NotebookLM gets mind maps and Amazon's new Nova AI model
Plus: The death of product development as we know it, Amazon's new Nova AI model, Deel vs Rippling - "spy" speaks out
Hi product people 👋, coming up this week, Replit’s CEO tells us why he thinks nobody should bother to learn how to code as his company launches the second iteration of its AI Assistant.
How a simple, well-intentioned UX design pattern from Snapchat’s product teams ended up causing more harm than good, the latest new model from Amazon to help you browse the web with AI agents and a bold new prediction that suggests we may be witnessing the death of the product development process as we know it.
Plus, how a new AI concept called “swarm intelligence” can be used by companies to generate new ideas and insights from hundreds of employees at the same time - with a little help from AI surrogates.
Enjoy the rest of your week!
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Key reads and resources for product teams
New from the Department of Product Knowledge Series this week:
Explainer - MCP Explained: A simple guide for product teams
In this Knowledge Series, we’ll cover the essentials worth knowing from a non-engineer’s perspective. We’ll explore some of the high level technical concepts involved in MCP, why it matters to product teams along with some real world examples from leading companies like Block and Microsoft. Plus, practical ways MCP can be used during the product development process with tools like Figma and Jira.
AI Tutorial - How to build AI Assistant Prototypes with vibe coding tools
Discover how you can use vibe coding tools to build an AI Assistant prototype for your product. We’ll cover 5 different approaches to AI Assistants and for each one, we’ll clone popular product products like Stripe, Shopify and Linear to demonstrate just how easy it is to build UIs that look exactly like the product you’re working on. (Department of Product)
Strategy - How should you bundle your products?
There’s no shortcut to understanding how your customers use your products and want to buy them—you have to ask. To keep things simple, go through your entire product suite, product by product, and ask each customer segment or persona whether each of your products is a need, a nice-to-have, or a pass. Within a given segment, if customers view a product in your suite as… (Andreessen Horowitz)
UX - The return of the UX Generalist
AI is already shifting this dynamic. AI tools and capabilities are starting to fill skill gaps, assisting in specialized tasks that once required years of expertise to master. For example, a visual designer can now leverage AI to generate various options for interface copy. A researcher can get AI advice on an accessible color palette or explore different data visualizations. (NN Group)
Process - Perplexity’s head of design on the death of product development as we know it
Imagine you’re assembling a team for an escape room challenge. Would you rather have six managers debating strategies or two sharp thinkers who rapidly test every combination to unlock the door? Perplexity’s head of design shares their thoughts on why the product development process as we know it is dead. (Medium)
Speed - How to use fake deadlines to speed up engineering velocity
As a developer, fake deadlines drove Anton Zaides crazy. When he became a manager, he finally saw why they were needed but felt guilty about using them. Learn more from the Director of Engineering at Shopify. (Substack)
New product features and innovation this week
Amazon has unveiled its take on AI browser operators. Nova Act is a new model designed to perform actions within a web browser. The new SDK allows developers to break down complex workflows into smaller, reliable commands (e.g. search, checkout ) and merge these with more detailed instructions like “don’t accept the insurance upsell”. Amazon says that it has focused on scoring >90% on the most common capabilities that other models fail at like date picking, drop downs and popups.
The engineer who opened the video started it with a very simple prediction: “Soon, there will be more AI Agents than people browsing the web” he said. New data from Wikimedia supports that hypothesis.
Meanwhile…
Tinder has launched a new AI-powered feature that assesses users' flirting skills. Powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Moderation API, it allows users to interact with an AI bot to practice flirting, reenate scenarios and receive scores with suggestions for improving their dating skills. MAUs are in decline with January seeing users drop ~8% so Tinder will be hoping this drives some re-engagement.
Google’s NotebookLM is continuing to ship new features. This week, it rolled out a new Mind Maps feature that’s perfect for scenarios where you want to visualise your thinking or technical concepts / processes you want to understand in more detail. Mind Maps will “transform the key concepts from your sources into an interactive visual map.” In the Chat pane, “Mind Map” appears alongside the shortcuts for Add note and Audio Overview. The Mind Maps you create appear in the Notes list. As well as Mind Maps, Google also shipped a new “Discover Sources” feature yesterday which is designed to enrich your Notebooks with different sources from the web. This is a pretty neat way for Google to take its own value prop (knowledge discovery) and weave it into its newer products.
Generative AI startup Runway has released an impressive new video generating model called Gen-4. It can create highly dynamic videos with realistic motion as well as subject, object and style consistency. To show off its capabilities, Runway produced a collection of short films and music videos, including one called The Lonely Little Flame.
Apple has released eight new emoji designs as part of its iOS 18.4 update. These include a radish, fingerprint, purple paint splatter and one that we can all relate to when we’re up against a tight deadline at work before shipping our next release: “Face with bags under eyes”.
It’s still the year of agents, agents, agents
Otter has released a series of its own AI Agents. One of which might be of particular interest to product teams. It’s called the Otter SDR Agent (short for sales development representative) and it can be embedded into websites to conduct interactive live demos of products. The goal is to give potential customers a glimpse at how products work and ask basic questions at any time, without waiting for a human sales rep.
Replit has officially launched v2 of its “vibe coding” agent. It was initially tested in beta earlier this year but is now widely available. Replit’s CEO also said this week that you shouldn’t bother learning to code today. He may be a little biased though…
Manus, the AI Assistant that went viral for its “agentic” capabilities including data analysis, creating company org charts and reviewing contract details, has launched its first mobile app. The new app is part of a wider launch of paid tiers which include two core plans: one priced at either $39 a month or $199 a month.
But not all execs are convinced …
Tools you can use
FluentSubs - a free alternative to DuoLingo that uses the news and viral clips to teach you how to speak foreign languages.
Grimo - vibe coding writing. Grimo is a writing tool with multi-model AI capabilities built in.
Zycko - create, customize, and share powerful AI prompt templates in seconds.
📈 Product data and trends to stay informed
YouTube could now be worth up to $550 billion - representing 30% of the company’s parent company, Alphabet. Its revenue may soon surpass Disney. The company was also recently named the most-watched platform on US TVs for only the second time. Here’s how its estimated valuation compares to other companies:
ChatGPT now has 500 million weekly active users and has been adding 1 million users an hour. The figure was revealed during the company’s announcement that it had raised a $40 billion funding round at a $300 billion post-money valuation. According to a senior analyst at SensorTower, ChatGPT had 10x the mobile app weekly active users compared to Gemini and Claude combined as of March.
The foldable smartphone market is set for its first YoY decline before rebounding in 2026. Report by Counterpoint.
Since the release of Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Anthropic has seen a 8.4% rise in the share of people using the model for coding. A new report goes deep into how people are using Claude and it also found that people use Claude 3.7 Sonnet’s new “extended thinking” mode predominantly for technical tasks typically associated with roles like computer science, software development and video game design. It’s self-selective data to some extent, but the report is still pretty interesting.
9,000 engineers at Amex now use GitHub Copilot and 85% of Amex’s say they’re happy with it.
A simple product design choice known as the half-swipe in Snapchat is having a profound impact on some of its users.
A group of 50 people using conversational “swarm intelligence” is currently tracking in the top 1.4% of an ESPN sports competition. The technology allows groups of 200+ people to collaborate with each other and brainstorm ideas with the help of an AI “conversational surrogate” who is responsible for distilling the human insights and sharing those with other groups. The research could have a significant impact on tech companies and product teams who want to generate more insights within their companies from large groups of people at the same time.
The Ghibli studio craze is over. This week, generative AI has started a new trend instead.
Other product news in brief
👋Meta’s head of AI research is planning to leave.
⚖️OnlyFans is being sued by two customers because the company allowed the use of agencies to chat with users.
🪦Tiktok is shutting down its Instagram competitor.
🕵The alleged Deel “spy” has published a damning affidavit. He says he was paid €5000 a month by Deel.
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