Briefing: Poe power and Spotify’s new social strategy
Plus: YouTube gets an AI painkiller, Loom’s CPO on how to hire, State of the Cloud Report 2024
Hi product people 👋,
Welcome to the 325+ new subscribers who joined us this past week!
While OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity all dominate the headlines, there’s one company that’s quietly building out some strong AI products that are worth exploring.
Quora’s Poe has announced the launch of a neat new feature called Previews. It works by creating previews of code generated by the bot. Anthropic recently launched something similar but Poe is model agnostic, allowing users to choose between Claude, GPT and Gemini. Here’s an example of an app built using Poe and Anthropic’s Claude in action. For product teams, this could make crafting small proof of concepts a lot easier.
Speaking of building apps built with AI, Amazon’s AWS has unveiled a new tool called App Studio which is designed for non-developers and PMs in tech companies to create internal apps for things like data dashboards. All a user needs to do is describe they need along with any third party data sources they want to integrate with. It’s a neat idea that, if nothing else, should take the load off engineers and data scientists who are sometimes burdened with building internal apps.
Coming up in today’s DoP briefing:
Is Spotify trying to become a social network? And should it?
Bumble’s AI risk and opportunity
Japan ditches the floppy disk
Loom’s CPO talks product hiring strategies
Enjoy the rest of your week!
Key reads, tools and resources for product teams
New for Department of Product premium subscribers this week:
Deep - The UX of Forms explored
In this Deep dive, we go deep on how top tier tech companies like Airbnb, Linear, Uber, OpenTable and others design their form UX so that you can use this as inspiration for your own product’s features that are reliant upon forms. (Department of Product)
Leadership skills - How to delegate as a first time manager
Many people are promoted into management for doing their previous job well. But once you’re promoted into a leadership role, you must accept that you can’t do everything on your own — nor should you. Harvard Business Review explains how. (Harvard Business Review)
Tools you can use
Hebbia - the AI platform for knowledge workers
Flat - the simplest way for teams to collaborate with each other
Airbook 2.0 - if Notion did product analytics
Process - How to create a user research repository
As a research function scales, managing the growing research-related body of knowledge becomes a challenge. It’s common for research insights to get lost in hard-to-find reports. When this happens, research efforts are sometimes duplicated. Enter research repositories: an antidote to some of these common growing pains. (NN Group)
UX analysis - Why users are ignoring your product’s features
Without a predictable or immediate value anchor, onboarding is hard. Retention is even harder. But that's the reality for most software. In this piece, UX designer Peter Ramsey explains why users ignore features - and what you can do about it. (Built for Mars
Podcast - Loom’s CPO Janie Lee on how to pick, find and train the best PMs
New product features, launches and announcements this week
Spotify has started rolling out a new comments feature to podcasters app which will allow users to leave comments on specific podcast episodes. Spotify says the feature was one of the most requested by users. Adding social elements like comments makes sense as more socially-oriented apps like YouTube and TikTok start to eat into the music market, too. Could Spotify continue to add more social features to become more of a social network itself? The strategy could pay off as a tactic to fend off competition from TikTok and YouTube but any move towards becoming a social network is likely to alienate dedicated music listeners who want an app which was designed for its original purpose.
Instagram’s CEO has confirmed that the company has no plans to pivot to long-form video. One of the reasons he gives is that users are less likely to share long-form content with friends which would undermine Instagram’s viral potential.
A judge has thrown out some - but not all - of the claims in a lawsuit brought by developers against GitHub which alleges that the company committed digital piracy.
Bumble is releasing a new feature that will make it easier for users to report AI generated profiles. According to a new survey, Bumble says that 71% of the company’s Gen Z and millennial respondents want limits on the use of AI generated content on dating apps. If 29% of users are happy to interact with AI profiles, perhaps Bumble could build a dedicated offering for them? A new startup called Butterflies is doing just that - and the future of social could soon involve worlds which are coinhabited by humans and AI.
A new Meta AI model can generate 3D models from text. The models accuracy as assessed by groups including 3D artists and product designers and alongside use cases you might expect like movie and game design, the assets could eventually be used in Meta’s social products, too. Here’s some samples of it in action:
YouTube is rolling out a smart new AI feature that will detect and remove copyrighted music from videos - but leave the rest of the video intact. Just a few months ago, this type of activity would take editors hours to achieve. It’s an excellent example of AI as a painkiller, not a vanity feature.
📈 Product data and trends to stay informed
Almost 80% of the companies featured in a recent deep dive still use REST APIs as their primary architectural design choice. GraphQL is still popular with 21% of companies offering at least one GraphQL API including companies like GitHub, Shopify, Atlassian and PayPal but the hype around GraphQL has died down a little in recent years.
A new trend is emerging which sees companies shifting towards using smaller AI models for domain-specific knowledge. Experian and Salesforce are among the companies who support the shift according to the WSJ.
$3.9 billion has been invested in the code copilot industry and 29% of respondents of a new survey think that developers will be less relevant by 2030. Full State of the Cloud report 2024.
Remember floppy disks? Japan’s government has decided the time has come to ditch them. Over 1,000 regulations that regulated their use will also be scrapped.
Amex has acquired Tock, a high-end reservation table management app for $400 million after confirming that restaurants account for $100 billion of Amex’s volume spend.
Other product news in brief
Microsoft has withdrawn from OpenAI’s board as regulators start to scrutinize its relationship with the company.
Humane’s former head of product engineering has left to launch a fact-checking search engine instead.
Roblox has appointed Jerret West as its new chief marketing officer.
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The Department of Product’s weekly briefing is written by Rich Holmes. Thanks for reading and if you enjoyed this week’s briefing hit the like button ❤️ below!