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Hello product people,

 

Amid mounting calls for Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to step down, the company has announced a controversial new feature it’s planning to roll out later this year. The company will soon let users decide who can respond to their messages. Options for who can reply will include: everyone, followers or nobody. In the instances where nobody is permitted to reply, the tweet will be referred to as a ‘statement’.

 

Apple, Google and Amazon have agreed to put their differences aside temporarily to work together on a standardised system for voice assistants and other smart home devices. In what is a welcome development for consumers, the giants will be collaborating with the aim of delivering a draft standard for voice assistants at some point during 2020. The process will be overseen by a group known as the Zigbee Alliance whose board members include representatives from companies including IKEA, Samsung, Silicon Labs and others. The vision is to create a unified protocol that is open-source and royalty free, which should result in more innovative applications across smart home devices as developers will eventually only need to build integrations for a single, standard platform. Consumers would then decide which device to buy, knowing that their devices will play nicely with their existing devices, irrespective of their hardware manufacturer. You can read more about the initiative in a blog post from Google Nest’s VP of engineering Nik Sathe here.

 

Deepfake videos will soon be categorised alongside nudity, graphic violence and hate speech, with the announcement that Facebook is planning to ban them. Facebook’s vice president of global policy Monike Bickert made the announcement last week which will see the social media giant take a much stricter stance on the videos, which are still in their technological infancy. The editing of video content through cuts and splices will still be permitted, however, which has led some commentators to argue that the deepfake ban doesn’t quite go far enough.

 

Finally, if you’re building any new landing pages this week, check out the landing page conversion checklist tool to help you optimise your page as much as possible.

 

Have a great week ahead!

 



Your product briefing

 

Skills - 5 ways to use post it notes as a product manager

To corporate execs, a wall without post it notes screams a lack of innovation. No digital transformation is complete without Slack, standups and scraps of paper with little adhesive strips. They’re a tech company cliche. And here’s 5 ways you and your product team can use them effectively. (Department of Product)
 


Technology - What is monolith to microservices architecture?

Smaller, discrete services are easier for a team to manage, maintain and understand. They also allow specialists to flourish, who are able to engage with their service without worrying about every way it will interact with the monolith. They reduce barriers to adoption, allowing developers to choose the technology which best complements their service. And microservices can be deployed independently, making the much-vaunted continuous deployment possible. (Just After Midnight)
 


New product features - Twitch launches ‘Hype train’ feature

Hype is important on Twitch. That’s why the company is gamifying it with a new feature called Hype Train, launching on Thursday. If you donate enough to a partnered or affiliate channel, you’ll see a bar pop up above chat, which will give donators rewards as it fills. (The Verge)
 


UX - How to manage user research priorities with limited resources

Now it’s obviously a nice problem to have, and democratizing UX through training and education can help, but how else can you prioritise research requests in the most stakeholder-pleasing way that’s ultimately also best for the user? To answer this question we sought the advice of Sr. UX Researcher Ted Boren from Infrastructure and Brandi Arnold, Senior UX Research Consultant at HBO. Here are their detailed recommendations on how to manage user research priorities. (UserZoom)
 


New product releases - The best products on show at CES 2020

Foldable display tech still feels slightly premature, but it’s edging closer to mass appeal this year. At CES, Lenovo was showing off a Windows tablet whose 13.3-inch screen folds in half, with a magnetic keyboard that can snap on the screen’s bottom portion. The idea is that it serve as either a tiny laptop or a larger screen with the keyboard detached. I also got to try Huawei’s foldable Mate X phone, which launched in China last year. The screen’s wraparound design, which folds out to become a large tablet, feels like the ideal format for a wave of foldable phones to come. (Fast Company)
 


Leadership - Don’t mistake execution for strategy

A business involved in conducting clinical trials for medical and pharmaceutical companies recently sent me a copy of their strategic plan for review in preparation for a forthcoming strategic planning workshop. I studied the nine pages carefully. But despite its promise to outline the company’s “Mission, Vision, Strategies, and Actions,” the document contained no real strategy. (Harvard Business Review)
 


Product review - Panasonic’s VR headset

Panasonic calls these “VR eyeglasses” a prototype, so consider any specifications shared in this article as placeholders for whatever could ship from the company or a partner. For example, a Panasonic representative said they could achieve a 100-degree field of view with this slim design using larger OLED microdisplays than the ones inside the headset I tried. So the smaller OLED panels in the CES prototype produced a noticeably smaller field of view than most current consumer designs — around 70 degrees measured diagonally, according to Panasonic. (VentureBeat)
 


Analysis - Should colleges really be putting smart speakers in dorm rooms?

We’re on the verge of a new era of smart speakers on campus. Schools as wide-ranging as Arizona State University, Lancaster University in the UK, and Ross University School of Medicine in Barbados have adopted voice-skill technology on campus. Some, including Northeastern University, have taken the technology a step further and now give students access to financials, course schedules and grades, and outstanding fees via voice devices. (MIT Review)
 


Case studies - Reimagining design systems at Spotify

How should we do design systems at Spotify? That’s a question we’ve tried to answer several times, through different approaches: from treating it as a one-off project to having a fully-staffed design team and lots of things in between. In the early days of Spotify, there was no design system—we were building everything for the first time. When we launched the mobile app in 2009, there were few standards or shared patterns in place, and the Spotify experience started to get increasingly…inconsistent. (Spotify Design Blog)
 


Process - How to work like a developer without learning to code

A former developer and anthropology major, a16z General Partner David Ulevitch has watched developers work for years. And he’s noticed something beyond their coding skills, developers don’t work like “us normals.” They are lazy, and that laziness is a feature, not a bug, in how they work. It has made them software power users who know how to collaborate at scale, turn data exhaust into insights, and automate any task they have to do more than once. (Andreessen Horowitz)

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About us

The Department of Product is an education company for product teams.


Our educational training programs include Product Mastery, designed to help you master your product skills and Web Technologies, built to help managers become more confident with technology and engineering teams.


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