Product Excellence, Tech Layoffs, Tesla Recalls, and Talking to the Dead
Product Excellence, Tech Layoffs, Tesla Recalls, and Talking to the Dead
Weekly Roundup of AI, Technology, and UX
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Here’s the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology. Let’s go:
🏅 Product Excellence
📒 AI Stories
📉 Tech Layoffs
☎️ Talking to the Dead
🤖 Beyond JTBD
🚙 Tesla Recalls
💻 Heirloom Computers
Podcast
Fostering Product Excellence and Customer-Centricity with Vidya Dinamani
In this episode, Kyle interviews Vidya, founder of Product Rebels, who shares her experience in coaching product teams and transforming organizations. We explore the importance of understanding the customer problem and achieving product-market fit. We also discuss the challenges of pricing and the characteristics of successful product teams.
News and Useful Reads
Instagram now offers AI-generated backgrounds on Stories
Most products are integrating AI in some way. Instagram has added AI backgrounds to stories. So we can now choose different backgrounds for stories. No more asking Reddit to edit out the bathroom stalls in the photo you took with your friends at the bar. The interesting thing to me is how all of this is eventually going to impact our sense of reality. At some point, we will probably just assume that no photo is an accurate representation of reality…
Instagram's backdrop tool appears once you upload or capture content for your Story. It sits alongside existing icons at the top of your screen, like text and music, represented by an image of a person with a rectangular frame behind them. To use backdrop, just click on that icon, and the image's entire background will go checkered (similar to picture editors like PhotoShop) along with a text box prompting you to "describe the backdrop you want..." From there, you can add anything from "surrounded by puppies" to "chased by dinosaurs" — very different vibes — and the AI tool will generate it in the background.
A comprehensive list of 2023 tech layoffs
Spotify just announced a round of layoffs along with Spotify wrapped, so it’s worth looking at layoffs in 2023. It was a very rough beginning to the year, as anyone in the industry will attest (myself included). And as always, companies looking to boost their end-of-year numbers are cutting staff because…money and capitalism.
Last year’s techwide reckoning continues. The tech industry has seen more than 240,000 jobs lost in 2023, a total that’s already 50% higher than last year and growing. Earlier this year, mass workforce reductions were driven by the biggest names in tech like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, Meta and Zoom. Startups across many sectors also announced cutbacks through the first half of the year. And while tech layoffs slowed down in the summer and fall, it appears that cuts are ramping up yet again.
Using A.I. to Talk to the Dead
While it may feel like a Black Mirror episode, the idea of using AI to hold on to loved ones clearly works for many people. And I expect will become more common in a variety of ways in the future.
Some people are turning to AI technology as a way to commune with the dead, but its use as part of the mourning process has raised ethical questions while leaving some who have experimented with it unsettled.
Want to Build? Technical Excellence Won’t Be Enough
I’ve been feeling this idea more and more regarding the products and features we all build. It isn’t just about the technical, but has to be much more about human elements, the harder-to-articulate and measure parts of the product that will be the real differentiators.
The frameworks that got us here, of jobs-to-be-done or product-market fit, will be insufficient going forward. For founders to have extraordinary outcomes, they will have to find alpha in markets that aren’t easily understood. Which is to say, technology alone won’t be enough. The other essential ingredient will be taste.
Tesla issues recall after Autopilot investigation
Tesla had to issue a recall for almost its entire fleet of vehicles in the United States.
Tesla issued a recall for 2 million vehicles—almost every single Tesla sold in the US—yesterday. The recall, which is really just a glorified software update being pushed to the vehicles, comes after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) wrapped up a two-year investigation into crashes involving the company’s Autopilot feature.
Other Interesting Finds
A Computer of One’s Own
When we think of computers, we don’t generally think of items that will last more than a few years, let along of heirlooms that could be passed down to our children. Which is too bad. But I saw this handmade computer and thought it was fascinating. I’d love to have something like this.
