YouTube Voice Notes, Google Veo and Grammarly’s new acquisition
Plus: 2024’s top mobile apps, How to design global navigation, a new tool for SaaS pricing
Hi everyone 👋, welcome to the 150+ new readers who joined us since last week!
Coming up in today’s product briefing, we take a look at the flurry of new product announcements from Google as it looks to end its year on a high and do away with any reputational damage it suffered earlier in the year with a series of missteps.
Plus, the year’s top iOS apps are revealed, a new startup that promises to make pricing management for SaaS companies a lot easier and is LinkedIn about to kill SQL as we know it?
Enjoy the rest of your week!
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Key reads and resources for product teams
New from the Department of Product Substack this week:
Knowledge Series - AI Playground 2024: 10 ways you can get hands on experience
Practical (and hopefully fun!) ways you can get some hands-on experience with some of the world’s leading AI tools from 2024. Build dashboards, create songs, conduct deep research with Claude, Perplexity, Suno and more. (Department of Product)
Interview - Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman
In this interview with DeepMind co-founder and Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, he covers several topics and predictions for the future including:
Why Natural language interaction with AI is expected to become the primary way users interact with technology and access information within the next 5-10 years
How Voice-first experiences are expected to be transformational, potentially leading to new hardware platforms beyond smartphones
AI-generated user interfaces are predicted to become the norm for apps and websites within 3-5 years.
Why Synthetic data is becoming increasingly high-quality and useful for training.
(The Verge)
Resource - A market map of AI Agents
If you’re looking for a quick understanding of what the AI agent marketplace looks like right now, this handy market map might help you to understand the various different categories. (GitHub)
Case study - How Atlassian designed its new global navigation
When every team was given the freedom to design its own navigation UI, this resulted in a fragmented codebase which prevented Atlassian from creating the consistent experience their customers needed. In this piece, head of design Tarra Van Amerongen explains how they managed to build one new navigation in one new codebase. (Atlassian Design Blog)
Design - 14 UI patterns for generative AI
Intercom’s co-founder Des Traynor explores new types of UI that are emerging in the generative AI age. (Des Traynor)
Strategy - The case for building products that adapt over time
According to Vijay Govindarajan, professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, smart organizations are increasingly eschewing that strategy for one focused on products that grow with the consumer through creative design or software updates. He shares several examples and explains how this approach can deliver more value for the buyer – and for the business – over the long term. (Harvard Business Review)
New product features and innovation this week
Google is ending the year on a high with a flurry of new product releases.
Following last week’s release of Deep Research, this week, the company unveiled Veo 2 - its latest video generation model. Veo generates high-quality videos up to 4K and comes with an advanced understanding of physics which allows it to follow detailed instructions. Early impressions are very impressive.
Other end of year announcements from Google include: Whisk AI - a new tool that will let you “remix” the pictures that you plug into it, an enterprise version of NotebookLM which comes with more customization and larger token windows. Plus, Google also announced a new product called Agentspace which can answer questions across an entire organisation including from sources with unstructured data. It has pre-built connectors available for third party apps including Jira, Confluence and Google Drive.
And Code Assistant is getting new features which allow engineers to plug in more sources for greater context. In one example, Google shows how an engineer might want to connect their integrated developer environment to third party sources like Google Docs to find out more information about the spec or who the product manager responsible for a feature is.
Meanwhile…
Slack will integrate deeply into Salesforce’ Agentforce 2.0. As part of this, Slack will get a library of customizable AI agents that can perform various tasks, from onboarding employees to managing complex cross-functional projects. At a time when some companies are introducing return to office working, only for their onboarding to be outsourced to an AI agent, this does feel like a strange time to be in tech. But there’s a product that also uses Slack messages that’s a little more interesting than this…
IP Copilot analyzes conversations from Slack, Jira and other workplace tools to identify potential opportunities for filing patents. It was founded by a team with over 1,000 patents between them. And it’s a stark reminder for many employees that their ideas are often owned by the companies they work for.
In other news…
OpenAI has launched “Projects” which allows users to organise their interactions with ChatGPT. When you start a project you can name it and assign it a color. Claude and Perplexity both have similar features, making interacting with chatbots easier, so to some extent, OpenAI is playing catch up a little here.
YouTube is testing voice replies on videos which will allow viewers to comment / reply to videos using voice notes.
If you’re planning product price changes in the new year, you might want to check out this new SaaS product called Stigg. It describes itself as a product monetization platform and gives product and engineering teams a single place to manage their pricing. Part of its offering is something it called “entitlements”. Stigg defines entitlements as a set of permissions defining what a customer can do with your product. For example, an entitlement can grant the customer access to the “Audit logs” feature or limit their account to “5 seats” within a given plan.
LinkedIn has built a new natural language SQL conversion tool. Is this the end of SQL as we know it?
Tools you can use
Findr is an infinite second brain that helps you organise, search and use information from different apps like Slack, Jira, Notion, Google Drive and more.
Graphy is a new app to visualize your data so that it stands out and drives actions.
10X Launch is like Google Analytics but lets you get the names, email addresses, LinkedIn profiles of users who have opted in to share it.
📈 Product data and trends to stay informed
Temu is the US’ most downloaded free iPhone app in 2024. This year, 3 of the top 10 are Chinese-based apps with the rest US-based. ChatGPT is a new entrant, displacing Max (HBO), which dropped off entirely (possibly as a result of a name change in May ‘23 which may have impacted discoverability).
Threads is the US’ second most downloaded free iPhone app of the year and now has over 100 million monthly active users.
Netflix is struggling to grow in Nigeria. After investing heavily in original content it has only captured ~200,000 paid users out of a population of 200 million.
A record number of new US data centers are forecast for construction next year with 4,750 set to be built, up from 4,250 in 2025.
In a survey of 106 generative AI decision makers conducted by Forrester, ~21% said their organizations have experienced an increase in legal investigation and litigation related to generative AI efforts. It look as though as the AI booms continues into 2025, so too will litigation.
YouTube viewership on TVs is growing, with over 1 billion hours watched per day on TVs in 2024. One product change which propelled this growth is the addition of a Subscribe button on TV videos.
Look out for a new tech buzzword in 2025: “Long thinking”. It’s a phrase designed to capture the idea of AI models that are designed to take more time to “think over” their results before they respond. This can mean spending a few seconds or much longer” some applications are designed to take as much as 100 days to think about a response.
Other product news in brief
📚 Grammarly has acquired Coda
⚖️ Nima Momeni has been found guilty of the murder of ex-Cash App chief product officer Bob Lee
🤖 Klarna’s CEO says the company has replaced hundreds of staff and stopped hiring
💰 OpenAI says Elon Musk wanted it to be for-profit all along
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