Product Managers Club: Three AI tools, three distinct roles

The article is published by Product Managers Club on Medium in April 2026. Its central argument is simple: ChatGPT, Claude, and NotebookLM look similar on the surface, but they are not interchangeable. PMs who treat them as equivalent end up using each tool for tasks where it performs poorly, and miss what each one actually does well.

The author draws on daily use across all three tools and describes a mental model for deciding which one to reach for in a given situation. ChatGPT is positioned as the best tool for open-ended generation and rapid brainstorming — it handles web search, code interpretation, and broad synthesis across many inputs. Claude is framed as better suited for tasks involving long documents, nuanced writing, and strict instruction-following — its strength is working with large bodies of text without losing the thread of the original request. NotebookLM is treated as a different category entirely: it is not a general-purpose assistant but a synthesis engine for your own documents, best when you want to query a corpus of notes, research papers, or transcripts you have already gathered.

The practical implication the author draws is not that you need all three tools, but that knowing the difference helps you stop reaching for the wrong one out of habit. Many PMs default to ChatGPT for everything because it was the first tool they learned, then wonder why Claude handles certain writing tasks better. The same logic runs in reverse: using Claude to search the web or run calculations misses what it is actually good at.

The article will be most useful for product managers who already use AI tools daily but have never mapped out where one ends and another begins. It is not a workflow tutorial — there are no step-by-step prompts or templates — but it offers a clear framing that can sharpen how you spend time with each tool. PMs who are new to AI tools altogether would benefit from getting basic practice first before the distinctions described here become meaningful.