Briefing: Apple DMA drama, Google Sheets goes smooth, Netflix’s churn success
Plus: How to conduct a product health check, Spotify's decision making framework, genAI’s controversial new use case
Hi product people 👋,
There seems to be a growing sense of fear in the air at the moment as each week, more new products get released which seem to threaten the existence of roles we take for granted. Last week, it was engineering, this week it’s user research.
A new early stage startup called Voicepanel describes itself as “the future of feedback” and promises to deliver user research at an unprecedented speed and scale. It works by recruiting your target audience, conducting interviews over voice or video and synthesizing all of the insights. It’s backed by Y Combinator and some of the use cases it lists include market research, product concept testing and one that’s particularly helpful for product teams: getting feedback on Figma designs. You can check out that use case here.
Meanwhile, this week marks final deadline for the introduction of the EU’s Digital Markets Act - something big tech has spent years preparing for. One of the companies that’s arguably been hardest hit by the Act is Apple and this week the company unveiled several changes to its services to comply with the DMA. Perhaps the most significant of these is the removal of Safari as the default browser for users and the introduction of support for third party app stores. Companies taking full advantage of these include Macpaw which has unveiled an app subscription platform outside of iOS and Mobivention - a new app marketplace.
But as well intentioned as these new rules are, there are likely to be unintended consequences which risk confusing users. For example, browsers are now randomly presented to users during onboarding and these include apps that the average user has never heard of.
Speaking of confusing users, another product worth exploring this week is this new tool which is designed to answer your users’ questions before they ask.
Enjoy the rest of your week!
Essential reads for product teams
New from the Department of Product Substack this week
Knowledge Series - How to conduct a product health check
Before deciding what to build next, it’s helpful to take a step back and assess your product’s performance - or health - today. In this guide, we explore how to conduct a product health check across dimensions including strategy, UX, technology and commercial performance. We’ve also included a simple one-page snapshot that you can use to communicate your own product’s health.
Chartpack - Product retention and churn rates part 2
How do your retention and churn rates look in context? An in-depth look at retention and churn rates at an industry level for B2B and B2C. We also explore the performance of specific products like Netflix, Atlassian, Adobe, HelloFresh and others.
(Department of Product)
Design - 7 insights for navigating B2B product design
Shifting from B2C to B2B software design isn't just a change of audience — it's a whole new playing field, says designer Pat Morgan. (
)Case studies - How Spotify uses a decision engine to make product decisions
Spotify uses its proprietary A/B testing technology to make product decisions. In this piece, the data scientists and engineers behind the technology explain how it works. (Spotify Engineering)
Interview - Signal’s Meredith Whittaker talks AI, privacy and security
Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation, joins Devin Coldewy for a conversation about the threats facing Signal and its mission, how Signal beat Apple in raising the bar on encryption and why NVIDIA is a “giant, core dependency” for the AI industry. (YouTube)
UX - Why building a chatbot is not (always) the answer
Product teams are rushing to integrate chatbots into their products - and in many cases this is a checkbox exercise to prove to customers (and execs) that you’re ‘doing AI’ In this piece, NNGroup discusses the use cases where chatbots may and may not be an appropriate solution in AI product design. (NN Group)
Tools you can use
Mapplic - create and embed beautiful maps into your product
Affine - craft documents, whiteboards, databases and to-dos in one place
Cleanmyphone - remove clutter and unwanted photos from your phone to free up space
New product features, launches and announcements this week
Google has unveiled performance improvements across Workspace - and some of these are relevant for product teams. First, Drive is getting a new bunch of search features that will allow users to search all file types - including videos. Sheets is also getting a smoother scrolling experience that will allow users to scroll through a specific part of a Google Sheet. Google says it's one of its most highly-requested features.
OpenAI is releasing a new “read aloud” feature for ChatGPT that will read ChatGPT text aloud. It’s available on iOS and Android.
Adobe has revealed an experimental new AI audio tool that can create music and other audio from text prompts. It is currently an experimental product known as Project Music GenAI Control and begins with a text prompt fed into a generative AI model, a method that Adobe already uses in Firefly. A user inputs a text prompt, like “powerful rock,” “happy dance,” or “sad jazz” to generate music. Once the tools generate music, fine grained editing is integrated directly into the workflow.
Stack Overflow is launching a new API that will give engineers access to its knowledge base. OverflowAPI includes over 58 million questions and answers, millions of user comments and post metadata such as votes and edits. The new API is in partnership with Google Cloud which could give Google a strategic advantage over its rivals. But how long will Stack Overflow (and its data) still be relevant for engineers if they can get answers elsewhere?
Anthropic has launched its latest version of its LLM, Claude. Claude 3 beats GPT-4 on benchmarks and its most advanced version, known as ‘Opus’ achieves near-human comprehension capabilities.
📈 Product data and trends to stay informed
Netflix is winning the streaming churn wars. Despite roughly doubling its churn rate over the past 5 years, it's proven remarkably resilient with churn rates of 2%, well below the industry average of ~5%. How long will its competitors realistically survive?
Just 7% of Apple’s App Store revenue is generated in the EU, leading some commentators to start questioning whether it’s worth operating there in the face of stricter regulation.
TikTok says its revamped creator fund increased revenue by over 250% in the last 6 months. Its live subscription monetization tools is also being renamed to “Subscription”.
European startups raised $61.8 billion last year and climate tech overtook fintech for the first time as fintech dropped to just 12% of funding. SaaS accounted for 31% and AI accounted for 33%. Full report from Orrick here.
A new trend involving generative AI is causing quite a stir: ghost kitchens for food delivery companies are using it to create images of food that doesn’t exist.
Nigerians are skipping traditional banks as a payment method and turning instead to a local startup Moniepoint. 2.3 million businesses now use the technology in the region.
Other product news in brief
Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin was spotted in tense meetings at the company’s Mountain View HQ.
TikTok’s parent ByteDance’s revenue rose 43% year on year to $30.9 billion.
Mistral has announced a major partnership with Microsoft.
The DoP Weekly Briefing is a product-led perspective of what’s happening in tech - and why it matters to product teams.
If you want more than the weekly briefing, paid subscribers also get access to The Knowledge Series, in-depth DOP Deep dives to learn from the experiences of top tech companies and data Chartpacks to feed your product brain and stay ahead.
The DMA will be very interesting to keep an eye on. I feel like where the EU goes many states tend to follow. Especially California. Of course lawsuits tend to follow as well. Definitely stuff to pay attention to.