Product Briefing - 29th September, 2022
The end of Slack? Amazon's brand new Kindle, LinkedIn's massive A/B test and presentation skills for PMs
Hello product people,
As Salesforce rolls out aggressive new pricing plans for Slack, some commentators are suggesting that the new pricing model means it’s time to ditch it and look for alternatives. One company that is marketing itself as precisely that is Threads. Described as a “Slack replacement designed for makers”, Threads’ ambition is to reinvent what it means to have workplace discussions, with each chat taking the form of a thread which can also be used as a canvas for a presentation. Borrowing elements from other apps including Notion and Discord, Thread certainly looks like an interesting, fresh take on workplace comms. You can check out a demo of it here.
In other news, Amazon unveiled a bunch of new products at its hardware event yesterday including new Echo Dots, a sleep tracking bedside light, new Ring cameras and an intriguing new version of the Kindle. Dubbed Kindle Scribe, the new e-reader isn’t just an e-reader - now it ships with a stylus that can be used as a pencil on the e-ink display. ReMarkable tablets have been on the market for a while now but they’ve always been plagued with reports of a poor software experience. Amazon is hoping it can go one better and bring us the whole package. Instinctively it makes sense; the seamless integration of the Kindle experience with the ability to scribble as you read is certainly an exciting prospect. We were just a little disappointed with the omission of one feature: the lack of clicky buttons for page turning.
Meanwhile, LinkedIn’s A/B testing tactics were in the spotlight this week after a fascinating study confirmed the paradoxical strength of ‘weak ties’. Here’s how it worked: over a 5 year period, 20 million LinkedIn users were shown different users in the “people you may know” section of the app. One group were shown ‘strong ties’ (users you’re likely to know well) and one group were shown ‘weak ties’ (users you’re less likely to know well). The results showed that weak ties are more beneficial for employment opportunities, promotions, and wages. The experiment was criticised in a New York Times piece which argued that the practice of A/B testing may have inadvertently put some users at a disadvantage in the job market. LinkedIn has confirmed that the test was in accordance with its privacy policy but the criticism does raise interesting ethical questions for product teams who are conducting large scale experiments that can have a real world impact.
Finally, if you’re looking for ways to impress your friends and colleagues, why not boost your vocabulary whilst you browse the web?
Enjoy the rest of your week!
Your product briefing
New product features - Google unveils new Maps features
Google is gearing up to launch several new updates for Maps in the coming months, the company announced today at its Search On event. Google teased the upcoming launches of new Maps features called Immersive view, Neighborhood vibe and Search with Live View. (TechCrunch)
Skills - Presentation skills for product managers
If you’re presenting a new feature to team members, don’t just focus on the shiny bits of the finished product the user sees; instead, tell the story of what brought you to the solutions you created. Blood sweat and tears included. (Department of Product)
Dates for your diary
October 6 - Google’s “Made by Google” Pixel event
October 12 - Microsoft Fall 2022 Event
October 15 - Product Mastery program 2022
October 18 - Netflix earnings
November 1-4 - Web Summit conference
November 28 - December 2 - AWS re:Invent conference
New product launches - Substack launches RSS Reader for the web
There’s a new reading experience waiting for you at Substack.com. Now you can read all your Substack subscriptions—and more—in a clean, simple, and fast web reader. Everything stays in-sync with your Substack app for iOS. (Substack product blog)
Design - How to design better inline form validation
Inline validation can be problematic. Mostly because we can’t really show an error at just the right time when it occurs. And the reason for that is that we can’t really know for sure when a user has actually finished their input, unless they explicitly tell us that they have. (Smashing Magazine)
Podcast - Google AR product manager Diego shares his framework for product thinking
Diego Rivas is a Product Manager at Google in the augmented reality (AR) team. Diego works with product teams across software and hardware and was previously part of the engineering team that launched the Pixel 3 and Pixel 4. Prior to joining Google, Diego was a product design engineer at Apple where he was involved in developing the design architecture of the iPad. (Department of Product)
Case Study - How fashion brand Marc O'Polo moved from a monolithic architecture to an API-based CMS
The team at Marc O'Polo was challenged to build a prototype using their most complex content components. They succeeded. Read a complete rundown of how the product teams moved away from a monolithic suite to a modern API-based content solution. (Sponsored)
UX - User journey management explained
User journeys should be managed like products — by people and teams with specialized, journey-dedicated roles who continually research, measure, optimize, and orchestrate the experience. (NN Group)
Graphs to ponder
IPO activity has declined significantly year on year but VC investment overall remains healthy.
Moments captured
Former Meta COO Cheryl Sandberg departs the company for one last time
Technical deep dives - How Spotify scaled translations to 62 languages
Last year, we added support for 36 new languages to our products in one go, for a total of 62 languages. This article describes how we delivered on such an immense localization effort at Spotify. We called the project Scaling Translations. (Spotify Engineering)
Other product news in brief
Stage Manager could be coming to older iPads after all
Calendly acquires recruitment startup Prelude before entering the sector
Docusign hires Google exec Allan Thygesen as new CEO
Instagram test removes the shopping tab from the home screen
Productboard welcomes former Box and Periscope execs Sebastien Giroux and Greg Strickland as CFO and COO
Kraken CEO is stepping down
Bored at work?
Check out the Department of Product job board for fresh roles every week.
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