Figma goes to war with Lovable, OpenAI's new CEO, Employers demand AI skills
Your weekly product briefing - 9th May 2025
Hi product people 👋, Rich here with your weekly briefing. It’s been a rather relentless week with acquisition rumors, new releases and some bold predictions about the future of engineering. Some weeks can feel like business as usual but this one certainly didn’t feel that way (to me at least!).
Coming up, we take a look at some of the product highlights from major tech conferences, the latest AI features and new data from a major study which shows us what exactly employers are looking for in 2025.
Enjoy the rest of your Friday and the weekend ahead.
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Stripe and Figma put on a show
First up, Stripe held its latest Stripe Sessions conference this week where it unveiled a series of new products, features and functionalities for product development teams.
Key new announcements include:
Payments Intelligence and Checkout Suite - a collection of AI-powered products designed to boost conversion during the checkout and improve authorization rates. Stripe says it now supports over 125 different payment methods and uses AI to decide which methods to show to users, which led to a 11.9% revenue boost.
Order Intents API - a new feature that enables AI agents to autonomously handle purchases.
Stripe Profiles - a public identity for businesses (which could be particularly helpful for SaaS products), allowing companies to do things like pay instant invoices between different products.
Figma also held its own product conference this week - and the most significant announcement for product teams is the launch of “Figma Make”. It’s a direct vibe coding competitor to tools like Lovable that allows users to describe what they’d like to make through a conversational interface and build an app from it in seconds. The advantage for Figma over other tools like Lovable, though, is that Figma Make connects fully into the Figma ecosystem where prototypes can connect to real data sources that may have already previously been integrated.
Lovable’s co-founder has previously jokingly mocked Figma on X in a few posts, joking that Lovable was set to acquire Figma along with a letter from Figma’s General Counsel warning Lovable that Figma is the owner of a trademark “Dev Mode”. I can’t imagine this announcement from Figma will do anything to repair relations between these two but it’ll certainly be interesting from a product strategy perspective to see if Figma’s moat is enough to contain the threat from tools like Lovable. The infamous Steve Jobs quote where he declared that Apple would go “thermonuclear” on Android springs to mind.
Grok released a new PDF export feature:
The rise of AI coding tools continues
Amazon is working on a secret new project called “Kiro” that uses AI agents to help product development teams write code. It’s a web and desktop app that can be customized to work with first-party and third-party AI agents.
OpenAI is set to acquire AI coding tool Windsurf for $3 billion if reports are to be believed. This would pit it directly against tools from Microsoft like Visual Studio / GitHub Copilot. At the moment, Windsurf is model-agnostic, but it’s not clear what a potential acquisition might do to that strategy. Not everyone was impressed with OpenAI’s announcement, though.
Google updated their Gemini 2.5 Pro model with new coding capabilities. Their latest model now sits firmly on top of the WebDev leaderboard and comes with “Video to code” capabilities that transforms video footage into functional web apps as well as the ability to create dynamic, interactive simulations.
If you’re interested in learning more about how the world’s most powerful AI coding tools work, this deep dive might help.
Product reading and resources
New from the Substack this week:
How do AI agent payments work?
If you buy into the hype, the way users make payments could be about to fundamentally change forever. In this Knowledge Series, we’ll take a closer look at the most important technologies behind AI payment agents and how they work along with some real world use cases and opportunities for product teams.
New UX patterns and interactions
Swipes, screenshots, conversational actions, hyper-personalization, generative UIs… 25 new UX patterns from top companies including Apple, Notion, Figma, Google Maps, Microsoft and more. (Department of Product)
Other reads and resources to feed your product brain:
How Headspace’s product teams built an AI companion (Figma Design Blog)
Tips on how to prompt your way to creating beautiful designs (Aura)
What to do when you’re asked to meet impossible goals (Harvard Business Review)
Tools you can use
Ema - your universal AI employee. Ema can analyze data, check contracts and create documents from scratch.
Stitch - prototype quickly with modern technology. Made by a small group of designers and engineers who love prototyping.
Face - transform your documents into “extraordinary pages”. This is a neat way to update your resume or other docs. Featured in the latest YCombinator batch.
📈 Product data, reports and trends to stay ahead
60% of companies have already appointed a Chief AI Officer and a massive 92% of organizations want new generative AI talent in 2025 according to a major new study. Full Generative AI Adoption Index Report from AWS.
DuoLingo’s CEO says that AI has drastically accelerated the speed at which the company can produce content. “Developing our first 100 courses took about 12 years, and now, in about a year, we’re able to create and launch nearly 150 new courses” - he said. Here’s a chart showing this in context. But some users say this coincides with a drop in quality.
Apple is actively seeking alternative partners for its Search on Safari after confirming that Google searches dropped for the first time in 22 years. Apple is actively exploring alternative partners including OpenAI and Perplexity to power its AI search. Google’s stock plummeted by ~7% following the news.
Accenture’s chief AI officer says 10-15% of her clients currently use multi AI agent systems but that she expects this to exceed 30% within 18 to 24 months.
Developers won’t exist in a traditional sense according to Windsurf’s CEO. He says they will instead transform into “builders” since AI is “going to be adding 10 times the amount of leverage very shortly”.
The average American has fewer than 3 friends but has demand for 15 - and AI can fill the gap, says Mark Zuckerberg.
Other product news
🥕 OpenAI has hired Instacart’s CEO Figji Simo to become “CEO of Applications”. Simo has a strong background in product management and monetization. I’m looking forward to seeing what products she cooks up in this new role. Read the blog post announcing the move.
🍾 Instacart itself also released a new product this week called Fizz. Designed specifically for Gen-Z, it’s a spin off app built in partnership with Partiful that helps users pay up front for party items. It’s rare for spin-off app strategies like this to work but Partiful has experienced strong growth since its launch just a few years ago. It might just work.
👀 Reddit says it plans to work with third parties to authenticate real users following last week’s debacle with AI bots.
Thanks for reading! And as always, if you have any comments or feedback about anything featured this week just drop a comment below.