Designing Product

Author

Ted Merz
July 19, 2024

In partnership with

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.

FREE AI & ChatGPT Masterclass to automate 50% of your workflow

More than 300 Million people use AI across the globe, but just the top 1% know the right ones for the right use-cases.

Join this free masterclass on AI tools that will teach you the 25 most useful AI tools on the internet – that too for $0 (they have 100 free seats only!)

This masterclass will teach you how to:

  • Build business strategies & solve problems like a pro

  • Write content for emails, socials & more in minutes

  • Build AI assistants & custom bots in minutes

  • Research 10x faster, do more in less time & make your life easier

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

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.