If you've shipped software before — even just one feature — you have a mental model for how it works. You write a spec. Engineers build it. It either works or it doesn't. QA checks the boxes. Ship it.

AI products don't work like that. And the PMs who treat them like traditional software are the ones whose products fail in production, get ripped out 6 months later, and become cautionary tales at all-hands meetings.

Here's the fundamental difference:

Traditional software:  Deterministic
                       Same input → Same output → Every time

AI-powered software:   Probabilistic
                       Same input → Different output → Sometimes better,
                                                        sometimes worse,
                                                        sometimes wrong

That one difference changes everything. Your spec process. Your testing. Your success metrics. Your rollout strategy. Your support playbook. All of it.