Team meetings are moving to the Metaverse?
Product Management, UX, Startups, and more — freshly curated by Zeda.io.
Hello, all you product-loving folks! 🥰
Welcome to this week's edition of Product Café, your weekly cup of coffee for everything product management, startups, and more. ☕
Okay, so there were two things that caught my eye this week. 1. A startup with no operations bags funding of $350 million and 2. Tech giant CEO thinks his employees are not working hard enough. I don’t know about you but the difference sounds kind of ironically funny to me.
WeWork’s co-founder gets massive investment for his new real estate startup! 💸
Let’s talk about the first one. WeWork’s co-founder and former CEO Adam Neumann, made headlines when he secured a massive cheque of $350 million from top investment fund Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), for his new floated residential real estate startup called “Flow”.
This investment values the company at $1 billion, making it a unicorn. And the mind-blowing part? All this happened even before it started operations.
Source: https://www.financialexpress.com/industry/wework-fame-adam-neumann-bags-mega-millions-for-new-real-estate-startup-already-labelled-unicorn-with-no-ops/2631781/
Sundar Pichai gets disappointed with Google’s productivity. Ouch. 😞
Now for the second one, Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai seems disappointed that his employees are not working hard enough.
“There are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the headcount we have. To create a culture that is more mission-focused, more focused on our products, and more customer-focused. We should think about how we can minimize distractions and really raise the bar on both product excellence and productivity,” he told his employees.
Google has also slowed down hiring and even rescinded many offers owing to the economic headwinds. Sundar was more subtle with his approach to raising these concerns with his employees as opposed to Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg who approached the same issue with his Facebook employees in a not-so-subtle way.
“Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here. And part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might just say that this place isn’t for you. And that self-selection is okay with me,” Zuckerberg said during a QnA session.
Okay team, let’s put on our VR headphones so we can start this meeting! 🎧
I am sure most of you have played video games in your life, where we choose a character and battle or race with other users who are also donning characters in the game. In short, this is the closest experience we have had with the Metaverse. I spoke a lot about what the Metaverse is and how it can affect our future in one of our previous newsletters.
Anyway, the reason I brought this up was that last week, my cousin had come home and she was using her VR headset and moving around frantically. My first thought was, “she’s probably playing a VR game”. But turns out, that she was attending her daily stand-up meeting with her team members who are spread across the world. My jaw dropped. Like literally. 😮
It wasn’t just her company but many top firms across the globe are turning to VR-based meetings and some even trying to move into the Metaverse.
1. PwC
For instance, for the consultancy firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, this is the new norm of meetings for a growing number of employees. It was during the pandemic while everyone was adopting remote work, that PwC started buying thousands of virtual reality headsets to help battle Zoom fatigue and level up the playing field. PWC’s UK operations are already running two to three team meetings via VR each week.
An interesting example by a PwC staff talked about how a presentation for a furniture company through VR was held in a virtual conference centre. Here, participants were able to conjure furniture designs out of thin air and allow clients to view them in real-time.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/feb/20/no-more-fomo-top-firms-turn-to-vr-to-liven-up-meetings
2. NTT Docomo Ventures
Christina Ku, a director at NTT Docomo Ventures has been fascinated with the potential of the Metaverse. As a huge fan of the Pokémon Go mobile game, she has captured many rare pokémons like Koffing, Psyducks and Mudkip, and that’s how her fascination for the Metaverse began. In January of this year, she conducted an all-hands Metaverse meeting with some of her colleagues and she broke down the pros of the technology into the following:
1. The relative conformity of people’s avatars made it easier to “focus on what they were saying, and how they interacted with you.”
2. There was no unconscious bias with respect to age, gender, height etc.
3. It saves a lot of time. '“I can meet 10 CEOs in the same amount of time” it would take to meet one in the real world, she says.
She also goes on to say how during one of her meetings with the founder of a stealth startup, she toured an NFT gallery via her VR headset. “Walking” through the gallery together brought the concept to life, she says. “I wouldn’t have been as excited if he’d just shown me a presentation.”
Source: https://www.fastcompany.com/90729331/executive-moving-meetings-metaverse
Gartner predicts that by 2026, 25% of people will spend at least one hour a day in the Metaverse for work, shopping, education and more.
Riddle of the week 💬
Why did the developer go broke?
The answer is at the end of this newsletter.
In other news….you will be able to exit silently from WhatsApp groups
Source: https://bgr.com/tech/whatsapp-will-finally-let-you-silently-leave-a-group-chat/
Yep, that’s right. No more sending awkward texts like “hey dude, I had to leave the group because of ………..” to your friends whenever you exit a group. (unless of course they check the group member’s list and find you missing 😅)
WhatsApp announced privacy features that will allow users to exit WhatsApp groups without notifying anyone except the group admin. Other features under the privacy umbrella include controlling who can see when you’re online and preventing screenshots to be taken on “view once” messages. According to the company, these features will be rolled out at the end of this month.
Once the feature that lets you control your online status arrives, it’ll feel like you’re switching on “stealth mode” on WhatsApp. If you set your “Last Seen” status to “Nobody” and set your online status to “Same as Last Seen,” you will be invisible while using WhatsApp. This is a feature that users have been requesting for years.
Zeda.io is going live on Product Hunt this August 23rd! ✨
In our previous newsletter, we told you how we couldn't keep calm because Zeda.io was finally going live this month. And now with the countdown to our “Go live” date and the release of our product launch video, we are beyond stoked for you to be a part of this journey with us.
Mark your calendars right away!
And presenting to you the launch video of Zeda.io! 😎
The all-in-one product management platform to empower your teams to build simpler and smarter products!
With features to Collect, Analyze, Plan and Execute, Zeda.io truly is the CAPE for product teams to manage their product life cycle from “should we build this feature” to “this feature is finally live!”💡
That’s all folks! Have something you want to share? Put them in the comments below and we’ll get back to you soon.
See you again next week! 🥂
It’s hard to explain what a Product Manager does, we get it. But you know what’s not that hard? Sharing this newsletter with your friends and colleagues!
Answer to the riddle: Because she used up all her cache 😂
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