Advanced Tech: Virtually Mirroring Magic

X, (formally known as Twitter) has exploded with demos of people turning sketches into fully functional programs with complex behaviour and logic using tldraw and its ‘Make Real’ function.

Andreas Klinger recreated the Atari breakout game using only a rough sketch and notes describing the rules. He jokes in the video: "This is the point I'm looking for a new job. I think this whole programmers thing is done!".

Under the hood, tldraw converts sketches to PNG images, which are then input to GPT4 to generate HTML + Tailwind styling.

My mind immediately jumped to the issue of maintainability for the software produced by AIs and whether we would be creating a mountain of technical debt. But then, considering the speed and quality of what is being created (and, as ever, this is the worst the technology will ever be!) I'm beginning to question whether a lot of technology will become disposable.

Instead of trying to “repair” it, will we discard the old code and get AI to regenerate a new version from scratch with the new features? Move over Fast Fashion - here comes Fast Tech.

Give me your thoughts in the poll below.

* Scroll down to see last week’s poll results.

This Weeks Updates

Enabling the Team

Move fast, break people  by Marttiina Keituri Gilchrist
We use urgency to “gently nudge” users in the desired direction, but humans often make hasty decisions when grappling with negative emotions like stress, sadness, fear, or anger. So we need to avoid negative urgency.

Rethinking Change In The Public Sector by Audree Fletcher
This article challenges the efficacy of programmatic change in UK public services, advocating for continuous improvement and sustained service evolution over traditional, temporary program structures.

Product Direction

What teams expect of a new product manager in the first 90 days by GoPractice
Leaders from the design, engineering, analytics, and sales teams share their expectations from newly hired PMs.

Stepping Into Your First Product Leadership Role—What to Expect by Melissa Suzuno
Melissa highlights the significant shift from focusing on individual projects to overseeing teams, building trust with stakeholders, understanding the business model, and more.

Continuous Discovery

How Asking Works: A Crash Course in Customer Discovery Questions by Tristan Kromer
Interviewing strangers is a science as much as an art. Learning how customer discovery questions actually work can give you fresh insight into the process.

Johan Cruyff’s Influence On Adaptive Role Switching In Product Design by Charlie Rowe
As our role remits keep changing to incorporate more responsibilities. Charlie Rowe takes a football analogy to a product design philosophy.

Continuous Design

The Gulf Between Design And Engineering by Rune Madsen
Rune believes the way most organizations produce digital products is fundamentally broken. In this article, she explains what things go wrong and how we can define better workflows when building digital products.

Why You’re Struggling to Prioritize by Itamar Gilad
Prioritizing ideas is much more than ICE/RICE technique. In this article Itamar shares crucial fundamentals that have to be in place.

Continuous Delivery

Architectural Decisions — The Making Of by Olaf Zimmermann
How to identify, make, and capture the design decisions that make or break the technical design of your project.

What is a Staff Engineer?  by Nicola Ballotta and Raviraj Achar
Nicola and Raviraj share some insights on the Staff Engineer Role at Meta including its unique blend of technical leadership, strategic impact, and advanced problem-solving.

UXDX Bulletin Board

LIVE EVENT TODAY: Learn How to Maximise Your Outcomes & Ensure Beta Success

There is a better way to create products… Later today, Stephen will share how to maximize business results by applying customer research at scale.

Jaclyn will share how to ensure the success of an open beta through mixed-methods research.

FREE tickets are available now, register to join us!

Video of the week - Product Teams & AI

Video Highlight of the Week: Dive into our top conference talks! Each week, we release a select, must-watch conference video for free. Don't miss out!"

Every product will contain some form of AI going forward. Explore insights from experts at Meta, NASA, Google and more on how AI transforms workflows, responsibilities, and the role of ethics in product teams.

The Results of Last Week’s Poll

The question was: Is it good for the CEO to be in the details of every project?

Users responded:

The majority of opinion is that this is a good thing but that it works with a limited number of projects. I agree. Brian himself said in the interview with Lenny that if something doesn't work you need to ask the question: was it the idea or the execution? When he described how Airbnb grew with the separation of divisions my mind jumped to it being a poor execution of a decentralised model (but it’s easy to criticise at a distance).

It'll be interesting to see how Airbnb operate in 2 or 3 years’ time to see how this scales in practice.

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