eBay, and LiveRamp, contributing to products that generated more than $2 billion in incremental revenue. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and engineering degrees from Stanford and Yale. He is also the co-founder of Inspire, a nonprofit that has helped more than 300,000 students.

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