AI Agents are here!

I just had an aha moment using Claude this week. I asked it to help putting together a dynamic convince your boss template for the conference, and instead of just giving me a text response it actually created a fully working React component and ran it so I could test it. But deploying the feature still took me about 3 hours in total as I needed to copy the code and integrate it into our product environment.

Cursor is trying to solve this copy-and-paste problem by creating a code editor that is AI native - and it is getting a lot of hype right now. Dozens of high profile developers have been raving about how much more productive they are becoming when using it.

But Replit just went a step further last week and launched agents. Instead of suggesting edits and improvements, you write a prompt and it builds the entire app. This is more than just code generation. The AI has full access to the code editor and sets up filesystem structures, installs dependencies, configures the database and deploys the app. There are some cool demos of simple apps, and I’m sure it is still very limited in capabilities, but it is another big step forward.

All of these AI’s still need competent developers to review, sanitise and improve the code. But every developer is now a lot more productive and these AI’s keep improving. I think we’re going to see a lot of agents launched over the next year continuing the LLM arms race of the past two years. Exciting times!

This Week’s Updates

Enabling the Team

3 Steps to Cultivate an Innovator’s Mindset by Soren Kaplan
People with an innovators mindset quickly move up the corporate ladder. Soren shares tips like embracing curiosity, engaging in continuous learning, and more.

Hierarchy in Teams: Why It Often Does More Harm Than Good by Pim de Morree
Does hierarchy help teams perform better? Or is that a wrong assumption underlying the management structures of most companies? Pim looks at the research.

Product Direction

Why you don’t get Value from your Product Strategy by Tim Herbig
Product strategy needs to be decisive and make explicit choices, it needs to be connected to business strategy and it needs to be executable.

Continuous Strategizing by Roman Pichler
As markets, products, and technologies change at an ever-faster pace, strategies that used to last for years are in danger of becoming stale.

Continuous Research

Getting Faster to Insights with Visual User Interview Notes by Christoph Steinlehner
Christopher shares a method and template to support capturing, synthesizing, defining insights and actions

How Triangulation Turns Research Insights Into Actionable Recommendations by Jayne Parfitt
Great research doesn’t just sit on a shelf. Jayne shares how you can turn all of those nuggets into actionable advice.

Continuous Design

How to Deliver Customer Experiences That Increase Conversions by Sonia Thompson
Empowering consumers with better brand experiences & inclusivity improves the customer experience and conversions.

Four Principles For Successful Cross-team Collaboration by Courtney Maya George
Courtney shares how you can cultivate alignment in the “white space” between product teams

Continuous Delivery

Is Simplicity making a comeback? Pieter Levels on Lex Fridman’s Podcast by Jose Canciani
Pieter Levels is a solo entrepreneur with multiple successful sites - photoAI.com, InteriorAI.com, Nomads.com and more. And he uses PHP and HTML.

Leading Effective Engineering Teams by Gergely Orosz
What makes software teams effective, and how do the TL, EM and TLM roles differ? Gergely shares an excerpt from Addy Osmani’s new book: Leading Effective Engineering Teams

UXDX EMEA Spotlight:
AI and ML in Drone Navigation
Insights for Product Development

Getting a coffee delivered by autonomous drone sounds like science fiction - but not in Ireland. Alan will be sharing the product journey for Manna, building a complex hardware and AI company that delivers exceptional NPS. You can see a drone in action here.

FREE COMMUNITY EVENTS 

Check out more upcoming community events 

Video of the Week:
Improving UX Research Quality with Cross-Department Collaboration

From mastering the art of stakeholder communication to unlocking the power of company-wide resources, Kasey offers a goldmine of strategies to amplify your research impact. You'll discover how to break down complex findings, maintain research momentum long after project completion, and tap into unexpected participant pools. Whether you're a lone researcher or part of a team, this talk is packed with actionable tips. Check it out now👇👇

The Results of Last Week’s Poll

The question: What platforms do you use to find events?

Meetup is still the go-to platform for most people (27.03%), although LinkedIn and Eventbrite seem to be rising. From my personal perspective, meetup doesn’t see to have either the same level of events as from before the pandemic and the same number of people looking for events.

Eventbrite and LinkedIn allow people to create events for free whereas Meetup charges so I assume that the hosts are migrating away (especially for free events). And as one person commented “I find out [about the event] in LinkedIn,Slack or Discord… I don't really care about the platform to signup”.

Given that Meetup has come out on top we’ll continue to use the platform for now for our community events. We’re in 20 cities around the world so far and always looking for more - if you’re interested in becoming an ambassador and hosting events in your city please get in touch!