Briefing: Bumble ditches a flagship feature, Google Maps' redesign and Pinterest’s gen-z win
Plus: Spotify Supremium, How Figma runs crits, a new tool for creating diagrams
Hi product people 👋,
Welcome to the 160+ new subscribers who joined us since last week!
Over the past year, product teams have been busy coming up with innovative names for the creepy, human-like clones that AI can now create. We’ve had avatars, chatbots, replicas and assistants but here’s a new one: digital twins. Designed for product customer success teams, digital twins is a new feature from SaaS product Sprinklr that helps team members create a clone of themselves that is visually represented inside a company’s org structure. The twin can be used for tasks such as answering questions from customers and colleagues, making decisions and even attending meetings on your behalf.
In other news, the product teams at Bumble placed a bold bet this week by ditching its flagship feature. Back in 2020, the then CEO of Bumble Whitney Wolfe Herd made it clear that women should be empowered to make the first move on the dating app. But this week, fuelled by a gen-z backlash, the company ditched this in favor of an “Opening Moves” feature which puts an open-ended question on a user’s profile that can be responded to instead.
Speaking of Gen-Z, Pinterest’s CEO this week confirmed that Gen-Z now makes up 40% of Pinterest's demographic and is also the company's fastest growing user group. In a wide ranging interview, the CEO confirmed that monthly active users hit an all time high of 518 million and its AI strategy was working well, thanks to the deployment of new machine learning models which improve pin recommendation accuracy by 10%. It's often difficult for a product to stay relevant to younger users as it matures but Pinterest seems to be doing a fine job at it.
Finally, if you’re addicted to opening new tabs every time you want to perform a new task, this handy tool might help.
Enjoy the rest of your week!
Key reads, tools and resources for product teams
New from the Department of Product Substack
Knowledge Series #34 - What is a vector database and why should you care?
Why this new type of database is essential for developing AI product features. Plus, real world examples of how companies like Pinterest, Airbnb and Spotify use vector databases to power their features.
(Department of Product)
UX - How to design cookie permissions
A guide to designing cookie permissions that balance respecting user privacy and being user-friendly from NN Group. (NN Group) Side note: Spotify does this very well.
Strategy - 7 battle tested strategies consumer products can use for retention
Great retention is a natural result of delivering the core product value to users, which of course varies by product. But recently, a few savvy consumer founders have found ways to improve retention by applying specific methods — in some cases, increasing their N-Day D30 retention by a whopping 10-15%. In this piece, Bryan Kim breaks down the tactics you can use to boost retention. (Andreesen Horowitz)
Process - How Figma runs ‘eng crits’ to give and get feedback
Inspired by design crits, engineering crits encourage a diversity of perspectives and unblock teams to pursue new ideas. In this post, the company explains what they are, how they work and the key steps to implementing them. (Figma Blog)
Report - 101 real-world generative AI use cases from the world’s leading companies
This in-depth report from Google Cloud gives you a snapshot of how leading companies are using generative AI in their businesses including Uber, Box, Paramount, Replit and more.
Tools you can use
Eraser - a new tool for creating architectural and design diagrams
Guardey - Duolingo but for raising security awareness at work
Illus - generate illustrations for your product instantly
New product features, launches and announcements this week
OpenAI is rumoured to be developing its own Search-based rival to Google and other new entrants to the search space such as Perplexity. Bloomberg reports that the new feature would let users search the web - and the company is reportedly trying to poach Google employees in the process.
Google Maps is undergoing a major redesign which removes several full screen UIs and replaces them with sheets that preserve background context.
Snapchat has launched new augmented reality (AR) and machine learning (ML) tools designed to help brands reach users. The new tools will enable users to experience AR inside new ad formats and the ML enhancements drastically reduce the time it takes an advertiser to transform a 2D asset into an AR experience.
Chrome is working on the ability to invoke Gemini from directly in the browser using the “@gemini” command.
Screenshots from Spotify’s new “Supremium” tier appear to have been leaked. Screenshots appeared on Reddit which include details about the new plan including hi-res, lossless audio. The company is also shifting its lyrics feature to premium only as it looks to nudge more users onto paid plans. Will other streaming companies follow with Supremium plans of their own?
Calendly has redesigned its browser extension to include a new “Meetings” tab which lets you join, cancel or reschedule them.
Amazon’s coding assistant and rival to GitHub Copilot is now live. Amazon says Q can help product engineering teams with all of their tasks including coding, testing, upgrading and performing security tests. You can see it in action here.
📈 Product data and trends to stay informed
Court documents have confirmed that Google pays Apple an eye watering $20 billion a year to be its default search engine in 2022. This is roughly equivalent to the revenues generated by Yelp, Instacart, Twilio and Spotify in the same year combined.
A new study found that ~85% of generative AI initiatives at Fortune 500 companies are focused on incremental improvements to products - and only 15% were pursuing more transformative changes such as expert task automation and hyper-personalization.
Live chat can boost conversion by an average of 9% but the positive effect is stronger when the information on web pages is less comprehensive. Full study.
Reddit’s revenues increased 48% to $243 million - and after suffering a backlash last year due to its API pricing, the company decided to take questions from its most important investors: its users. An AMA Reddit was set up for community members under the subreddit /RDDT.
TikTok is driving a new consumer trend among young users: money dysmorphia.
Other product news in brief
Peloton is laying off 15% of its workforce following a post-pandemic slump.
Audible’s chief product officer says it’s testing book recommendations using Prime viewing history.
Tesla is going ‘hardcore’ on its layoffs, just two weeks after it laid off 14,000 workers.
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