Spotify body scans and a controversial new spreadsheet
Spotify body scans and a controversial new spreadsheet
Plus: Netflix’s unconventional growth strategy, Zoom smart tags, more layoffs
Hi product people 👋,
The CEO of Intercom and the co-founder of Dropbox have invested in a new startup founded by a 22-year-old who thinks there’s a better way to build spreadsheets. The product is called Paradigm and aims to reimagine what a spreadsheet might look like in 2024. Unlike traditional Excel or Google Sheets, every cell in a Paradigm table is a potential generative AI environment which can be connected to external data sources from things like LinkedIn and GitHub. A prompt tells the spreadsheet what to do and Paradigm will automatically fill out - or ‘enrich’ - the spreadsheet at an average rate of 500 cells per minute.
It’s certainly a futuristic take on what the future of knowledge management could look like but the promotional videos used to mark the launch caused a bit of a stir. One of the use cases showed what appeared to be a manager creating a spreadsheet which pulls GitHub data to rank the most productive engineers based on their GitHub activity. I’m sure a few engineers will have something to say about that.
In other knowledge-based AI startup news, You.com (the company that originally launched as a search engine) has raised $50 million to continue building out a new category it calls “productivity engines” that helps with tasks like performing research, building custom agents and visual asset creation for workplace documents. You’s homepage is now split into dedicated productivity areas for roles including product management and engineering with pre-made templates for tasks like strategy creation or unit tests.
Meanwhile, it’s been a big week for the application of AI in healthcare. Google has trained models with 300 million pieces of audio including coughs, sniffles and laboured breathing to help detect disease when users wear headphones and Spotify’s CEO has opened the first of his body scanning service Neko in London.
Finally, if you’re looking for a way to automatically transform your written documents into visuals, this tool might help.
Enjoy the rest of your week!
Key reads, resources and tools for product teams
New from the Department of Product Substack this week:
Deep - New payment features and capabilities
PayPal confirmed that its new feature helped users convert by an impressive 80% of the time when compared to a traditional guest checkout. Stripe says Link boosts conversion rates by up to 7%. In this deep dive, we look at what new features payment companies like Affirm, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Revolut, Wise and others have released recently - and what this means for product teams. (Department of Product)
UX - How to clearly display choices to users
Good UX ensures that users make the correct choice the first time or, if they do make a mistake, that they don’t feel it’s the website’s fault. Presenting the difference in options explicitly is the first step in guaranteeing that users make the right choice. In this guide, NNGroup explains how to present choices to users effectively. (NN Group)
New tools you can use - Bucket: Feature flagging for B2B product teams with instant customer feedback
Roll out features and get instant feedback and adoption metrics to increase iteration velocity and customer satisfaction without creating any custom dashboards for product updates.*
➡️ DoP readers get 10% off Pro for 1 year with DOP0924.
Resource - 73,000+ books summarized using AI and free to read
If you’re feeling back to school energy this week and want to get stuck into some new ideas for learning, this new collection of free book summaries from the likes of Cal Newport, Chris Anderson, Kai-fu Lee and others might be worth a look. (Sobrief)
Case study - How Slack re-architected its APIs to support new customer growth
there are times when it’s worth revising the core architecture of a large software application. Recently, Slack’s engineering teams did just that, taking a step back to change how their backend and clients (the desktop and mobile applications) work on a foundational level. In this piece, they outline each of the steps they took to re-architect their application to support larger enterprise customers. (Slack Engineering)
Podcast - How to embrace ambiguity when making decisions
*sponsored by Bucket - feature flagging for B2B product teams with instant customer feedback.
New product features and innovation
Instagram Stories are getting comments. Story comments can be turned on or off for any individual post. If enabled, comments can be seen by anyone following an account, but only mutuals can leave comments. Spotify recently rolled out a commenting section on podcasts and studies have shown that commenting - and replying to comments - can impact overall engagement level significantly.
Amazon is reported to be turning to Anthropic’s Claude to power a new, AI-enabled device. Amazon has invested over $4 billion into Anthropic which makes the partnership a natural fit. The challenge for Amazon though, is that the underlying assumption which justifies its investment in Alexa - that users will buy more from Amazon if they have an Alexa device - hasn’t turned out to be true so far at least.
Snap’s CEO says the company is testing a ‘simplified’ version of Snapchat. In a letter to staff and shareholders, Evan Spiegel says early indications show that the changes have been ‘directionally positive’ during testing but it’s unclear if this simplified version will run in parallel to the existing version. It’s encouraging to see product leaders recognise bloat and take bold decisions to address it.
Zoom is adding a smart name tag that allows you to automatically assign names to people in physical locations. A nice idea for the days where half the team are in the office and the rest are working remotely.
OpenAI’s chief product officer Kevin Weil has invested in a new social startup which allows users to add their faces to any photos. Vybe lets users upload their selfies to a mix of templates that can include multiple people. The founders are differentiating the product by leaning heavily on network effects; in this case, the network is powered by user generated templates which users can add their faces to. Vybe said it has more than 100,000 user generated templates created so far - with that number growing since it requires little effort to create a template.
X has launched a beta version of its TV app that will allow users to watch content on smart TVs.
📈 Product data and trends to stay informed
AI coding startups are quickly becoming the most hotly contested sectors in the AI boom. This week alone, code creation startups Magic and Codeium confirmed a further $320 million and $150 million, respectively. The top five AI coding startups have collectively raised over $1.6 billion. Here’s how they compare:
Meta’s Llama models are approaching 350 million downloads to date and were downloaded more than 20 million times in the last month alone. Usage has grown 10x from Jan to July this year and Llama is now the leading open source AI model. Report from Meta.
68% of TikTok users say companies should use the comments section to better understand their customers. TikTok is now advising companies who use the platform to build collaboratively alongside users. Something to bear in mind for software product development too, perhaps. TikTok Shopping Trend report.
80% of OpenAI’s staff joined after ChatGPT launched and only 3 of the 13 people who helped found the company are still there.
10.58% of news websites are now blocking Apple’s bot which is being used to train its AI models. “applebot-extended” is blocked by the likes of Wired and the New York Times with more potentially on the way as exclusivity deals start to get enforced.
Other product news in brief
Netflix has a new, unconventional growth strategy.
Facial recognition company Clearview has been hit with its largest ever fine for data storage violations.
Character.ai is laying off 15% of its staff.
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 dive reports to learn from the strategies and new features released by top tech companies, The Knowledge Series for sharpening your tech skills and more.