Briefing: Notion connectors, Alexa’s AI pain, Reddit beats Google
Plus: TikTok’s new mobile strategy, how to maximize your 10x work, a new product for real-time analytics
Hi product people 👋,
Startups whose core value proposition is AI-powered knowledge surfacing may need to start working on additional use cases after Notion’s new feature was unveiled this week. Notion AI Connectors allows users to integrate with various third party apps to get answers to specific questions. The feature is launching with a connector to Slack which will offer users GPT-4 powered answers to questions like “what’s the mobile product team working on this week?”. More connectors with Google Drive, Jira, Github and other products are also on the horizon. You can watch a demo of it in action here.
Speaking of Slack, if you’re starting to get a little tired of it and want to explore some alternatives, this week we came across a new messaging app with a difference. Wallow is a messaging app that is specifically designed for product teams and focuses on product-centric communication. What this means in reality is that channels are organized around specific products called “productspaces” where communication is focused on just one product. Other features include delivery sentiment which taps into sentiment about how development on a feature is progressing, customer personas, team delivery visualizations and development patterns to stay on top of deployments. It’s still early days for the startup but a product-oriented messaging app is a neat idea.
Other startups worth mentioning this week include Tinybird who announced $30 million in additional funding for their real time data platforming product. Tinybird is a real time data analytics product which captures data from multiple real-time event sources and transforms it into API endpoints which can be used to get access to that data quickly. The startup counts companies like Canva, Vercel and Factorial as customers so far and the funding will be used to fuel its expansion further.
Finally, if you’re a Google Docs and Sheets power user, this tool might come in handy when you’re working on both at the same time.
Enjoy the rest of your week!
Key reads, tools and resources for product teams
New from the Department of Product Substack this week:
Knowledge Series - What does JavaScript actually do?
In this Knowledge Series we look at what JavaScript is and how it powers the web from a non-engineer’s perspective. With some real world examples from leading tech companies, we’ll explore how JavaScript is used today along with some practical snippets of JavaScript you can use yourself so that the next time someone in your company talks about it, you’re fully up to speed with the essentials. (Department of Product)
Skills - How to maximize your 10x work
We are stuck in a world of routines: Wake up, answer email, go to a meeting, then another meeting, check off an item from a todo list, and repeat. Andrew Chen makes a case against morning yoga, daily routines, and endless meetings. (Substack)
UX strategy - What if Netflix reintroduced its comments section?
Did you know that before 2018, Netflix had a comments and reviews section that allowed users to see other viewers’ reviews before watching? Some users threatened to cancel their subscriptions over the removal of reviews, as it limited their ability to evaluate content. In this piece, a UX designer explores how the UX of a Netflix comments section might work in 2024. (UX Planet)
Tech talk - How LinkedIn uses AI
LinkedIn’s Data & AI Tech Talk event explored how AI and Data form the bedrock of our business and engineering philosophy committing to fostering a safe, trusted and productive community through responsible AI principles. (LinkedIn Engineering)
Tools you can use
Flowriver - map out your product’s competitor’s screens
SQL workbench - query data from CSV files, JSON files and other sources - all in the browser
UImagine - transform your ideas into design and code from a prompt
Podcast - How to solve your company’s toughest problems
New product features, launches and announcements this week
TikTok is launching another standalone app. This time, it’s an Instagram-like photo sharing app called Whee. With other companies like Arc browser and Pinterest also launching separate standalone apps recently, this appears to be a new trend in mobile product strategy for larger companies who want to compete on specific use cases without polluting their core product with feature bloat. Potentially a smart move.
YouTube is experimenting with a new Notes feature that will work a lot like X’s Community Notes.
ElevenLabs has released a free open-source version of its new sound effects SFX API. It allows users to generate sound effects automatically from a small video clip. You can check it out here.
The new version of Amazon’s Alexa is running behind schedule, according to a new report. The reason, according to interviews with more than a dozen former employees who worked on AI for Alexa, is an organization struggling with structural dysfunction and technological challenges that have repeatedly delayed shipment of the new generative AI-powered Alexa. Amazon has also, former employees say, repeatedly deprioritized the new Alexa in favor of building generative AI for AWS. It sounds like tough product prioritisation decisions need to be made even in larger organisations with R&D budgets bigger than countries.
Snap has previewed an early look at a new feature that can generate AR features.
Meta has released its Threads API. It’s free and will allow developers to build “unique integrations” into Threads - and potentially even result in third party apps for Threads, as Reddit’s Apollo did before Reddit hiked their API prices.
Apple is ditching its native buy now pay later product, just over a year after launching it. But it’s excellent news for Affirm, who will now power its BNPL offering.
📈 Product data and trends to stay informed
Reddit search is growing and Google search isn’t. YoY desktop visits are up 39% and Google is down 2.2%. But is Reddit good enough to replace Google? A new study by the WSJ decided to pit the two against each other across 4 tests. Reddit comes out on top overall but while it might be growing YoY, it’s still dwarfed by Google in volume terms with 86 billion visits vs 2.4 billion for Reddit.
Waymo and Uber officially launched their partnership this week. Waymo’s AI powered rides have an average 4.9 star rating. Are users more or less likely to rank something high if it’s a robot? Perhaps we have more compassion and empathy for robots than strangers. Something to consider for product teams infusing AI into their products.
X’s revenue was about $1.5 billion in the first six months of 2023, down nearly 40% from the same period a year earlier.
A new trend on food delivery apps is emerging in China. Group bookings allow users in the same location to pool together orders from the same restaurant to drive down prices to as low as $3 per order. The goal is to make delivery so cheap that even frugal or low-income buyers can afford frequent orders in China’s post-Covid economic environment. Will the same trend start in the West, too?
The average customer acquisition payback period for a tech company has dropped from a high of 42 months to 36 months.
Apple says 2.2 billion of its devices are in use around the world, which will give OpenAI plenty of headroom to increase its 100 million weekly active users.
Other product news in brief
Perplexity has announced a strategic partnership with Softbank to expand into Japan.
Meta is restructuring its Reality Labs division into wearables and the Metaverse.
Apple has suspended work on a Vision Pro follow up to concentrate on a lower end model.
OpenAI’s co-founder Ilya Sutskever is launching a new AI company
The DoP Weekly Briefing is a product-led perspective of what’s happening in tech - and why it matters to product teams.
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