Briefing: Slack treasure troves, Face swaps, Spotify components
Plus: A new tool for testing, Plaid’s new CPO, Security and privacy trends for product teams
Hi product people 👋,
Welcome to the 600+ readers who joined us this past week!
Slack’s chief product officer Noah Weiss says their new feature is designed to help companies solve the problem of finding ways to surface hidden treasure troves of knowledge. This week, the company confirmed that it’s releasing a new AI feature that summarizes long threads and messages you might have previously missed. This raises an important question, though: do you trust it to summarize something as critical as workplace messages where knowledge accuracy is so important?
Product development platform Linear’s CEO has made it clear he’s not a fan of embedding AI assistants into products for the sake of it. This week, he confirmed the company has a whole roadmap of its own AI features planned but is focused on practical use cases with a low risk profile, rather than just adding chatbots as a check box exercise.
Meanwhile, a new startup that’s very relevant to product teams has raised $47m. Antithesis is a software automation set up by former employees at FoundationDB which Apple acquired in 205. Antithesis' product continuously scans the newest version of software under development for bugs inside a separate environment that is simulated to work just like production. The company’s founders say this eliminates the need for developers to manually write their own tests and if this is indeed the case then it’s not difficult to see why they’ve managed to raise such a large seed investment round.
Other new products worth exploring include a tool that has seemingly drawn inspiration from the account sharing crackdown recently imposed by companies like Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime. Rupt is designed to help product teams monitor and prevent account sharing - which it claims costs some companies up to 45% of their revenues.
Finally, if you’re looking for ways to level up your writing skills, this new product might help.
Enjoy the rest of your week!
Essential reads for product teams
New from the Department of Product Substack this week
Deep - What AI features are the world’s top product teams building in Q1 2024?
In this DoP Deep, we explore the new ways top tech companies including Stripe, Roblox, Quora and more are integrating AI into their products so that you can stay in the loop - and more importantly - consider how these new features and developments might help you craft your own product’s AI strategy.
Chartpack - Security threats and privacy trends for product teams
Security is no longer the responsibility of SecOps and DevOps only. Thanks to the rise of generative AI, product teams now have to be increasingly vigilant about the new ways criminals can cause catastrophic damage. In this Chartpack we go deeper into some different types of security threats to explain how they work.
(Department of Product)
Case studies - How Spotify uses components without creating a fragmented user experience
Spotify’s engineering team explains how they use React components in the header of the core product to prevent duplication and maintain consistency. (Spotify Engineering Blog)
Product concepts - What is Conway’s law and how does it help you create internal product processes?
The theory gained popularity when it was cited by Fred Brooks in the iconic book “The Mythical Man Month.” It can often have a significant impact on a company’s operational capabilities. In this piece, researchers explain what happens when you try an alternative approach. (Atlassian blog)
Strategy - How to align machine learning models
Google ML engineer Logan Thornloe explains why alignment is critical when building ML models and how to do it. Alignment ensures AI systems achieve desired outcomes and align with human values, goals, and ethical principles. It means the outputs of ML systems not only align with the creator’s intentions, but also that these systems are safe and reliable for users. (Society’s Backend Substack)
UX - The problem with ‘Free trials’ in UX
A look at the complexities involved in offering free trials in your product, using Adobe’s Creative Cloud as a case study. (Growth Design)
Tools you can use
Superlist - all your to dos for personal and professional work in one place
Outverse - a beautifully modern way to create customer support for SaaS products
For.um - a headless forum solution to help product teams create communities
Fima - a new whiteboard canvas collaboration designed with product teams in mind
New product features, launches and announcements this week
Google renamed its AI offerings from a series of disparate names including Bard and others, into one single brand: Gemini. It’s a welcome move that shows a little more strategic clarity than its previous efforts in attempting to unify product names (Allo, Duet, Duo, Google Chat and others are a testament to that). First impressions are a little mixed, though.
Meeting transcription product Otter has added a bunch of new features, including the ability to search past meetings and a chat interface that can be used to ask questions about previous meetings.
WhatsApp is experimenting with interoperability in its efforts to stay compliant with new EU regulations. It will be interesting to see what the consequences of this are in Europe. Does exposure to third party messaging services encourage users to switch to another provider? Apple is apparently not keen on interoperability which does feel like a missed opportunity for them.
TikTok is launching a series of local language “election centres” to curb the spread of misinformation ahead of upcoming elections.
OpenAI is reportedly working on a new software product that is focused on task automation, inching us one step closer to agent-driven experiences and away from user experiences - particularly for chores that bore us.
📈 Product data and trends to stay informed
The percentage of frauds which involve deep fakes has risen from less than 1% in 2022 to almost 5% in 2023. The practice of ‘face swapping’ - where users steal someone’s face and swap it for their own - also increased a massive 704% in H2 of last year vs H1.
Microsoft mentioned Copilot 52 times during its recent earnings call. Surface got zero mentions and Bing was mentioned just once. But… a new report in the Wall Street Journal suggests that execs are starting to question whether it’s really worth $30 per employee. Some users have taken matters into their own hands and launched an app to remove Copilot from Windows entirely.
OpenAI is now reportedly at a $2bn annual revenue run rate, according to the FT. And it’s generating 100 billion words a day.
A new trend in China is starting to take hold: parents are buying their children $1255 AI-powered tablets, following a clampdown on after-school tutors by the government. The tablets look like iPads but come with LLMs that can scan and grade schoolwork.
Less than 100 startups became ‘unicorns’ in 2023. AI was the leading sector, adding 20 new unicorns.
The average number of hours spent using mobile apps a day was 5 hours in 2023, up 6% from 2022 to reach new highs. Indonesia is number one, with 6 hours a day spent in mobile apps. Some of the fastest growing countries include Japan, Australia and Canada with growth of 18%, 16% and 16% respectively. Chartpack on mobile app economy.
Over 50% of the apps currently in Apple’s Vision Pro visionOS App store are paid-only vs 5% of apps in the general App Store.
Other product news in brief
Instacart is laying off 250 people as it pushes for higher margins.
An influential co-founder at OpenAI is leaving the company. But it’s not the first time: he previously left in 2017 for Tesla.
Mark Zuckerberg says the Quest is the “better product, period”.
Plaid has unveiled Jen Taylor, ex-CPO at Cloudflare, as its new president.
The Department of Product is now officially a Substack bestseller with over 40,000 subscribers and hundreds of paid subscribers from companies including Apple, Amazon, Stripe, Microsoft and more.
If you want to join them, paid subscribers also get access to The Knowledge Series, in-depth DOP Deep dives and Chartpacks to feed your product brain.
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