Product-Led Growth, Design Tools, Measuring Dev Productivity, and In-Demand Skills

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-Led Growth

• 😱 AI Concern

• 🤹 In-Demand Skills

• 📱 Duolingo

• ✨ Google

• 👩‍💻 Developer Productivity

• 🗣️ Low-Fi Design

Podcast

Product-Led Growth for New Companies - A Conversation with founder Peter Schroeder

Peter started as a musician but shifted his focus to technology as he discovered problems that needed to be solved. In this episode, Peter and I discuss product-led growth for young companies, AI technology, and the importance of design across a business.

News and Useful Reads

People Are Increasingly Worried AI Will Make Daily Life Worse

We’ve been tracking AI sentiment in several newsletters (here and here). It seems like concern about AI continues to grow as more people become aware of it.

A majority of Americans say their concern about artificial intelligence in daily life outweighs their excitement about it, according to a Pew Research Center survey of more than 11,000 US adults. The results come at a time when a growing number of people are paying attention to news about AI in their daily lives.

The most in-demand AI skills — and how companies want to use them

It’s no surprise that AI skills are in demand right now. And for the foreseeable future. The more skills you can add to your repertoire, the better positioned you’ll be for your next role.

The top 10 Generative AI-related skills listed in Upwork job seeker profiles with the largest quarter-over-quarter growth (Q2 2023 vs Q1 2023) were: Large Language Model (LLM); Generative AI; You Only Look Once (YOLO); Object Detection; Stable Diffusion; Prompt Engineering; ChatGPT; Azure OpenAI; AI Chatbot; and AI Text-to-Speech.

How Duolingo uses AI to enhance its user experience

Duolingo is an application that I’m continually impressed by. It is an amazing product, in my opinion, and continues to offer so much value to users (of which I’m one). So it’s interesting to see how they’re incorporating AI into the learning experience.

“One of the things we’ve learned through user interviews is that we could be much more proactive in providing feedback on how well they are learning,” he says. “Not all learners are conscious that they need help. We are asking ourselves how to use GPT-4 more and make it act more like a coach.”

Google Announces Slew of New Tools/Features

In its Next Conference, Google announced lots of cool things. From AI image detection to an AI meeting assistant.

Yes, you can measure software developer productivity

Measuring productivity can be hard, especially in roles where we don’t have concrete metrics (like sales, for example). So measuring development team productivity is hard. McKinsey thinks they have the answer, though. I remain skeptical that these types of approaches apply to most companies and will generate the results you would want. But as software eats the world, we’ll probably see more efforts to measure it.

At least they recognize some pitfalls:

As valuable as it can be, developer productivity data can be damaging to organizations if used incorrectly, so it’s important to avoid certain pitfalls. In our work we see two main types of missteps occur: misuse of metrics and failing to move past old mindsets.

Useful Tools and Resources

uizard

I’ve been using uizard to create low-fidelity designs, and wanted to share it. While Figma is great, I often feel like design has shifted too far to the high-fidelity. It is really easy to create hi-fi designs, which is why I think it is so common now, but also makes us scared to start designing until we have a good idea of what it will look like. So using simple tools to get ideas on a screen is still one of my favorite things.