(1) FAANG seems to be running out of new ideas. They've collectively turned everything into some kind of feed and frantically reiterated on that trying to squeeze out every penny of it. Some 10 years ago they were searching for "how can we monetize mobile and ads" and now everything seems to look like a nail. Their products all look similar, they're copycatting each others' features and there's barely any "ha, interesting UX idea"-moment anymore.
Also, they're too big to try something new in the small with no or minimal ROI which is especially driven by all of them being public companies with a historically high YoY growth rate.
Good news for small disrupting startups. Also for pretty old behemoths who are able to survive hard times like tardigrades (Microsoft) and strategically put themselves into a good waiting position.
(2) The data-driven mindset as a sole strategy seems to be ceasing. To me, this comes without surprise. Having watched product manager work in recent years it looked like mindless and uncreative A/B-testing: "let's push this box 10px to the left and see what happens" and months later "push this box 15px to the right and measure". Data-driven is good, but it does not replace but only augment qualitative product management.
Also, "we do design sprints bc Google is doing so" from my perspective often ends in a soulless process where all stakeholders are just doing their thing in order to measure something (anything) systematically cutting out peaks (and lows).
My counter-initiative would be: Can we please make digital products creative, weird, un-commercialized, at least when they're new? Can we again listen more to our guts?
"Data-driven" the way FAANG does it is just design by committee at scale. It will always converge to the blandest design. No one will have an opinion about it.
The flip side to that, at FAANG, is "look, we put the start button in the middle! Eh? Eh?" which I'm sure went through traditional design by committee.
This is how my business competes, at least partially.
To be intentionally vague:
For our product we have taken the “old” ways of doing things and just automated them using automation tools like Ansible AWX. We didn’t try to compete with the firms offering “new web scale 2.0 instant” nonsense, and we use their architectural shortcomings to market our strengths. We losely couple everything we can to achieve flexibility in our product rather than building flexibility as specific features.
It works well for us. Most of our clients left absolutely massive but effectively cookie cutter companies and are much happier. And we make money.
(1) FAANG seems to be running out of new ideas. They've collectively turned everything into some kind of feed and frantically reiterated on that trying to squeeze out every penny of it. Some 10 years ago they were searching for "how can we monetize mobile and ads" and now everything seems to look like a nail. Their products all look similar, they're copycatting each others' features and there's barely any "ha, interesting UX idea"-moment anymore.
Also, they're too big to try something new in the small with no or minimal ROI which is especially driven by all of them being public companies with a historically high YoY growth rate. Good news for small disrupting startups. Also for pretty old behemoths who are able to survive hard times like tardigrades (Microsoft) and strategically put themselves into a good waiting position.
(2) The data-driven mindset as a sole strategy seems to be ceasing. To me, this comes without surprise. Having watched product manager work in recent years it looked like mindless and uncreative A/B-testing: "let's push this box 10px to the left and see what happens" and months later "push this box 15px to the right and measure". Data-driven is good, but it does not replace but only augment qualitative product management. Also, "we do design sprints bc Google is doing so" from my perspective often ends in a soulless process where all stakeholders are just doing their thing in order to measure something (anything) systematically cutting out peaks (and lows).
My counter-initiative would be: Can we please make digital products creative, weird, un-commercialized, at least when they're new? Can we again listen more to our guts?