Q: How will AI affect Design?
Will it commoditise the boring bits, leaving time and space for designers to shine?
Or will it just usher in a new "age of average"?
@intercom
Off Script E04 featuring
@thoughtwax
is live, and it's excellent
@nytimes
Or you could try…
“37 yr old female entrepreneur who started a company now worth >$1B successfully transitions to a new leadership role having previously recruited an excellent successor.”
🚨ɴᴇᴡ ꜰᴇᴀᴛᴜʀᴇ ᴀʟᴇʀᴛ🚨
The day ChatGPT launched our ML team got straight to work, asking how it could make
@Intercom
better at Customer Service.
Today we're announcing our first wave of features...
Most project management software is designed for how we *wish* projects ran: predictable work, accurate estimates, known outputs, zero entropy.
This is why we all end up in spreadsheets; spreadsheets don't even assume a project is actually happening.
There's 447M people in the EU, 92% have internet (411M)
Let's say they "accept cookies" 5x/day
Let's say it takes 1 second to accept them
That's 2 Billion wasted seconds every day
That's 24,000 person-days wasted every day
Did anyone in the EU ever think about this...
Thinking about productivity and its tools
* Your email is what *others* think you should work on.
* Your Todo list is what *you* think you should work on.
* Your calendar is (usually) what you *actually* work on.
How much do they overlap in your world?
If you're a startup founder trying to take lessons from this chart about how Teams "beat" Slack, just remember that Slack was bought for $27,700,000,000, and then get back to work.
This conversation between Jose Mourinho (amazing soccer manager) and Dele Alli (super talented but badly inconsistent player) is one of the most inspirational pieces I’ve seen.
Worth a watch (regardless of whether you know/like soccer)
🚨ChatGPT for Customer Service is Here🚨
Hot on the heels of the
@OpenAI
GPT-4 launch, you'll be ꜱʜᴏᴄᴋᴇᴅ to hear that we have a new product release built entirely on GPT-4.
This is perhaps Intercom's biggest new release in our history...
Every Feb 13th for the last 6 years I've tried to write a personal piece about my mother who passed away. This time I promised myself I'd just click Save and then tweet it at the end. No matter what.
So here it is:
Explore the solution space before refining the solution.
(aka 'Get the right design, then get the design right')
This is the biggest lesson I've learned from
@wasbuxton
.
Signing docs...
SF
Click here to sign, p.s. we already clicked for you, thanks for signing👍
Europe
Murder a raven
Sign doc using its blood & feather
Scan & email to us
Fedex raven to us
Send a PDF of steps 1→4
Include video evidence from a witness
Please redo with latest doc
The Irish Taoiseach (aka Prime Minister)
@LeoVaradkar
has given up his free time, re-registered as a doctor, and is now working a shift a week in the battle against COVID-19
He does the one thing you want a leader to do: He walks the walk.
@DeanPreston
Genuine question: Have you considered passing a law to make it illegal to leave anything in your car?
My head has imploded trying to work out if you would actually enforce that law or not.
A cool
@SlackHQ
feature would be to generate an editable glossary of company-specific lingo and acronyms frequently used.
It would let new hires get up to speed a lot faster without unintentional & inconvenient speedbumps
(e.g. “what does JTBD mean” etc.)
1⃣ꜱᴜᴍᴍᴀʀɪᴢᴀᴛɪᴏɴ
Support folks spend a lot of time either re-capping threads for others, or reading back to get the jist of an inherited conversation.
Now with
@intercom
it's just one click, and it's very cool...
@balajis
I certainly see this one a lot...
- Shocking declarative statement
- Supporting anecdote
[[ Paywall ]]
- Mitigating context
- Mitigating context
- Dilution & walk back of headline
- Vague conclusion
3 strong products solving real problems that I'd love to see "done again"
1. Lanyrd (Acquired by Eventbrite)
2. Slideshare (Acquired by LinkedIn)
3. TripIt (Acquired by Concur)
All stagnated after acquisition
What others?
LinkedIn's strength is its big weakness: there's no real difference between someone you've worked with for 10yrs, and a random event contact.
Big opportunity for them (and others) is to build a network that doesn't growth hack weak connections and also distinguishes strong ones.
You have to choose between speed & quality. Don't kid yourself.
Speed is desirable at the start of a project because the deadline is so insufferably far away.
Quality becomes desirable at the end when you finally see all the ugly compromises you've made along the way.
I love soccer but rarley tweet about it.
However Lukaku's movement here is exquisite. He is conductor of the orchestra; he never touches the ball, but without him this move is not possible.
Your 30s are the decade where
*Not Deciding* to do something
becomes, with the passage of the time,
*Deciding Not* to do something
And if you're not careful you won't see it happen.
I admire anyone optimistic enough to dream about exploring space, and skilled enough to realise it.
One thing I’ve consistently observed in my career…
• Haters don’t make.
• Makers don’t hate.
If you think Slack's product is easy or small, here's how 'easy' their notifications are. (And bear in mind this chart is before they released 'Pause' features)
This is an incredible little teaching tool that illustrates how good & bad ideas spread across a crowd (or company) as long as they're simple enough, whereas complex ones are rarely contagious.
Overlaps with everything from products to politics
Path is one of those ideas that I'd love to see tried again, and enough has changed in the tech landscape over 12 years to make it worth a shot.
Their 2010 launch video was really compelling
🚨Intercom launch day🚨
Release
#1
- ᴀ ʙʀᴀɴᴅ ɴᴇᴡ ᴍᴇꜱꜱᴇɴɢᴇʀ
☑️ Your style
☑️ Your layout
☑️ Your launcher
☑️ Your content
☑️ Your features
All the gorgeous details here→
Professional maturity means knowing (and being honest about) the things that you...
- can do
- can't do
- can do, but hate doing, and thus do badly/slowly
- can do, but never have time for, and thus can't do
What else...
For about a decade
@davebarrett
and I have tried to be first to prank each other every Wednesday. This Wednesday I woke up to a barbershop quartet on my doorstep at 9am.
January is always a tough month.
Lads: it's a good time to check in on your mates. 8/10 suicides in Ireland are men, and it's the
#1
cause of death for men under 25.
One text, one call, one invite, one chat, it can make all the difference.
Last night I "went out for drinks" by joining a 6 person Google Meet/Hangout with my mates for about 3 hours.
It's not perfect but it works *really* well. (I'm going out again tonight)
Now that Ireland has decided to
#CloseThePubs
, don't do big house parties, try this instead.
Watch this drone deliver 2 hot lattes straight to my back garden this morning. The flight was only 158 seconds.
A truly incredible experience from
@MannaAero
in Dublin.
Technology is Awesome.
I announced internally last night that we’re going to invest an extra ~$100M to bring a new AI technology we’re dreaming about to market that we’re calling Fin X. Running a scaled company on your own cashflows brings wonderful discipline, and when I returned to
@intercom
in late
Pro tip
Hopefully you'll sit down for Christmas dinner this year with people you love. Take a good look around the table. Relish every moment with these people, they won't be there forever
Twitter’s hot takes & outrage will be right where you left it in 2018
Happy Christmas.
🚨We just launched Intercom Series🚨
A visual drag and drop, campaign builder. It’s an incredible piece of work conceived, designed and delivered by the exceptional folks on our Engage team.
More here:
We have a huge release today in Intercom, more on that in a second. For now I just want to remind startups of a core fact:
→ Nothing starts finished ←
For example, here's the
@Intercom
Inbox from ~2011. A "toy" by all accounts at the time.
@RudiKinsella
I would could talk about how SAF plucked a young Dutch lad called Robin out of total obscurity, got him on a free, when everyone doubted him, and that’s how they won the title.
For 13 years I used
@gmail
exclusively as my mail client & loved it.
Midway through this year I switched to
@SuperhumanCo
.
It is genuinely everything it's cracked up to be.
2018 will be a big year for them.
@Austen
* runs promoted tweets to ensure the world never forgets, for even a second, that this man took a paycut and raised his employee minimum wage to $70k
2⃣ ꜰɪɴᴅɪɴɢ ᴛʜᴇ ʀɪɢʜᴛ ᴛᴏɴᴇ.
A lot of time is spent translating "the answer" into "the proper way to explain the answer".
Now with
@intercom
, it's one click.
Ryan's thread overlaps with and reminds me of Bill Buxton's point about the difference in skills/approaches needed between "getting the right design, and getting the design right"
I've started saying "prototyping" more, instead of "iterating", after I learned something from
@bmoesta
.
Prototyping means trying wildly different options that cover more possibilities to discover what works.
Iterating implies gradual change down one path we're already on.
"I'd like to deposit €20 please"
Bank teller: "Sure thing, no problem..."
Bank teller (on their keyboard)
Alt→PauseBreak→F7→F7→Num Lock→Num Lock→Num Lock→PrintScr→Ctrl+Shift+ScrollBreak →Home→End→[→End →F4 →PQ → Esc
"So, €20 was it?"
WTF is this interface?
🎶 Happy birthday to us 🎶 We'll be singing that all day long because it's our 10th birthday! 🎂
What a decade it's been. We couldn't have done it without all the support from all of you so, thank you. Cheers to another 10 years! 🥂