The Main Thing

Reflection: A Time of Realignment in Tech

Hey everyone,

Lately, I've been mulling over the stark contrast we're seeing in our industry. On one side, there's the U.S. economy, booming. On the other, major tech players like Spotify, Twilio, and VMware are hitting the brakes hard with significant layoffs. It hits close to home for all of us in UX, design, product, and engineering and I know some people in this newsletter are affected either directly, or indirectly.

The fact that Spotify’s stock price jumped 20% after announcing the layoffs signifies that the growth by headcount strategy, even in a strong economy, is over. This is a wake-up call for how we, as product teams, respond to a tech industry that's shifting gears. Efficiency and profitability are going to take the lead for the foreseeable future.

So, what does this mean for you on the ground? Have you been impacted by the change in sentiment? How is your team adapting? Are you finding new ways to innovate within these constraints? Drop your thoughts in the poll

For a deeper dive into this topic, I've pulled my thoughts into a full article in this issue below. It's a mix of my reflections, some hard facts, and a personal reflection of 2024.

Keep innovating,

Rory

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

This Weeks Updates

Enabling the Team

From Sociocracy to Deep Democracy: Comparing Decision-Making Methods… by Lennard Toma
In this post, we'll take a closer look at four of the most popular consent decision-making methods.

Writing to Think by Farnam Street
Writing is the process by which you realize that you do not understand what you are talking about. It's also how you discover new ideas.

Product Direction

Feature/Product Fit by Casey Winters
Leaders from the design, engineering, analytics, and sales teams share their expLearn how to achieve a feature-product fit and boost your product's success with expert insights.

Vertical, Horizontal, And Ghost Markets by Matt Brown
Ghost markets seem real. Delve into the intriguing world of ghost markets and their hidden dynamics.

Continuous Discovery

No Time for Discovery? Here’s How to Fix It. by Teresa Torres
Many product teams don’t think they have time for discovery. If this is you, Discover how to accelerate product discovery in this insightful article.

Design Sprints are Not Enough, Prepare for a UX Marathon by Alex Kreger
Learn strategies to improve the long-term user experience rather than quick design sprints within digital banking channels.

Continuous Design

Responsible Interaction Design by Vicky Teinaki
Discover how to create responsible and ethical interactions in design where you contextualise history, consider power dynamics and act (or not) with intention.

Zara: The Billion Dollar Missed Opportunity by Peter Ramsey
A borderline unusable user experience, littered with bugs and full of missed opportunities. Dive into a UX case study on Zara.com.

Continuous Delivery

A Faster Web In 2024 by Rick Viscomi
Which analyses three metrics that represent different aspects of page performance: loading speed, responsiveness and design stability.

How Qwik’s Astro Integration Beats Both React and Vanilla JS by Paul Scanlon
Paul tests Qwik with Astro, and finds it's the best of both worlds — lighter than React and less verbose than Vanilla JavaScript.

UPCOMING COMMUNITY EVENTS

Streamlining Service and Accessibility Design
for Product Exploration and Workflow Optimization in Enterprises

📅 Tue, Dec 12, 2023, 19:00 CET
📹 Online
📢 Dianne Tennent - Software Developer at Optimal Workshop
Tiannan Zhao - UX- Focused Product Designer at Burberry
Harjit Kaur - Senior Product Designer at Imprivata

🔗 Website & Registration here or Click to attend on LinkedIn

Empathetic UX:
Merging Gamified Research and Social Responsibility

📅 Tue, Jan 30, 2024, 19:00 CET
📹 Online
📢 Janice Hannaway & Jane Reid - Director, Co-founders at
ResearchU Training Academy
Benjamin Basseches - Sr. UX Researcher at Workiva
Jonathan Haines - Senior UX Designer at Tailorbird

🔗 Website & Registration here or Click to attend on LinkedIn  

Mastering AI Tools and Cognitive Insights
for a Captivating UX Portfolio

📅 Tue, Feb 06, 2024, 19:00 CET
📹 Online
📢 Mariia Hrabovska - Senior User Experience Designer at Fidelity Investments
Kelly Dern - Senior Product Designer, Video AI at Google
Jason Zhou - Product Designer at PayPal

🔗 Website & Registration here or Click to attend on LinkedIn

THE UXDX MAJOR EVENTS

UXDX USA | 15 - 17 May 2024
📍 New York & Livestreamed Online

UXDX EMEA | 9 - 11 Oct 2024
📍 Dublin & Livestreamed Online

Learn More about UXDX

New Video Release This Week

Want to know how to better pick the right tools for your teams? 👇👇👇

The Results of Last Week’s Poll

The question was: Will AI-created apps be the new way of creating software?

Users responded:

The majority of people think that AI-generated apps will be the future leading to throwaway code.

I think this is a great opportunity for the next generation of no-code editors.. I'm imagining a UI where you can write your business logic in plain text and the AI will always validate that it passes each of the business rules. We all know how business rules grow over time so making sure that it remains maintainable will be an interesting UI challenge to solve.

Exciting times!