Hey, happy Monday!
If you attended the Product Management Day, it’s great to see you back here!
The talented team of 20tabs spared no effort to create Italy’s first Product Management conference-it was powerful!
Know that tickets are already available early bird 2022, consider taking advantage of the offer, thereby supporting the project and raising the quality of your work.
I would like to continue talking to you about Product by adding a piece to the talk I gave: “How to Create a Product Roadmap with Mathematical Accuracy Using JTDB.”
The gist of the story is that when you can understand what real progress consists of that people want in their lives you get the keys to the market.
There is a particular category of products that takes this concept to a new level, and they are the computational products.
I’ll leave you my notes and let me know if they are helpful.
STAY FOCUSED, MAKE FIRE ☀️🔎🔥
● PRODUCTS / Hungry for Data.
Progress at Scale
Computational products are a new category of products enabled by the intensive use of algorithms to enable users to receive a contextual, personalized experience in real time.
There are already so many in your life even though you have never paid attention to them.
Google Search, Facebook, Spotify…
These are just a few examples of computational products that you use on a daily basis.
Not only are they designed to enable their users to do their “job” perfectly, they are also built to be sticky like honey to gnats thanks to an experience that improves with time as opposed to classic products that wear out with use.
As your computer gets slower as the hd gets heavier or your car loses value parked in the garage, computational products use data to increase their value to those who buy them and those who build them.
Every second Google processes 63,000+ searches, and the data that comes back on how users use the results immediately improves subsequent searches. It almost seems like a few, but in one year it’s more than 2 trillion opportunities to improve their product. Here they tell how the AI makes the results more useful.
Every minute Spotify streams 750,000 songs worldwide to devices that return telemetry data such as volume change, skip, add to favorites or playlist. The more music you listen to, the more the platform knows about your tastes. The next song will be more and more the right one.
The game is simple. The faster you can learn what your users want, the faster you can improve their lives. As a result they will decide to continue using your product for longer.
● PRODUCTS / Design Systems
Computational matter
Do you know what design teams working on computational products have in common?
They will never see their own layout implemented! 😂
Or to be precise, they will see endless versions implemented!
The layout of Spotify’s Home section will have appeared as designed, perhaps, only in Figma’s file or on some developer’s computer but it is highly unlikely that it would have appeared as such in a real user’s app.
My Spotify is different from yours because the data with which we fed the algorithm are different.
In fact, this interface is nothing more than a series of black boxes in which song covers, names and titles will appear. Placeholders that are filled by the algorithm.
There is no single layout. There are as many layouts as there are users.
There is no such thing as a single experience. There are as many experiences as there are users.
How then do product teams design (well) these endless possibilities?
They can rely on a Design System, that is, on a system of graphic elements and rules that constitute the visual (and other) language of the experience.
Design Systems are not a recent thing; they have their roots in Brand Guidelines (or Style Guides) and carry them into the future by designing individual components that can be used programmatically.
If you want to embrace the real potential of computational products, you can’t help but equip your team with a Design System. You could adopt an open source one and design your own completely (and all the nuances in between).
In any case, prepare to equip your team with designers who understand how to program and developers who understand design because the stuff of future products is made of algorithms and a library of bricks that will be assembled in real-time.
No longer will “products” be designed, but “products that will produce other products.”
● PRODUCTS / Links
📐 Writing Design specifications well is an art. Here is a guide done right on how to get developers to understand your work.
🥡 The Design System is that blurred boundary between Branding and Product.
🧰 From the same site, the best Design Systems Made in Figma.
👁️🗨️ In a 2017 video, using computer vision, Airbnb designers show how artificial intelligence can generate working prototypes using its Design System.
👁️🐝Ⓜ️ Perhaps the most beautiful Design System around. IBM’s Carbon., open source.
