Narrowing this Substack down
When you have to build a product to figure out what the product is
I started this series with the intention of telling large-scale, "macro" stories about a topic I’ve been fascinated with for years — how companies (like my employer Spotify) managed to compete with tech giants through product innovations, business model innovations, and culture innovations.
But sometimes you have to build a product to figure out what the product is. And I’ve learned two things as I’ve been writing.
First learning: It turns out people were far more interested in reading about small-scale, "micro" mysteries of consumer product design.
Some of my best posts were ones whose scope dramatically narrowed from research to draft to publish.
Like long-term thoughts about digital music competition that led to a more interesting question about why the iPod's iconic click wheel wasn't actually featured in iPod ads ("Hide the Mechanic!").
Or a post that started about general AI team structures, but evolved into an explanation of mixed-method qualitative and quantitative evaluation ("Why the AI Boom is a Bad Time to Lay Off User Researchers").
Second learning: I personally found myself less interested in writing about historical winners and losers of the cloud/mobile era, and more interested in writing about what it’s like inventing right now.
I've mentioned before that I’m early stage in building a consumer-social AI startup. As “AI” increasingly means dystopian automation and slop and fake friends, I think there's a growing hunger to connect with real people you actually care about.
The idea itself started as Aux1 (auxiliary, second person), and evolved over time to Alt (alternate, second identity). With Alt I’m interested in building something that’s additive to human relationships, not subtractive – and a bit fun and weird, like my favorite Spotify products.
I’ll have a lot more to say about this in my next post. But so far, I actually haven't talked much about it publicly.
Not because I wanted to stay in “stealth” lol, but instead because every three months some kind of incredible new model capabilities have been emerging, which let me tear down what I had and rebuild an even better version of it.
But honestly, my work was leaking into my writing anyway. My "aesthetic, mechanic, promise" framework was something I came up with for my own use, as I was working through iterations that felt overstuffed (“Your Daily Mess”) and figuring out UX tradeoffs (“You’re Allowed to Be Boring”).
So I may as well just write about my work directly.
In short: Rather than retroactive analyses of other companies, I think this Substack would be more interesting as a living time capsule, written from the point of view of someone building a new product at this chaotic moment in time for consumer tech.
So I’ll be redefining the scope of this Substack, from large-scale studies of how midsize consumer tech companies competed with larger players in the past, to more focused posts about consumer-tech design, filtered through a new AI product. (Which is kind of what my posts have turned into anyway, I’m just formalizing it.)
If that's not your thing, no hard feelings, smash that unsubscribe button.
But if it sounds intriguing, then I’m glad you're sticking around!
At no point did it mean “aux” as in “aux cord”