Dear friends,

Every week, I’m sharing an essay that relates to what we are building and learning at Alan. Those essays are fed by the article I’m lucky enough to read and capitalise on.

I’m going to try to be provocative in those essays to trigger a discussion with the community. Please answer, comment, and ping me!

If you are not subscribed yet, it's right here! 

If you like it, please share it on social networks!

Share 💡JC's Newsletter

AI will change the way we build product

I have a strong conviction that artificial intelligence will completely transform our internal product development dynamics and make us all more creative and efficient. 

We will spend less time coordinating and more time building, as we'll have smaller teams. 

If you can have smaller teams, it means we can have fewer discussions, fewer disagreements, faster decision making, faster experimentation. It also means we spend less time recruiting, onboarding, coaching, …

As Scott Belsky said in one of his articles: “There is a consistent unfair competitive advantage when the talent stack was collapsed - when the lead designer was also the product leader, when the front-end engineer was also a designer, when the designer is also a great copywriter, when the product leader was also the founder/ceo, etc.  Tighter conduits for decision making and synthesizing information are an incredible advantage when it comes to crafting products.”

So, what's possible? What will change? What can we build? 

In my view, the direction is that each role will broaden and overlap with others'. The best Alaners will be the ones who don’t remain static in their knowledge and to learn to use the next generation of tools. 

These tools will make us even stronger builders and reduce the size of our product teams, our crews, from 7-8 people to 3-4 people who can move quickly and build a vast array of products. 

I envision a world where a non-designer, be it a product manager or an engineer, can describe the screen they want with just a few lines of text, explaining why they want it, and get that screen automatically generated in Figma using our design system, adhering to all our product consistency rules, and be able to have a prototype. 

I also imagine our designers creating a screen, an experience, a new animation, and, with one click, having the code generated for that screen or experience. 

I see our engineers having highly intelligent co-pilots that can be used to do things that help them code ten times faster, thus focusing on the more complex aspects. I also believe that documentation and testing will be mostly automated. Our engineers will be able to spend her time on software architecture and product thinking.

It's a bit like imagining the era of the great Flemish painters, where each master painter had a studio composed of dozens of apprentices, who helped them build whatever they wanted, much more quickly, and just add the strategic direction and the final brushstroke that made all the difference. 

Our team is working on this very deeply, and we have first demonstrators of this.

So, what are the skills you should develop as an Alaner?

• Incredible curiosity for the adjacent skill and the new tools that allow you to develop it

• Pursuit of relentless automation of your tasks to focus on the highest value ones

• Build more and more product thinking, architecture thinking and taste on what makes an amazing product

• Spend time developing your creativity

I envision a future where a small team or even an individual can develop a product, empowering even more all our Alaners to build.

I focused this post on Product, but I think it applies to Sales, Marketing, Operations,

Some good articles I have read this week

👉 Google: “Antitrust Basics for Search Team” (Internal Tech Emails)

• Interesting to see that what we see as our product strategy becomes antitrust as you become dominant.

👉 Brain Food: Taking Risks (Farnam Street)

• Stop reading the news! “The more news we consume, the more misinformed we become.”

👉 Notes on “Taste” (Are.na)

• The importance of Taste and how to develop it:

  • Taste requires intention, focus, and care. Taste is a commitment to a state of attention. It’s a process of peeling back layer after layer, turning over rock after rock.

  • Taste is often formed through the integration of diverse, and wide-ranging inputs. 

  •  Taste requires originality. Taste hits different. It intrigues. 

👉 Apple Earnings, Shopify Earnings (Stratechery)

• Apple gross margin is at 36% on products, and then they upsell services to reach 45%

It’s already over! Please share JC’s Newsletter with your friends, and subscribe 👇

Let’s talk about this together on LinkedIn or on Twitter. Have a good week!