Briefing: Apple Vision Woes and Airtable’s bold new product bet
Briefing: Apple Vision Woes and Airtable’s bold new product bet
Plus: Instagram QR codes, new product research startups, North Korean generative AI hoaxes
Hi product people 👋, Rich Holmes here with the Department of Product Briefing and a big welcome to the 325+ readers who joined since last week.
After the largely positive feedback from last week’s experimental YouTube episode, you can also watch this week’s briefing here too.
Coming up this week, we look at a big new bet from Airtable which pits it directly against Jira and Linear, the latest app figures for the Apple Vision Pro and some new startups which could help you with your product research efforts.
Enjoy the rest of your week!
Key reads and resources for product teams
New from the Department of Product Substack this week
Knowledge Series - Diffusion Models explained for product teams
The technology underpinning diffusion models is pretty complex but in this Knowledge Series we’ll unpack the essentials worth knowing about this generative AI technique.
Deep - What new AI features are product teams building?
A deeper look at new AI features from 25+ companies including Intercom, Ring, Tinder, Strava, Microsoft, Slack, Google Sheets, Gusto and others. Plus, opportunities and considerations for how product teams can use these technologies.
UX - The DNA of a great pricing page
What are the essential ingredients of a winning pricing page? In this piece, Elena Verna provides a comprehensive guide to creating an effective pricing page for B2B and SaaS companies. (Substack)
Process - How to use AI to improve your company’s collective intelligence
Collective intelligence is the shared intelligence that emerges from collaboration, collective efforts, and competition. It reflects groups’ ability to achieve consensus, solve complex problems, and adapt to changing environments. HBR’s Christoph Riedl makes the case for using AI to improve your company’s collective intelligence - with some practical steps on how to do it. (Harvard Business Review)
Podcast - Why DuoLingo’s CEO wants you addicted to learning
New product features and innovation this week
Airtable has unveiled a major new product release - designed specifically for product teams - called ProductCentral.
It pits Airtable directly against products like Jira and Linear by offering an integrated package that includes features like roadmaps, launches customer feedback and other product-oriented items in one place. Since Airtable already has existing integrations with hundreds of third party vendors, ProductCentral also comes with a bunch of integrations out of the box. It’s a bold move from Airtable and more competition in the product space dominated by Jira is definitely welcome.
Adobe has unveiled a new product which could be of interest to product designers. It’s called “Project Concept” and it’s an AI-powered mood boarding tool which looks a little bit like a Photoshop-powered Miro board, designed to be used in the early stages of a product design process. Not all designers are happy about the direction of travel towards generative AI, though.
Instagram is rolling out sharable QR codes that will allow users to create a personalized contact card and share it across other platforms. We covered QR codes in a previous Deep Dive, too.
Meanwhile…
A new startup showcased its capabilities at a demo day for VC firm Pear this week. It’s called Quno AI and its core value proposition is automating market research with AI. Quno AI uses AI agents to conduct phone calls with hundreds of customers, gathering both qualitative and quantitative data. It then analyzes each interview and combines it with survey data to produce an automated report which synthesizes and shares the most important learnings.
It’s early days for Quno but it already faces some stiff competition. This week, a new startup in the market research automation space called Strella raised an impressive $4 million in seed funding to automate customer research.
Founded by Lydia Hylton and Priya Krishnan, Strella’s AI moderator can conduct interviews, analyze responses, and synthesize findings in real-time, condensing timelines for gathering qualitative feedback. Definitely a space worth exploring for product teams who perhaps don’t have the budget for a dedicated user research team.
In other news…
Intercom has launched the second iteration of its chatbot Fin, with new capabilities including the ability to perform actions on behalf of users during customer support queries. Thanks to third party API integrations, Fin 2 can do things like assist customers with payment queries by checking Stripe for payment amounts and understand why payments weren’t processed correctly. It’s a step towards AI customer support agents becoming not just knowledge hubs but autonomous agents who can solve problems by performing actions.
Passkeys are getting a new feature: the ability to transfer from one password manager provider to another.
YouTube is working on a new “captured with a camera” label that will let users know if a video has been recorded using a recognised camera device to help users understand when content is human vs AI generated. Other new features include a fine-tunable playback speed which allows for smaller 0.05 increments and a Sleep Timer feature for users who watch videos in bed which lets users set a timer to automatically pause videos after a certain duration of time. YouTube’s Director of Product, Matthew Darby, says that during initial testing with Premium users, this feature was extremely popular.
Tools you can use
Scrintal is a tool which describes itself as a “playground for the mind”. It has an infinite canvas like Miro but works with blocks of embeddable information like a Notion Doc.
Fabloq lets you build APIs and documentation using a simple flowchart interface. Ideal for non-technical folks who want to get more involved in the API design process.
Question Base organises all of your decisions, answers and insights from your Slack chats into one place.
📈 Product data and trends to stay informed
Product teams and developers aren’t building much for the Apple Vision Pro. There were just 10 Vision Pro apps built last month.
If the Vision Pro was the MVP and a product team was tasked with finding out if there was an appetite for spacial - or more aptly, facial - computing devices, what conclusions would they draw at this stage? Maybe lightweight glasses like Meta's are the only form factor that people are willing to wear for long periods of time, or maybe the overall market for wearables is tiny? With Microsoft now out of the market altogether, the next few years look set to be an Apple vs. Meta showdown, and it'll be fascinating to see if either company can brute force consumer demand for spacial computing into existence.
OpenAI is projecting that it will reach profitability in 2029 at $100bn of revenue, with $44bn of cumulative losses to get there. Microsoft is also in line to get a 20% cut of all revenues as part of its partnership with OpenAI.
X is continuing to add new users to its premium plans with an estimated 1.4 million added during September.
A disturbing new trend has emerged where fake users are posting AI generated posts on social media, praising North Korea.
87% of teens own an iPhone and nearly 30% of teens plan to upgrade their Apple hardware in the next 6 months because of Apple Intelligence. TikTok remains the most popular social network among teens with 39% of respondents using this over other networks and Netflix remains the top streaming platform at 30% vs 27% for YouTube. Read the full Fall Piper Sandler Teens report here.
LinkedIn says there’s been a 35% increase in C-suite professionals in the U.S. using the product in the past five years.
Other product news in brief
🔐 Former Palantir exec Dane Stuckey is joining OpenAI as Chief Information Security Officer.
₿ Stripe has reintroduced crypto payment support.
🎧 Zoom has filed a patent which measures how engaged users are in meetings.
🫡 Generative AI startup Tome is laying off around a third of its workers as it re-pivots.
The Weekly Briefing is a product-led perspective of what’s happening in tech - and why it matters to product teams.
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