Briefing: Coda Brain, Perplexity Pages, Zoom calls without people
Plus: How to ask smarter questions, Threads’ Taiwan success, machine learning features explored
Hi product people 👋,
With Google Docs and Notion often grabbing most of the attention in the workplace docs space, Coda doesn’t always get the love it deserves. This week, the company unveiled an impressive flagship new feature called Coda Brain. The feature is powered by Snowflake and works by allowing users to ask any questions about their company's documents and data. The results provide sources to reduce the risk of hallucination and these results can then be transformed into a live Coda block and embedded directly into a document.
A Brain API is also in development to allow engineers to use the same data to build reporting dashboards which could be super helpful for product teams. It’s currently in beta and you can learn more here.
Speaking of workplace docs, AI startup Perplexity has announced the launch of a new feature called “Pages” - a Google Docs / Notion style document editor that can embed the generative AI content it creates into a beautifully designed page. Perplexity is an excellent product but given the high levels of hallucinations, there is a risk here that putting its results into a document that looks professional may lead to folks forgetting to double check all sources before publishing or sharing it.
Google is learning this the hard way with the rollout of its much-criticised AI-powered search overviews. New analysis this week shows that the company's overviews are now only appearing in 15% of search queries vs 84% when it first launched.
Finally, if you’re on the lookout for a tool to make your market research and user research interviews easier, this new startup might help.
Enjoy the rest of your week!
Key reads, tools and resources for product teams
New from the Department of Product Substack
Deep - How are companies using machine learning?
A deep dive into some new ML-powered features from specific companies including Strava, TikTok, Stripe, Spotify, Snapchat and other new companies you might not have heard of. Designed to help inspire and inform your own product’s roadmap. (Department of Product)
UX - Design systems vs style guides explained
Design systems are a set of standards (like Google’s Material Design or IBM’s Carbon Design System) needed to manage design at scale. Style guides (like content or visual style guides) are just one piece in a design system. Kelley Gordon explains the differences product teams need to know. (NN Group)
Productivity - 25 AI prompts to make product managers’ lives easier
With AI prompts, product teams can work smarter and make better decisions. In this guide from Atlassian’s product team, they share some of the prompts worth knowing. (Atlassian blog)
Case study - How GitHub reduced its testing time for its mobile app
The GitHub iOS team previously used a single workflow with one job to build and test the entire codebase on GitHub Actions that took 38 minutes to complete. This post explains the performance improvements that were implemented to speed up testing time. (GitHub blog)
Leadership skills - How to ask smarter questions
The late scholar and business thinker Sumantra Ghoshal once said that leadership means making happen what otherwise would not. Asking questions is an important part of this process. In this piece, HBR explain how. (Harvard Business Review)
Tools you can use
Taloflow - make decisions about which tech vendors you use fast
Payfill - auto-fill card details for testing ecommerce checkout flows
Maze - an all-in-one product discovery tool for product teams
Interview - Google’s CEO on the future of search
New product features, launches and announcements this week
Instagram is currently testing a new type of ‘unskippable ad’ which forces users to watch an ad before they can continue to swipe to the next screen. While Instagram has always been ad-funded, this would be the first time the company has introduced this type of format. With Meta’s ad revenues at over $130 billion a year, one does wonder whether this is a step too far - or perhaps Meta is looking to take a leaf out of the YouTube playbook and allow skippable ads at a price.
Microsoft’s recently announced Recall feature is shaping up to be a privacy nightmare. One engineer posted on X how easy it might be to get access to someone’s viewing history. How long until Microsoft pulls the plug on this completely?
ElevenLabs has moved beyond speech for the first time with the launch of new generative AI sound effects.
Zoom’s CEO says he wants a future where users can send their AI twin to attend a meeting on their behalf. This sounds ideal for the times when you really don’t feel like it’s necessary for you to attend a meeting but what happens if you do attend and you’re the only human on the call?
Discord has confirmed that it will revamp its product strategy to focus more on the user segment that fuelled its growth in the first place. In the age of growth at all costs, it feels refreshing for a product leadership team to be completely dedicated to a specific group of users these days.
Mistral has unveiled its alternative to GitHub copilot with the launch of a new coding tool. Codestral is fluent in over 80 programming languages including Python, Javascript and Swift.
📈 Product data and trends to stay informed
Despite its recent troubles, OpenAI continues to be the market leader for powering company chatbots, with ~60% of the companies featured in Department of Product analysis using them to power their chatbot.
Facebook’s Head of Product is leading a new strategy to target Gen-Z users. Just 32% of teenagers use Facebook but usage among young users is up year on year - particularly in Facebook Marketplace. The plan is to explore which areas of Facebook are most used by younger users and package this up into a more coherent, targeted offering.
Shutterstock generated over $130m last year and is on track to do more this year by licensing its media to AI models. Impressive numbers but is this a case of Turkeys helping Santa wrap Christmas presents?
SaaS startup funding is falling to record lows. 2024 YTD funding is $4.7 billion so far this year but is on track to be down year on year.
28% of Americans say they have used generative AI at work vs 20% of UK citizens, 19% of French citizens and just 12% of Japanese citizens. Full report by Oxford University.
Threads is doing exceptionally well in Taiwan with over 1.8 million active users using it to organise protests.
Other product news in brief
Microsoft is laying off over 1000 in its cloud and mixed reality groups.
Spotify is launching a music only tier.
Salesforce is opening its first AI centre in London.
Google’s chief privacy officer is departing after 13 years.
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 Chartpacks to feed your product brain and stay ahead.