Briefing: GPT flops, Facebook pokes and a letter from Stripe
Plus: LinkedIn adds gaming, how LLM API integrations work, rethinking the MVP
Hi product people 👋,
Welcome to the 350+ new readers who joined us this week!
Each year, Stripe’s co-founders write a letter to keep us in the loop with what the product teams have been up to at the company and how they see tech evolving in the year ahead. This year’s letter covers a broad range of topics from robotics to LLMs and the transformation of the SaaS industry.
One of the highlights worth noting for product teams is the company’s relentless focus on optimizing checkout conversions. This includes changes to pre-built Stripe payment links which drove a 3% conversion rate uplift for Slack, the announcement that the engineering team shaved 300ms off payment links to drive conversions further and new direct integrations with issuing banks which boosted transaction speeds. The full letter is well worth a read and if you’re working on payment integrations of your own, this Knowledge Series on the topic might be of interest, too.
Meanwhile, after launching to much fanfare earlier this year, OpenAI’s GPT Store appears to be failing. Developers have complained that nobody is using their apps and spam is a real issue, too. Given that the Pro version of ChatGPT is already $20 a month, some commentators are wondering whether it’s a little too ambitious to assume that users will pay for additional GPTs that offer marginal additional value.
One product that users are willing to pay for, however, is a new startup that raised $34 million this week. TheyDo is a new SaaS journey management platform that invites everyone (not just product and engineering) to think in terms of customer journeys. It can be used for everything from user journeys, OKRs, customer lifecycles and more. It’s certainly an intriguing concept that - if proven successful - could make life a lot easier for product teams. You can watch a demo of it here.
Finally, this week saw the conclusion of the 2024 South by South West Festival, where some of the world's top product and design leaders shared their views on the future of product design, and if you missed it, this curated recap of key takeaways should help.
Enjoy the rest of your week!
Essential reads for product teams
New from the Department of Product Substack this week
Knowledge Series - How does an integration with an LLM work?
What is an LLM and why are product teams integrating with them?
The basic technical components of an LLM integration
What you can do with an API integration with an LLM - real examples using OpenAI
3 examples of recent features from Notion, Amazon and Google which use LLMs to help you understand how to use them in your own product
The full list of the leading LLMs product teams can integrate with and how they compare
DoP Deep - The AI companies that want to replace us
A deeper look at the new companies looking to replace or augment product team members including engineers, product managers and product designers.
(Department of Product)
Free guide - How to manage product integrations at scale: comparing two approaches
If you're trying to scale your SaaS app's integration ecosystem, you've probably come across unified APIs and embedded iPaaS. Both of these tools are used by B2B SaaS engineering teams looking to save time building and maintaining integrations. There are major differences in how they approach the problem. This article will help get your bearings in this emerging space. (Paragon*)
UX - How to use use AI and UX to design intelligent experiences
Ioana Teleanu is an experienced design leader specializing in AI-powered products. Currently, she is the Lead Product Designer for AI at Miro. In this talk she explains how to exercise your critical thinking skills when it comes to integrating AI in your design craft, and how to build a solid ethical mindset around making design decisions in the Age of AI. (Ioana Teleanu, Miro)
Strategy - Rethinking the MVP
Today's Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is often about building a better version of an idea, not validating a novel one. It’s not good enough to be first with an idea. You have to out-execute from day 1. A new piece from the co-founder of product development software, Linear. (Linear product blog)
Case study - How GitHub manages to ship hundreds of changes every day
In 2020, engineers from across GitHub came together with a goal: improve the process for deploying and merging pull requests across the GitHub service. In this post, they explain how they did it. (GitHub engineering)
Tools you can use
Divriot - design in Figma using your product’s real data
GeniusSheets - talk to your spreadsheets like a coworker
Spoke - connect Jira, Slack, Notion and the rest of your comms stack, designed specifically for product teams
Interview - Figma’s CEO Dylan Field on the future of design
*sponsored content
New product features, launches and announcements this week
Threads is adding a trending now page on Threads, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has confirmed. New swipe gestures are also on their way which help to train its algorithm.
YouTube Music is rolling out a new feature that will allow users to search for a song by humming it. A dedicated button will allow users to press to sing into the phone for their favorite song.
SaaS management platform Productiv has launched a chatbot with a unique, but highly relevant use case for product teams. Sidekick allows finance and ops managers to ask it questions about which SaaS products are being used by the company. Great news for CFOs, but maybe not so great for the SaaS companies relying on underutilisation to boost profitability.
GitHub has released CodeQL, the company’s semantic code analysis engine. It promises that this new system can remediate more than two-thirds of the security vulnerabilities it finds - often without the developers having to edit any code themselves.
LinkedIn is planning to add new gaming features to the platform. Nobody is quite sure why.
📈 Product data and trends to stay informed
An old trend is back from the dead. Facebook “poking” has experienced a 13x spike in the last month. The social network is still remarkably popular with all age groups - including younger demographics. 67% of US adults 18-29 say they use it.
Brave browser downloads on iOS are on the rise after Apple was forced to offer alternatives during the sign up process. Good news for Brave but a jump from 8k a day to ~11k a day is still pretty small. Here’s a summary of some recommended alternatives to Safari if you’re interested.
85% of Americans use the internet daily and the average US internet user spends just under 7 hours online every day. 2 hours, 27 minutes are spent on social media. Full report from Sparktoro here.
Asian workers are more positive about the impact of AI in the workplace. 67% of Indian workers believe that AI has enhanced overall productivity in their workplace over the past year vs only 17% of American workers.
Is saying hello a waste of time? Stopping saying ‘hello’ at the start of a conversation is one of the best ways to boost productivity, according to ex Notion employee Ben Lang. If you’re interested in trying out the new trend at your company you can read more about it here.
Other product news in brief
The co-founder of Deepmind is joining Microsoft as CEO of Microsoft AI.
Twilio announced Thomas Wyatt as president of Segment and Inbal Shani as its new chief product officer (joining from GitHub).
Google has announced Liz Reid as their new Head of Search. She was previously responsible for leading the company’s new Search Generative Experience.
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.
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