Briefing: YouTube’s big bets, Snap slumps, Airbnb’s Winter Redesign
And: How to add ads to your product, Google Maps’ new search, Copilot code churn
Hi product people 👋,
YouTube’s CEO Neal Mohan has outlined the company’s 4 big product bets for 2024. Alongside more predictable focus areas like AI and supporting the creator economy with next-gen editing tools, the CEO has finally put a major part of the business center stage: subscriptions. Just as Amazon has quietly built the world’s third largest advertising company, YouTube has quietly transformed itself into a subscription superpower with over 100 million paying subscribers. YouTube still beats Netflix as the top streaming service in the US and the focus on paid subscriptions reinforces the idea that the days where product leaders were forced to make a binary choice between either an ad-funded model or a paid subscription model are over.
A YouTube company spokesperson also confirmed that a Vision Pro app was “on the roadmap”. But as product teams well know, this could mean that the app is indeed on the roadmap or that it’s on a card floating in a Jira board somewhere in product purgatory awaiting prioritisation. Whatever the case, it’s clear from early reviews of the device that the lack of a native YouTube app is potentially hurting the company as users have now taken to paying for an alternative created by the developers of the much loved Reddit app Apollo.
Speaking of Vision Pro, designers have had fun crafting mock ups of what a swipeable full body persona might look like on Tinder, but this week many product teams have been seriously pondering whether or not to build a native app for the device. We covered product opportunities in spatial computing previously but if you are looking for some inspiration, this directory of VisionOS apps is super helpful.
Meanwhile, this week, major tech companies announced their latest earnings reports. It’s fair to say that Spotify impressed, Snap didn’t and Uber finally seems to have built a profitable business. Part of Uber’s success is the incredible ads business the company has built, which CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said last year was on track to do $1bn in revenues this year.
Finally, if you’re looking for an alternative to Asana, Notion or Confluence, the new announcement from Todoist might be something to consider.
Enjoy the rest of your week!
PS if you want more than the Weekly Briefings, you can ask your company to expense the premium version of the DoP newsletter using this template.
Essential reads for product teams
New from the Department of Product Substack this week
DoP Deep - Uber, Instacart and How to introduce ads as a new product revenue stream
Product teams can be a little snobbish about the impact of ads on their products. And in many cases, this is justified; badly implemented ads can have a significant detrimental impact on the overall user experience. Netflix’s recent introduction of ads has already sparked complaints from users who say that the ads are poorly placed with little consideration for the context of the show they’re watching. But when done well, ads can complement - or even enhance - the overall experience.
Knowledge Series - Passkeys explained for product teams
The passwordless future always seems to be on the horizon but never seems to arrive. In this Knowledge Series, you’ll learn what passkeys are, why you should care and how you can implement them in your own product.
(Department of Product)
Strategy - High quality principles to support your product led growth
Miro’s former head of growth
explains why quality and speed don’t have to be a trade off and why the outcomes of growth teams should be tightly linked to the quality delivered to end users. (Substack)Case study - Key takeaways from Airbnb’s winter redesign
Airbnb is unlike most companies in that it only releases major updates 2 times a year. In this piece, designer Daniel De Mello analyses the new design and its impact on the product’s user experience. (UX Design)
UX - How to use card sorting for better information architecture
A card-sorting study is a specialty UX research method used to uncover users’ mental models of the information architecture (IA) of your digital product. In other words, card sorting can help your users find the information on your site more easily. In this guide, you’ll learn how to use it in product development. (NN Group)
Tools you can use
Pirsch - a simple, lighter weight alternative to Google Analytics
Coefficient - import live data from your product into spreadsheets
Keycheck - find all the keyboard shortcuts you need for over 100 apps
New product features, launches and announcements this week
Roblox has introduced an LLM-powered real time translation model that allows users to communicate with each other in different languages in real time. In a post outlining the new feature, Roblox’s CTO Daniel Sturman says the feature works in approximately 100 milliseconds which means latency is so low that most users won’t realise translation is happening. For product teams, internationalization might get a lot easier if more companies develop these types of solutions and this is very impressive to see.
Snap has filed a patent designed to make reading in AR more engaging. The patent outlines plans that allows readers to create physical objects referenced in the book to life in AR.
Microsoft has launched Face Check - a new facial recognition feature which allows businesses to match a user’s selfie to their government ID or employee credentials. Bumble is also rolling out a new feature called Deception Detector, designed to detect fake users. Generative AI is proving to be a security nightmare for SecOps and DevOps teams and so these new features are likely to be welcomed by product teams.
A new dating app called Blush has secured $7 million in additional funding ahead of its launch. The app differentiates itself by focusing on shared experiences in local physical locations like gyms, coffee shops and restaurants.
Google Maps has introduced LLM search that allows users to search using key phrases. The feature uses over 300 million user contributions tol answer queries for restaurant or shopping recommendations like “places with a vintage vibe in SF”. It’s rolling out in the US first with other countries expected to follow and is the latest step in Google taking steps to make Maps the starting point for search.
OpenAI has confirmed that AI-generated images from DALL-E 3 and ChatGPT will include watermarks.
📈 Product data and trends to stay informed
GitHub recently reported that Copilot helped engineers write code 55% faster. However, a first of its kind study has concluded that this will lead to a doubling of the rate of code churn - the percentage of lines that are reverted or updated less than two weeks after being authored.
The report was pretty scathing in its analysis, saying:
Code generated during 2023 more resembles an itinerant contributor, prone to violate the DRY-ness of the repos visited.
83% of US adults surveyed say they use YouTube - an unsurprising but pretty astounding figure. Full Pew survey here.
Snap’s stock plunged 30% after its Q42023 results failed to meet expectations. Daily active users grew 10% year on year to 414 million but this was up just 8 million since the last quarter. Despite that, the company revealed that its paid subscription product reached 7 million subscribers and that over 300 million users engage with augmented reality every day.
Bangladesh is now the fastest growing global software development hub, with 66.5% year on year growth.
AI can help to allocate team member roles based on their present work schedules and their skill sets, attitudes, and actions. Microsoft’s Future of Work report contains a bunch of super interesting insights into AI in the workplace.
Spotify has over 200,000 audiobook titles in its premium offering and is now the world’s second largest audiobook platform after Audible.
Other product news in brief
Docusign is to lay off 440 jobs, representing 6% of its workforce.
TikTok’s China CEO is stepping down from the company.
WhatsApp is preparing to start rolling out third party interoperability support ahead of the EU’s Digital Markets Act.
Alphabet’s health tech company Verily has announced Myoung Chat as Chief Product Officer.
The DOP Weekly Briefing is a product-led perspective of what’s happening in tech - and why it matters to product teams. If you want more than the weekly briefing, paid subscribers also get access to The Knowledge Series, in-depth DOP Deep dives and Chartpacks to feed your product brain and stay ahead.
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