Slack’s AI principles, RIP Alexa Skills and a new use case for your data
Your weekly briefing - Thursday, April 18th, 2024
Hi product people 👋,
Welcome to the 155+ readers who joined us since last week!
Thanks to privacy regulations, users in many countries now have the right to demand that tech companies delete their data. But a new startup thinks users should be free to do something entirely different with their data: package it up and rent it out to AI companies. Founded by MIT alumni, Vana allows users to pool their data - including chats, speech recordings and photos - into datasets that can be used for generative AI model training.
This data takes the form of a persona which can be used anywhere and this week the company unveiled its plans to allow Reddit users to do this with their posting history. So far, 141,000 Reddit users have done so and while Reddit isn’t happy, it’s a thought provoking example of what product teams might allow their users to do with their data beyond protecting or exporting it.
Speaking of Reddit, this week the company’s CPO outlined some of the items on the newly public company’s roadmap. He explained that 50% of its users are now based outside of the US which played a part in the company’s decision to build a new translation feature will allow those users to interact with English speakers.
Meanwhile, Figma hosted its global Framework conference this past week which focused squarely on the creation and adoption of design systems. One of the more interesting announcements for product teams includes the beta launch of Library Analytics API which is a new API designed to help team members understand which components are being used the most - and which aren’t. A data dashboard of the most used design components is just a few API calls away.
Finally, if you’re looking for an easier way to share design files, notes or documents in one place at work or at home this new product might help.
Enjoy the rest of your week!
- Rich
Key reads, tools and resources for product teams
New from the Department of Product Substack this week:
DoP Deep - AI product strategies compared - deep dives into the AI strategies of a variety of top tier tech companies including: Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Stack Overflow and Stripe - with notes and lessons on how to craft your own AI product strategy.
Chartpack - Product conversion rates 2024 - The latest conversion rates for important parts of the product development lifecycle including: landing pages, lead to sale conversion rates, email and more.
(Department of Product)
UX - How to design error messages
When humans interact with computers, mistakes and misunderstandings are inevitable. In these situations, good error messages are a vital tool to avoid frustrations and provide a satisfying user experience. NNGroup explains how. (NNGroup)
Technical case study - How we built Slack AI to be secure and private
When you’re building new AI features, security and privacy are paramount. In this piece by Slack’s engineers, they explain some of the principles they uphold when creating new AI features. These principles include: Customer data never leaves Slack, we do not train large language models (LLMs) on customer data, Slack AI only operates on the data that the user can already see, Slack AI upholds all of Slack’s enterprise-grade security and compliance requirements. (Slack Engineering)
Insights - How people are really using generative AI at work
Are people really using these tools? Have they found ways for generative AI to help them lighten their workloads, increase their productivity, think through problems in new ways? In this piece, HBR investigates the real world ways companies are using genAI at work. (Harvard Business Review)
Tools you can use
PenPot 2.0 - the latest version of the open-source alternative to Figma
InterviewwithAI - conduct mock job interviews with AI
Tempo - stop speaking too fast in presentations
Interview - Dropbox’s CEO on why companies should be remote-first
New product features, launches and announcements this week
Alexa Skills are probably dead. From June 30, Amazon will stop paying engineers for apps created on the Alexa Skills platform, essentially killing it. Amazon initially paid engineers to build Skills for the platform back in 2018 but since then, the company has realised nobody really used them. Question marks remain about voice as an interface, especially since Humane’s recent AI pin launch was panned.
Meta is rolling out its AI chatbot to other products including Instagram and WhatsApp. Perplexity’s CEO noted that the design looked remarkably similar to the Perplexity home screen.
Zendesk has unveiled a major update to its customer support tools. Features relevant for product teams include: Voice QA which evaluates call transcripts, AI agents for customer support and new APIs for tracking product operations.
AI presentation startup Tome is cutting 20% of its staff but is pivoting to focus specifically on a specific segment which is willing to pay: sales teams. The company says it recently discovered this user segment was the group most likely to pay and is pivoting its entire product strategy and customer support team as a result. Tome is working on an AI tool that can scrape U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings for valuable information that could be useful in sales pitches to public companies. An interesting case study for startups battling to find product / market fit.
Docusign has a new brand identity and this week launched a new AI powered Intelligent Agreement Management platform.
📈 Product data and trends to stay ahead
DuckDuckGo is the latest search engine to announce a new paid search engine that puts privacy first. Here’s how the new competitors to Google fare against each other:
After stalling in 2022, the average number of SaaS products used by companies has grown again, up 4% YoY to an average of 93 per company.
For the second consecutive year, global corporate investment in AI has seen a decline. In 2023, the total investment dropped to $189.2 billion, a decrease of approximately 20% from 2022. While overall funding decreased, investing in generative AI increased. In 2023, the sector attracted $25.2 billion, nearly nine times the investment of 2022 and about 30 times the amount from 2019. Full Artificial Intelligence Index report 2024.
Weekly Vision Pro app releases have plummeted from a high of 150 to less than 10 since the device went on sale earlier this year. It’s still early days, but VisionOS may not be the paradigm shift many predicted.
LinkedIn’s premium user subscriptions grew 25% year on year to $1.7 billion.
The so-called “dumbphone” business is thriving. Sales for one dumb phone manufacturer are up 10x year on year.
Microsoft says Copilot has attracted 1.3 million customers so far, including 50,000 businesses ranging from small startups to corporations like Goldman Sachs, Ford and Ernst & Young.
New hardware you can use at work
Product builders love using new devices to help stay productive. This is a pre-production model of a new tablet which uses e-ink. It’s called Daylight and it describes itself as a new kind of computer. There are no notifications, it runs at 60fps on Android and glows amber in the dark.
The best part for me though, is its dedication to thick bezels. The recent obsession with thin bezels makes no sense for handheld devices so it’s refreshing to see a company resisting the urge to bin them and instead put handheld usability first.
(Not sponsored or affiliated, just a very nice prototype I came across and wanted to mention).
Other product news in brief
Snap is planning to add watermarks to clearly identify AI generated content.
Shopify is using a numerical ranking system where employees compete against each other for pay rises.
Apple’s head of iPhone and Watch is leaving the company.
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The Department of Product Weekly Briefing is written by Rich Holmes. If you enjoyed this week’s briefing, hit the like ♥️ button below!