Briefing: Stripe’s plant-based APIs
Plus: Global benchmarks report 2024, Where do OpenAI and Anthropic generate most of their revenues?
Hi product people 👋, Rich here with your DoP briefing. 295 readers have joined 46,000+ DoP subscribers since the last edition of the briefing - a warm welcome to you all.
Coming up today, we’re exploring the charming ways Stripe is managing its API releases, a major new set of features from Airtable, Microft’s Copilot refresh and a closer look at where OpenAI and Anthropic generate most of their revenues.
Enjoy the rest of your week!
Key reads and resources for product teams
New from the Department of Product Substack:
Deep: Navigation UX patterns explored
Studies have shown that well-designed navigation can result in a significant 37% improvement in task completion rates. In this deep dive, we explore the navigational styles and UX patterns of 20+ top tier companies including: YouTube, Linear, New York Times, Uber, Perplexity, Reddit and others. (Department of Product)
Case study - How Figma redesigned its core UI
Overhauling Figma’s interface meant reimagining how designers work. From docked panels to a new labeling system, here’s how Figma shaped what it calls UI3 by balancing user feedback with their vision for the future.
The product design process included:
Conducting "speed round" design critiques to efficiently address the numerous surfaces being redesigned.
Striking a balance between user feedback and design intuition, with careful consideration of the long-term implications of proposed changes.
Implementing a gradual transition strategy by providing users with the option to opt out of UI3 during the beta phase, allowing for iterative improvements based on real-world usage.
(Figma Design blog)
Report - Global product benchmarks 2024
What’s considered low, average, good, and best-in-class for enterprise products? Ho to improve feature adoption, active user growth, user retention, and more. Pendo’s global product benchmarks report is always worth a read. (Pendo)
From the 🧠Knowledge Series:
Podcast - How to manage the innovation process
Astro Teller is the Captain of Moonshots at X, Google’s secretive moonshot division. In this podcast, he shares key lessons for managing the process that delivers breakthrough innovations.
New product features and innovation this week
Airtable has launched a major set of new AI capabilities. The updates include a new App Library which allows companies to create standardized AI-powered apps that can be customized across an organisation. Apps can be created for things like OKR tracking or upcoming product launches and published in the library for other users across large organizations to use. The core schema of the app is locked down to ensure global consistency of apps but local versions can also be created and tailored for a specific team’s needs.
The other new major feature launched by Airtable is a new tool called HyberDB which gives companies the ability to store hundreds of millions of records in a single table and then build apps on top of it.
As Airtable gears up for its IPO, it’s clear that they’re doubling down on the enterprise market.
Meanwhile…
Stripe has streamlined its API product release process to make it easier for engineers to understand what’s changing in each version and why. The new release cadence combines twice-yearly major updates with monthly feature enhancements.
Each semiannual update major API release will be named after a 🌳 tree or plant because, according to the product / engineering leads at Stripe, “APIs are growing systems that need to be carefully maintained”. The first API release name is Acacia. A charming case study for product teams exploring ways to make API product releases easier to understand.
Shopify also announced a major change to its API: it’s going all in on GraphQL.
Udemy gave instructors the chance to opt-out of training its generative AI models. After the deadline passed, instructors can no longer opt out… and some instructors aren’t happy, saying the changes weren’t communicated clearly enough. Removing training data from a large language model after it is ingested isn’t trivial and the saga highlights just how important clear comms are if a product is using its users’ data to train proprietary models.
Snap has launched a new footsteps feature which allows users to see exactly where they’ve been.
And in other news…
Microsoft has given Copilot a redesign across mobile, web and desktop app. The UX is now more card-based and looks similar to the work of folks at Pi - a personalized AI assistant from which Microsoft hired a bunch of folks earlier this year, including DeepMind’s cofounder Mustafa Suleyman.
To mark the launch, Suleyman published an open letter outlining the product and design principles which underpinned the new version of Copilot. The letter also announced a series of new Copilot products including:
Copilot voice which allows uers to chat to their companion
Copilot Daily which kicks off a user’s morning with a summary of news, weather, reminders and events
Copilot Vision which can see everything you’re doing and chat to you about it in real time. It’s a little creepy but helpful for some use cases. Watch it here.
Suleyman is optimistic about the role Copilot can play in people’s lives and says that he expects AI to foster a “calmer, more helpful and supportive era of technology, quite unlike anything we’ve seen before”.
Tools you can use
Atlantix is designed to help you discover innovations from leading research institutions that you can potentially use in your product.
Quodo is a coding startup that differentiates itself by plugging into the end to end development process by running tests and embedding into GitLab and GitHub.
Pathway is for modern product teams who want to find relevant respondents and quickly validate UX solutions.
📈 Product data and trends to stay informed
OpenAI is generating ~73% of its revenues from ChatGPT subscriptions and is less dependent on API revenues. The opposite is true for Anthropic, according to analysis by FutureSearch, which estimates that Anthropic is generating over ~85% of its revenues from its API products.
This week, OpenAI announced a series of new updates and one of these will likely drop API costs down further. Prompt caching will allow engineers to re-use previously used prompts between different API calls.
Disney+ says over 10 million hours of content has been watched by users so far on its new Streams feature. Streams are live feeds of curated, continuous programming that allow subscribers to enjoy content without having to select individual titles. The company says that early indications show the launch of Streams is leading to an overall engagement uplift.
WhatsApp’s paid messaging feature has now generated revenues in the billions according to product chief Alice Newton-Rex.
Analysis of Stripe data found that AI startups have faster-growing revenue than previous generations of startups. AI start-ups took a median 11 months to hit $1mn in annualized revenue after their first sales on Stripe, compared with 15 months for the previous generation of SaaS companies, the data showed. But… given that AI startups have a much higher marginal cost than traditional SaaS companies, they don’t have much choice than to push for revenues as early as possible.
Despite high-profile exits, only 41 out of the 702 people - or about 6% - of OpenAI employees who signed the open letter to the board have left the company as of September 2024.
Other product news in brief
🧵 Meta has purchased the Threads.com domain after it was previously owned by a Slack competitor.
🧑⚖️ California governor Gavin Newsom has vetoed the state’s AI legislation.
💳PayPal reportedly opted users into data sharing for personalization without notifying users.
🎵 Sonos has outlined its turnaround plan after its new app rollout was a disaster.
The Weekly Briefing is a product-led perspective of what’s happening in tech - and why it matters to product teams.
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