In partnership with

We track Product so you don't have to. Top Podcasts summarised, the latest AI tools, plus research and news in a 5 min digest.

Hey Product Fans!

Welcome to this week’s 🌮 Product Tapas!

If you’ve been forwarded this or just stumbled upon it, you’re in for a treat. For the best reading experience, check out the web version and sign up for future editions here.

What’s on the menu this week? 🧑‍🍳

📰 Not Boring: Google's bringing AI to YouTube search, whilst WhatsApp now schedules tasks with Perplexity. The living room is becoming the new battleground as TikTok and Meta chase YouTube's TV success. Plus Figma's going public with the ultimate "we don't need you" energy after that Adobe drama.

⌚️ Productivity Tapas: This week's lineup includes animated icons that'll make your UI pop, the top 10 prompts that are turning Sonnet into everyone's secret weapon, and a no-code agent builder that's about to change how teams work. Plus, there's a tool that transforms your messy text into genuinely useful visuals instantly.

🍔 Blog Bites: John Cutler dismantles why traditional strategy pyramids are broken (spoiler: real work behaves like fabric, not cascades), Peter Ramsay's back with more micro-interactions that prove small details create massive delight, and how Figma conquered design through multiplayer innovation—patience really does pay for category creation.

🎙️ Pod Shots: We finish off a bit of a design-heavy edition with Canva's Cameron Adams revealing how a tiny rubber duck became the secret to building the world's most beloved design platform. He shares why they're killing the PRD and how AI is transforming their entire approach to building software.

Ready to dive into the chaos? Lez Goh! 🚀

📰 Not boring

AI & Search Evolution

• Google begins rolling out AI search in YouTube. Who doesn’t need AI to help us find cat videos and conspiracy theories more efficiently?

• You can now schedule tasks on WhatsApp with Perplexity - get regular industry, competitor, product etc. insights sent directly to your phone 👀 

• Interesting thought; “Whoever owns the AI first browser will win AI memory long-term. The browser is the closest approximation of humanity's memory that we have.”

Platform Wars & Big Tech

• TikTok and Meta want a piece of YouTube’s TV success. The living room is the new battleground, and everyone wants to be the next Netflix

• Meta adds business voice calling to WhatsApp and explores AI-powered product recommendations. WhatsApp continues its march from simple messaging to everything-app

• Instagram now lets you share Spotify songs with sound to Stories. Discover new music without leaving the app. Yay MORE time on Insta…

• Airtable stealthily pivots away from ‘just’ spreadsheets and databases to a complete AI-native app platform to help users build apps for personal and work use (see productivity tapas for more)

• Substack brings new updates to livestreaming as it increases video push. Because no-one wants to bother actually reading stuff (I fully reserve the right to create a video edition of this newsletter btw…)

• Figma is going public. After the Adobe acquisition drama, going public feels like the ultimate "we don't need you" move. Good for them

• Tinder to require new users in California to use facial recognition tech to verify their profiles

Stats & Fax

• Is SaaS as we know it dead (episode, 345)? Replit’s CEO thinks so, with one user vibe-coding a $150k ERP automation tool for $400

  • Whilst we’re on Replit, they’ve now crossed $100m ARR, up from $10m 6m ago. That's not just hockey stick growth, that's a SpaceX trajectory

• Great keynote report from Coatue full of super interesting stats [hat tip to DoP]

  • Anthropic doubled from $1B to $2B revenue in just 2 months (took 21 months to get to $1B)

  • AI coding startups saw $1.2B revenue jump year-over-year

  • AI add-ons now drive 51% of Notion's sales

  • ChatGPT users spend 29 minutes daily - beating Snapchat, chasing Instagram

Everything Else

• HeyGen can now turn your ideas into complete videos. Waitlist. We're rapidly approaching the point where thinking about content and having content will be the same thing. Creators everywhere are either excited or terrified

• Tesla’s energy storage business gets sucked into the company’s downward spiral. The Elon effect not quite what it used to be

• Google embraces AI in the classroom with new Gemini tools for educators, chatbots for students, and more

• iPhone Fold reportedly on track for launch next year

• AI virtual personality YouTubers, or ‘VTubers,’ are earning millions

• CEOs start saying the quiet part out loud: AI will wipe out-out-out-out-out-out-out. Maybe.

• Windows is getting rid of the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) after 40 years. But wait, long live the BSOD (Black Screen of Death)! Progress 🙄 

Learn AI in 5 minutes a day

This is the easiest way for a busy person wanting to learn AI in as little time as possible:

1. Sign up for The Rundown AI newsletter

2. They send you 5-minute email updates on the latest AI news and how to use it

3. You learn how to become 2x more productive by leveraging AI

Sign up to start learning.

⌚️ Productivity Tapas: Time-Saving Tools & GPTs

• Prompt central

  • Animated Airbnb-style icons with ChatGPT + Midjourney, perfect for web and UI work

  • Top 10 Sonnet prompts: 1. Automated research reports, 2. Build interactive tools & apps without code, 3. Generate infographics from plain text, 4. Create McKinsey-style web presentations, 5. Replace your tutor, 6. Content creation: Newsletters, threads, YouTube scripts, 7. Strategic decision making assistant, 8. Write long-form reports and whitepapers, 9. Instant idea validation engine, 10. Summarise long reports + PDFs like a top analyst

• Airtable AI playbook: Get inspired by the most impactful, real world AI uses in Airtable. Try them out yourself to unlock immediate value for your business

• Runbear: Create AI agents for Slack, workspace, HubSpot, Teams +++ without any code or flow charts

• Napkin: Get visuals from your text to help share your ideas quicker

Remember, as a Product Tapas Pro subscriber you can access the full time saving tools database for fast approaching 400 time-saving tools relevant for product managers and founders 🔥.

Check the link here to access.

🍔 Blog Bites - Essential Reads for Product Teams

Strategy: The Problem With Value Hierarchies

John Cutler dismantles the seductive simplicity of traditional strategy pyramids, revealing why the familiar "Pillars → Priorities → Initiatives → Epics → Tasks" cascade fails to capture the messy reality of how organisations actually work. With his characteristic blend of systems thinking and practical wisdom, he offers a more nuanced framework for understanding strategic work. Read the full article here.

💡 "Real work behaves more like a fabric than a cascade. Work, strategy, and feedback move in all directions—not just top-down. Strategic influence can originate anywhere, and changes at any level can ripple across the system."

The article serves as both a critique of oversimplified planning models and a blueprint for designing operating systems that actually reflect how successful organisations navigate uncertainty and create value.

UX Design: Five Clever Micro-Interactions That Delight Users

Yes it’s been a minute, but Peter Ramsay’s back with another collection of thoughtful UX moments that demonstrate how small design decisions can create memorable user experiences. From themed progress bars to contextual feature reveals, these examples show how brands inject personality while solving real user problems. Read Peter’s latest UX Bites and more here.

Growth Strategy: How Figma Conquered Design Through Multiplayer Innovation

Bill Kerr and Jaryd Hermann dissect Figma's remarkable journey from stealth startup to design industry dominance, revealing how Dylan Field and Evan Wallace's vision of browser-based, multiplayer design tools disrupted an entire market. Through an exclusive interview with CTO Kris Rasmussen, they explore Figma's strategic expansion beyond designers to capture the entire product development value chain. Read the full article here.

💡 "What if we brought design software to the browser, and at the same time, we made design multiplayer?"

Speaking of design democratisation, make sure to catch Peter Yang's interview with Canva's CPO later in this newsletter for another perspective on how design platforms are evolving.

🎙️ Pod Shots - Bitesized Podcast Summaries

Remember, Product Tapas Pro subscribers get access to an ever growing database of all the top Podcast summaries we’ve ever created. 

Check it out here

🎨 Canva's AI Revolution: How a Rubber Duck Became the Secret to Building the World's Most Beloved Design Platform

Cameron Adams has helped build one of the most successful design platforms in history. As co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Canva, he's overseen the creation of a tool that generates over a billion designs per month and has fundamentally changed design for millions of users worldwide.

But Canva's success isn't just about powerful AI or intuitive interfaces—it's about a culture that puts love, craft, and human connection at the centre of everything they build. In his recent conversation with Peter Yang, Adams shares how a tiny rubber duck Easter egg became a symbol of their philosophy, why they're killing the PRD, and how AI is transforming not just their product, but their entire approach to building software.

 🎥Watch the full episode here

📆 Published: January 29th, 2025

🕒 Estimated Reading Time: 3 mins. Time saved: 45 mins🔥

🤖 The AI Stack: From Intent Recognition to Visual Creation

Canva AI represents a sophisticated orchestration of multiple AI models working together to understand user intent and deliver the right creative output. When a user submits a prompt, the system first determines what they're trying to create—an image, a design, a document, or even interactive code.

"The first thing that our product needs to do is figure out your intent," Adams explains. "Figure out which part of Canva you actually want to need and which model that you might be interacting with."

For image generation, Canva leverages Leonardo AI (a company they acquired), which built a foundational model called Phoenix that excels at creativity and style transfer. For design generation—Canva's bread and butter—they use their own proprietary model trained specifically on design principles and layouts. The conversational interface relies on OpenAI's GPT models, but the visual creation happens through Canva's specialised systems.

Key Takeaways:

• Intent recognition is crucial for multi-modal AI products—users shouldn't have to specify what type of output they want

• Specialised models often outperform general-purpose ones for domain-specific tasks

• The real magic happens in the orchestration layer that routes requests to the right models

🎯 The Final Mile Problem: Why Chat Interfaces Aren't Enough

While prompt-based interfaces are great for getting started, Adams identifies a crucial limitation: "Prompt box is definitely a great interface for quickly getting an idea together, but then for drilling into the details becomes really cumbersome."

Canva's solution is what Adams calls "augmented interfaces"—moving beyond pure chat to visual manipulation tools. Users can upload reference images for style or structure, click directly on elements to modify them, and seamlessly transition from AI generation to traditional editing.

"Telling it to change this one word on the 15th slide that's in the bottom right corner, again, really cumbersome to do through a chat interface, but just being able to do that by pointing and clicking just as you normally would in a presentation is super valuable."

Key Takeaways:

• Pure chat interfaces hit limitations when users need precise control

• Visual interfaces are essential for creative tools where spatial relationships matter

• The best AI products combine conversational and direct manipulation interfaces

🦆 The Rubber Duck Philosophy: How Easter Eggs Build Emotional Connection

One of Canva's most beloved features started as an unplanned Easter egg. When Adams designed an upload progress indicator, engineer Patrick Lee added a tiny rubber duck that floats by after users upload 100 images. Adams didn't know about it until customers started mentioning rubber ducks in feedback.

"The reaction we got from people was amazing because a very small subset saw it. But when they did see it, it created this incredible connection particularly amongst our most rabid fans," Adams recalls.

The duck became a symbol of Canva's approach to product development: putting love and care into every detail, even ones most users will never see. It shows that real people are building the product, not just delivering features through algorithms.

Key Takeaways:

• Small details create disproportionate emotional impact

• Easter eggs reward your most engaged users and make them feel like insiders

• Personality in products builds stronger user relationships than pure functionality

• The "emotional part of product-led growth isn't given enough attention"

🏗️ Visual-First Product Development: Killing the PRD

Canva has developed a different approach to product development that prioritises visual artefacts over written specifications. "Often we'll go to product build without a textual description of what the product actually does because writing a bunch of paragraphs in a document for us doesn't capture what we want to create," Adams explains.

Instead, they focus on detailed mockups and increasingly, interactive prototypes. The rise of AI-powered "vibe coding" has accelerated this trend, allowing designers and product managers to create functional prototypes without traditional engineering overhead.

"We're now moving prototyping further and further up the stream in terms of product development. And we're pretty much in some cases almost skipping static mock-ups and just going straight from idea to prototype."

Key Takeaways:

• Visual artefacts communicate intent better than written specs for design-heavy products

• AI-powered prototyping tools are speeding up product management cycles

• Interactive prototypes enable better user testing than static mockups

• The shortest path from idea to customer feedback is often through working code, not documentation

🎓 Coaching Over Managing: Democratising Executive Development

Canva has implemented an organisational structure that provides executive-level coaching to all employees, not just senior leaders. They have over 500 trained coaches embedded throughout the organisation—senior product managers, designers, and engineers who receive coaching training and work with team members on personal and professional growth.

"We call it coaching on purpose because it isn't managing. It really is about thinking about the person holistically," Adams explains. The approach focuses on collaborative goal-setting and skill development rather than top-down management.

This stems from the founders' own positive experiences with coaching and their desire to roll out that type of development across the entire organisation.

Key Takeaways:

• Coaching creates more collaborative relationships than traditional management

• Investing in everyone's development, not just high-potential employees, builds stronger culture

• Embedded coaches who are also practitioners understand the work better than external coaches

• Holistic development (personal and professional) leads to better outcomes

🔄 AI's Impact on Team Dynamics: Blending Roles for Better Collaboration

Adams sees AI fundamentally changing how product teams collaborate by giving everyone shared tools for creation and communication. "It bleeds roles together a bit more and just makes it a lot more collaborative," he observes.

When designers, engineers, and product managers can all create functional prototypes, conversations shift from explaining concepts to solving real problems together. "Everyone being able to see exactly what you're talking about is a massive leap forward."

This democratisation of creation tools means teams spend less time on craft-specific tasks and more time on the core problems they're solving for customers.

Key Takeaways:

• AI tools create shared vernacular across different roles

• When everyone can prototype, conversations become more productive

• Teams focus more on customer problems when craft barriers are lowered

• Visual communication (prototypes) is exponentially more effective than verbal description

🚀 The Launch Story: Dedication Through Adversity

Adams shares a remarkable story from Canva's 2013 launch that illustrates the team's dedication. The Saturday night before their Tuesday launch, Adams was hit by a taxi while biking home from the office. After being hospitalised and receiving stitches, he returned to work Sunday to ensure the launch would proceed on schedule.

"We still needed code shipped for the launch on Tuesday. So on Sunday, I was back in the office not looking as good as I do now and back coding."

The launch was successful, starting with 100 users the first night and growing to 25,000 by the end of the month. But Adams emphasises that both vision and team motivated his return: "We need to get this vision shipped, but we also need to do it for an amazing team and be there in the trenches next to them."

Key Takeaways:

• Strong vision provides motivation through difficult circumstances

• Team loyalty works both ways—leaders inspire teams, but teams also inspire leaders

• Early growth often looks slow before hockey stick acceleration

• Great products require great teams working together toward shared goals

🎨 The Future of Design: Democratisation Without Losing Craft

Canva's approach to AI reflects a broader philosophy about democratising design while maintaining quality and craft. Rather than replacing designers, their AI tools aim to make design accessible to non-designers while giving professionals more powerful capabilities.

The rubber duck story exemplifies this balance—using technology to make design approachable while never losing the human touch that creates emotional connection. As Adams puts it, users need to know "it is actually a team of people in Sydney, Australia and all over the world creating a product that they love and they want you to feel the love as well."

Key Takeaways:

• Democratisation doesn't mean dumbing down—it means making powerful tools accessible

• Human personality and craft remain essential even as AI capabilities grow

• The best AI products amplify human creativity rather than replacing it

• Emotional connection drives user loyalty more than features alone

Cameron Adams and the Canva team have built an impressive product. But equally as impressive is the culture that has enabled it; one that values craft, empowers people, and never forgets that behind every design is a human trying to communicate something important.

 🎥Watch the full episode here

📅Timestamps:

• (00:00) Will AI democratise design?

• (06:32) How Canva runs AI evaluations for its product

• (10:17) Moving beyond chat boxes to visual AI interfaces

• (22:23) Why Canva skips PRDs and goes straight to prototypes

• (29:08) The rubber duck Easter egg that became a cultural icon

• (33:13) Keeping craft and quality as a priority as the team grows

• (35:32) Why Canva gives everyone executive coaching, not just managers

• (39:23) How AI is blurring boundaries between PM and design

• (43:26) The bike accident story that almost derailed Canva's launch

That’s a wrap.

As always, the journey doesn't end here!

Please share and let us know what you would like to see more or less of so we can continue to improve your Product Tapas. 🚀👋

Alastair 🍽️.