Google takes Notes for you, Copilot risks, Nvidia agents
Google takes Notes for you, Copilot risks, Nvidia agents
Plus: How Amazon's CEO saved 4,500 years of engineering work, free APIs for testing, does market share matter any more?
Hi product people 👋,
Amazon’s CEO says the average time it takes to upgrade programming language versions has dropped from 50 days to just a few hours. He estimates that using Amazon Q (its generative AI coding assistant), has meant it saved the company 4,500 years of work. There’s clearly a bit of salesmanship here given that Amazon has a generative AI product to push, but the figures have done little to stop the claims that AI could have a significant impact on the future of engineering.
And this week, a new star arrived onto the AI coding scene.
Cursor pitches itself as an AI coding editor that works like a traditional text editor that engineers might use but with the ability for users to simply describe what they want to build. One user shared a video of his 8 year old daughter building an app from scratch which is worth a watch for a glimpse into the potential future of the product development process.
Meanwhile, other products worth exploring this week include this free collection of publicly available APIs which could be useful if you’re looking for off the shelf APIs to use in your product at no extra cost. One of which could be super helpful is this random user generator which makes testing a lot easier by randomly generating things like usernames, emails and addresses in helpful formats like JSON or XML.
Coming up in today’s briefing:
Google Meet gets new note taking capabilities
Telegram’s scale in context
Exec changes at Apple and Shopify
Why some chief data officers are hitting pause on Copilot
Enjoy the rest of your week!
Key reads, resources and tools for product teams
New from the Department of Product Substack this week:
Knowledge Series - How to use Perplexity to automate product market research
In this Knowledge Series, you'll learn how to use Perplexity's core features to conduct product market research, as well as some practical examples of how you can use Perplexity's API to build your own autonomous AI workflows that will conduct useful market research on your behalf. (Department of Product)
Strategy - Does market share still matter?
Market share regularly ranks amongst the most important KPIs for C-suite executives. And for good reason: Larger market share has long been associated with higher profitability. But does this relationship still hold today, given companies’ increasing digitalization? Harvard Business Reviews analyses the relationship between market share and profitability. (Harvard Business Review)
New QA features - Ensure Faster Releases with Comprehensive Bug Reports
As a Product Manager, keeping your teams aligned and moving fast is key. Bug Capture streamlines the handoff between QA and development by capturing all the details - screen recordings, console logs, and metadata - in one clean report. Reduce back-and-forth between teams, accelerate releases, and maintain product quality.*
UX - How to create better UX through Information Architecture
Understandability has very real business consequences. Reducing cognitive load is a prerequisite to engagement and conversion. People won’t buy or use things they don’t understand. UX designer Jorge Arango explains why semantic structures matter in product design. (Jorge Arango)
Tools you can use
Mixpeek - pull important data from Sheets, Docs, PDFs, ppt and more
Linky - keep your org chart on auto-pilot in Slack
Noteey - an all in one canvas for deep thinking and making sense of complex topics
Podcast - Does anyone in big tech actually work?
In this episode of Techish, Michael and Abadesi discuss the comments made by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt about Google being a laggard in AI due to being 'too soft'.
*sponsored by Browserstack - empowering developers to build amazing experiences.
New product features and innovation
Google Meet has released a new feature called “take notes for me”. Notes are transcribed during the meeting into a Google Doc which is then automatically added to the calendar invite and emailed to all participants. It also gives late attendees a chance to catch up with what’s happened in a meeting so far. For product teams, this could be helpful for activities like user research sessions or daily standups (assuming you want everyone to know what was said in those meetings, of course).
Midjourney has ended its requirement for users to create a Discord account to access the product. Users can now go to the Midjourney website instead. The company is also getting into hardware.
Nvidia has launched a series of “Agent Blueprints” - a set of pre-trained, customizable AI workflows designed to accelerate the development and deployment of generative AI applications. Initially, Nvidia has released blueprints for three core use cases: digital humans for customer service, generative virtual screening for drug discovery, and multimodal PDF data extraction for helping companies with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
Snapchat has officially launched an iPad app - 13 years later. The app is fully functional in portrait mode and gives users access to all of the AR features available on mobile devices. There are reports that Snap is also working on a new set of AR glasses set to be unveiled next month.
Lyft is the latest company to add ID verification for safety purposes. But this verification program will be for verifying riders, not drivers. While much of the attention has been focused on the safety of riders up until this point, drivers can also face safety risks like carjacking and other crimes. It’s not mandatory but it could mean that verified riders become the preferred option for Lyft drivers.
X appears to be testing a new Zoom competitor called X Conference. Perhaps it will eventually replace Spaces.
📈 Product data and trends to stay informed
Telegram has over 950 million users and its CEO previously told the FT that each user cost only 70 cents a year to support. Following the news that Telegram’s CEO has been arrested, here’s how its user base compares with other comparable products for context:
52% of US under-30s use TikTok for news and politics. Pew report on use of TikTok.
50% of Chief Data Officers have hit pause on their Copilot rollouts pending a review of high security data being inadvertently leaked into Copilot search results. One risk is that they summarise data employees shouldn’t have access to - like salary information.
Image generation apps make up 41% of the world’s top generative AI products and ChatGPT is still the world’s most used gen AI product across web and mobile. However, Claude and Perplexity are now growing faster than ChatGPT. Report by A16Z.
Threads is now the second fastest growing mobile app in the UK with 1.8 million new users added between March and June.
Other product news in brief
Brave is laying off 27 employees as it pivots from crypto features to AI.
Dropbox is acquiring the scheduling startup Reclaim.ai.
Apple is getting a new CFO after Luca Maestri announced he will step down on January 1, 2025.
Shopify has hired a new CTO, Mikhail Parakhin.
The Weekly Briefing is a product-led perspective of what’s happening in tech - and why it matters to product teams. Paid subscribers also get access to in-depth DoP Deep dives to learn from the strategies and new features released by top tech companies, The Knowledge Series for sharpening your tech skills and more.