Explainable AI (XAI) for Product Managers: Bridging the Gap between AI Models and Business Needs

Product managers often grapple with integrating opaque AI systems into decision making all the while ensuring transparency, trust, and alignment with business goals. Explainable AI (XAI) is an emerging field targeting the transparency and interpretability aspects of AI. While considerable progress has been made in AI technology in the last few years, for the average non-technical user, the inner workings of AI are like a black box, still a mystery in the results and a potential misuse of the data by the AI systems. This paper proposes a robust framework –the XAI-Bridge Framework leveraging Explainable AI (XAI) to address these challenges. One of the significant principles of Explainable AI (XAI) is incorporating cutting-edge techniques such as model-agnostic tools like LIME [1], SHAP [2] to enable the users gain an understanding of the high-level behaviour of the model without needing access to its inner structure. These tools help the users with intuitive explanations and causal inference for deeper insights. Through real-world case studies spanning e-commerce personalization, retail demand forecasting, loan approval systems, and cancer diagnostics, this paper illustrates XAI’s capabilities to enhance model interpretability, reduce biases, and build stakeholder confidence. The results of this work include a practical, end-to-end methodology for setting explainability objectives, selecting optimal XAI tools, and assessing their impact on business metrics and compliance. Also, this work equips product managers with actionable strategies to seamlessly connect AI capabilities to organizational success.