Remote Workers, Human Coordination, Lumiere, and Innovation Labs

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:

• 🧠 Revolutionizing Product Management

• 👨‍💼 Remote Workers

• 🤖 ChatGPT

• ☀️ AI Summer

• 💡 Lumiere

• 🏪 Store 8

• 🥽 Innovation Labs

Podcast

Revolutionizing Product Management with Ryan Glasgow, Founder and CEO of Sprig

In this episode, Ryan Glasgow, the founder and CEO of Sprig, shares his insights on product management and the impact of AI. He and Kyle discuss his background in product management and his experience scaling companies like Weebly and Vurb from startup to successful exit. Ryan also explains the importance of product market fit and how to determine if a product is meeting customer needs. We also explore the concept of feature market fit and the role of AI in analyzing user data. Ryan provides advice for aspiring founders and product managers and shares his recommendations for interesting podcasts and products.

News and Useful Reads

When Layoffs Happen, Remote Workers Are Hardest Hit

We continue to see layoffs, especially in technology. So this headline likely caught your eye, like it did mine. Of course, the WSJ is no friend to remote work, so no surprise there. And all remote jobs are not the same, so lumping them together doesn’t make sense. But still worthwhile to think about.

Workers logging on from home five days a week were 35% more likely to be laid off in 2023 than their peers who put in office time, according to an analysis of two million white-collar workers conducted by employment data provider Live Data Technologies. The analysis showed 10% of fully remote workers were laid off last year, compared with 7% of those working in an office full time or on a hybrid basis.

ChatGPT Unlocks the Most Powerful Force on Earth

ChatGPT isn’t just translating from one language to another, it is translating from technical to non-technical. Or translating from non-technical to technical. Or from colloquial to formal. It is making the subtle changes we need to coordinate across fields in ways we couldn’t before.

In other words, good translation equals human coordination. And human coordination is the most powerful force on Earth. We can see ChatGPT already beginning to unlock this superpower. 

After AI’s summer: What’s next for artificial intelligence?

Importantly, 2023 was the year when large numbers of people started to use and adopt AI intentionally as part of their daily work. Rapid AI innovation has fueled future predictions, as well, including everything from friendly home robots to artificial general intelligence (AGI) within a decade. That said, progress is never a straight line and challenges could sidetrack some of these predicted advances.

As AI increasingly weaves into the fabric of our daily lives and work, it begs the question: What can we expect next?

Google’s Lumiere brings AI video closer to real than unreal

AI video generation keeps getting better, there is no denying it.

Google’s new video generation AI model Lumiere uses a new diffusion model called Space-Time-U-Net, or STUNet, that figures out where things are in a video (space) and how they simultaneously move and change (time). Ars Technica reports this method lets Lumiere create the video in one process instead of putting smaller still frames together. 

Walmart Closes Store No. 8 Innovation Unit

Walmart announced it is closing its innovation lab in order to cut costs. They put other spin on it as well.

Walmart plans to shutter Store No. 8, a business unit it created to spur innovation, as the country’s largest retailer works to curb costs and test technology in new ways.

When Walmart launched the unit seven years ago, it was working to quickly catch up to Amazon’s growing online business and foster new ideas that might not be immediately profitable. Walmart hadrecently spent $3.3 billion to buy Jet.com and placed its founder,Marc Lore, at the head of the company’s ecommerce operations. 

Other Interesting Finds

Speaking of innovation labs, should we be surprised that Walmart shut theirs down? Probably not. Most companies will shut them down after a few years because they are misaligned. Either the lab was successful and the company feels like they can fold it back in (which doesn’t work), or the lab wasn’t successful in the way the company hoped (usually in coming up with some really profitable idea or cost-cutting strategy). Either way, executives always miss the point.

Why Innovation Labs Fail, and How to Ensure Yours Doesn’t

This article was written a few years ago, as you’ll be able to see. But it highlights the pitfalls many companies face with innovation labs.

What do Walmart, Facebook, and Lockheed Martin have in common? They all recently unveiled lavish new innovation labs. These kinds of labs go by different names — accelerators, business incubators, research hubs — and my research suggests their numbers are growing. Over half of financial services firms have started their own creative spaces, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a health care company or retailer without at least one innovation lab, whether it’s a conference room with sticky notes or a 20,000-square-foot incubator space, like the one launched by Starbucks in November of last year.

SUCCESSFUL INNOVATION LABS HAVE THESE FOUR THINGS IN COMMON

But we’re not here just to give negative commentary. We’re also here to offer advice for success. So how can we succeed? Well, IDEO has some ideas for us:

One way to offer air cover for ideas that may look wild at first is to build an innovation lab—a dedicated safe space where employees can focus on deeply understanding customer needs to design the next generation of products and services for the parent organization.

Unfortunately, many labs have gotten a bad rap for being nothing more than cost centers or design palaces with modular furniture, generating radical ideas that are not aligned with the core business.

But not all labs are fads. They take time to find their stride and show value—sometimes several years to see a new product or service through from ideation to market. That kind of timeline requires leaders with strong enough stomachs to ignore short-term failures, knowing it’s the only way to ensure long-term sustainability.