Designing Product

_{Sign up to receive Surface Area or follow me on Linkedin or Twitter. Book a meeting here to talk about ghostwriting from my agency, Principals Media}.

Yvonne Caravia met me for lunch at La Bonne Soupe, a French restaurant on 55th street in midtown Manhattan.

Yvonne is the Chief Product Officer at Lab49, a consulting firm that designs and builds highly specialized tech solutions for banks. Lab49 is best known for creating the trading systems used by firms including UBS, Citibank and Morgan Stanley in the early 2000s.

I met Yvonne a decade ago when we were product managers at Bloomberg; she ran mobile applications, and I managed news features.

Yvonne was in town to meet clients. The firm is working on projects aimed at integrating generative AI into the systems used by financial professionals to trade securities and manage money.

We talked about one of the challenges facing all product managers: you can’t ask clients what they want directly. They won’t be able to tell you.

They can describe the problem, of course.

The solution, however, remains elusive.

Yvonne said the most effective approach when building a new application is to watch customers click and type and process information. Only with that can you suggest effective systems.

I had a similar experience at Bloomberg. I would visit clients purportedly to demo new functions, but actually to watch how they used the terminal.

Seeing how they looked up, say news on a company or topic, helped me understand what needed to be changed.

The ability to conduct such time-consuming and high-touch research is a huge advantage for companies like Bloomberg and Lab49 that build professional systems.

That’s particularly true with AI, which in most cases is being integrated into existing platforms.

Yvonne estimated that 30% to 50% of the cost of implementing new technology is not the “new” part per se, but the integration costs. Stitching new features into legacy software.

She said that one reason to get tech right is because it’s so expensive to get it wrong.

Learn how to build custom GPTs & automate 50% of your workflow with AI

Don’t pay for sh*tty AI courses when you can learn it for FREE!

This incredible 3-hour Masterclass on AI & ChatGPT (worth $399) makes you a master of 25+ AI tools, hacks & prompting techniques to save 16 hours/week and do more with your time.

Get it now for absolutely free! (for first 100 users only) 🎁

This masterclass will teach you how to:

• Do AI-driven data analysis to make quick business decisions

• Make stunning PPTs & write content for emails, socials & more in minutes

• Build AI assistants & custom bots in minutes

• Solve complex problems, research 10x faster & make your simpler & easier

You’ll wish you knew about this FREE AI masterclass sooner 😉

Register & save your seat now! (valid for next 24 hours only!)

BRIEF OBSERVATIONS

CVS: View of the CVS in my neighborhood in NYC with practically everything locked up because of theft. I’ll never get used to this.

HIROSHIMA: These two photos are so emotionally evocative of destruction and renewal.

STARTUP CULTURE: America is in the midst of a startup boom. Never before have so many people started so many new ventures. This captures the mood.

GRIEVING: The beginning of this essay by John Pavlovitz captures how grief is often juxtaposed with day-to-day challenges.

FOUNDER FRIENDLY: Top lists are sometimes not what they appear.