Briefing: Google Meet's new audio, Granola and PayPal ads
Plus: OpenAI accusations, How to design for UI density, the most popular sign in options explored
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Hi product people 👋,
If your return to work this week has been filled with back to back meetings, this new product could be worth exploring. Granola takes the raw notes and bullet points you wrote in a meeting and organizes them into an easier to read format. Super helpful for the times when you look back on your notes and wonder what exactly they’re referring to.
Meanwhile, OpenAI continues to sign major partnerships as it looks to cement its dominance as the preferred AI partner for enterprise. This week, PwC became OpenAI’s largest ChatGPT enterprise customer as the company said it would roll out ChatGPT enterprise to its 75,000 US employees and 26,000 UK employees. Alongside PWC, major news corporations like the FT, NYT and others have also announced deals. But, given their recent troubles, how many more companies will choose OpenAI as their preferred partner? An ex-OpenAI board member painted a pretty grim picture of the company this week which included accusations that CEO Sam Altman misled and lied to board members, along with revelations that the board first learned about the launch of ChatGPT on Twitter.
In other news, following in the footsteps of Uber, Instacart and others, this week saw another product announce the launch of ads as a new monetization strategy. After helping Uber reach $1 billion in ad revenues, PayPal unveiled former Uber exec Mark Grether to lead its new ad product.
Finally, if you’re currently figuring out how to prioritise what to build next in your own product, this free webinar on prioritisation frameworks might be of interest.
Enjoy the rest of your week!
Key reads, tools and resources for product teams
New from the Department of Product Substack this week:
DoP Deep - Homepage UX explored
How are top tier tech companies designing homepages in 2024? In this Deep dive, we explore in-depth the homepage UX of top tier tech companies including Intercom, Perplexity, ElevenLabs, Figma, Linear, Rippling, Grammarly, DuoLingo and others. Attributes explored include: the registration methods they offer, navigational styles, components, button CTAs and more.
(Department of Product)
UX - What is UI density and how do you design for it?
Information density can be related to visual density. Usually, the higher the information density is, the more dense a visualization will look. If you’re building interfaces like dashboards or other data-led screens, this guide should help. (Matthew Strom)
Free webinar - Fibery 2.0 introduces Life after RICE
Traditional prioritization methods like RICE often rely on subjective assessments, making it difficult to align priorities and make informed decisions. But is there life after RICE and can we bring a more scientific approach to product prioritization?
Join Fibery's upcoming webinar to see what fact-based prioritization might look like.
(Fibery*)
Skills - 3 ways to clearly communicate your company’s strategy
Crafting a strategy is one thing but communicating it is another. In this guide, Harvard Business Review explains how to effectively communicate your company’s strategy.
(Harvard Business Review)
Interview - Linktree’s CPO on why all product teams should have a scorecard
Jiaona “JZ” Zhang is the Chief Product Officer at Linktree, the world’s leading link-in-bio platform empowering 45M+ creators, brands and SMBs. JZ joined Linktree from Webflow, where she served as SVP of Product and prior to that she was in product at Airbnb. (20VC)
Tools you can use
Anecdote - uncover bugs and UX issues from customer reviews
Hex - an all-in-one collaborative workspace for creating interactive data
Converse - create a central hub for all of your Google Docs, Miro boards, Figma files and more
*Sponsored by this week’s partner, Fibery - build your own work and knowledge hub
New product features, launches and announcements this week
Google Meet is adding adaptive audio to its core product which will make it easier for groups in the same room to join the same call without worrying about echoes or audio issues.
Canva has announced a series of new updates including the launch of an entirely new product: Canva Enterprise. The new offering includes a series of visualization and productivity tools including docs, presentations, data visualizations and more. The new series of products means Canva has its sights set firmly on Google Workspace and Microsoft Office as it looks to widen its strategy to include enterprises as well as its traditional user base of hobbyists and casual designers. The announcement was also marked by a unique dance performed on stage which wouldn’t have looked too out of place on an episode of HBO’s Silicon Valley. Watch it here.
Notion has launched a new dedicated home tab called ‘Home’ which allows users to add their favorite widgets to a single page. Many users were already doing this with custom built dashboards but Home is the first native version of this use case.
Microsoft has unveiled a Copilot bot designed to work in messaging app Telegram. Copilot for Telegram is currently in beta but it will allow users to interact with Copilot in all the ways you might typically interact with a bot. It’s one of the first third party partnerships Microsoft has launched for Copilot and it will be hoping to get a head start over Meta and Google to become the de facto partner for chat bot integrations.
Strava has announced a series of new AI features at its annual Camp Strava event.
Apple has announced the finalists for its annual Design Awards - always worth a look for product teams who want to get inspired by some of the finest examples of product design.
📈 Product data and trends to stay informed
Facebook sign in isn’t quite as popular as it once was. Email and Google now lead the way as the primary sign up options for product teams with over 90% of top tier products offering these as default sign up options. But some SaaS companies are also supporting more niche sign up options like Stripe, Xerox and others. A smart tactic for attracting clients put off by high switching costs.
A new study from the Wall Street Journal ranks Perplexity as the top performer for AI tasks and dimensions including health, finance, cooking, work writing, creative writing and coding.
Food delivery apps Deliveroo, Just Eat Takeaway, Delivery Hero, and DoorDash have racked up $20.3B in combined operating losses since they went public, according to analysis from the FT.
Revenue from ChatGPT’s mobile app increased by 22% on the day GPT-4o was announced.
The number of LinkedIn members adding skills like Copilot and ChatGPT to their profiles was 142 times as great as in the year prior, according to the 2024 Work Trend Index from Microsoft and LinkedIn. New tech job postings fell from an average of around 308,000 a month in 2019 to 180,000 a month as of April. Read the Work Trend Index.
About 40% of S&P 500 companies discussed AI on their earnings calls this past quarter — up from 1% five years ago.
Other product news in brief
Anthropic has hired former OpenAI safety exec Jan Leike to lead its safety efforts.
Spotify is ending support for its hardware device, Car Thing.
FourSquare has laid off 105 employees.
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.
Excellent summary as always! Agree that PayPal ads seems inevitable in retrospect but not so sure if it's a good idea. I wonder what privacy protections there are.