Des Traynor

Had an opportunity to talk with Dan Currell at DCA about the future of card-linked offers. The idea of providing meaningful and relevant offers to consumers based on their purchase history is awesome, but not if high friction prevents the offers from ever being used. Financial institutions deliver billions of merchant-funded offers a year, but the vast majority go unseen and unused. That's why we built our SmartOffers Platform, to make it easy for consumers to engage with offers. They save, the merchants find their best customers and the financial institutions get transaction fees and ad revenue. It's a win-win-win. Since the US Digital Advertising spending forecast for 2024 is projected to be $300B according to Statista, there's a lot of potential for merchant-funded card-linked offers, if they just get a little smarter.

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I doubt my experiments are particularly original, but here's what I'm doing differently this past year, thanks to AI: 1. Writing and deploying scripts to fetch data from APIs and populate a spreadsheet, rather than (a) doing it manually, (b) bothering a developer, or (c) giving up 2. Writing and deploying simple monitoring scripts to catch error webhooks coming from our 3rd-party integrations, populate a spreadsheet, and notify via Slack so I can investigate 3. Writing little utility scripts to debug issues I'm having with Google Sheets 4. Saving time running calculations by getting AI to parse some screenshots of tabular data, rather than transcribing it myself 5. Learning how to use new software (eg. Google Apps Scripts, Looker Studio dashboard) to perform a specific task, rather than wading through documentation or wasting time on maybe-helpful-maybe-not YouTube videos 6. Generating copywriting ideas with ChatGPT's help – especially shortening UX copy and labels 7. Transcribing and summarising customer interviews in seconds (thanks Dovetail!) 8. Getting early indications of feasibility for API integrations ("can I get this information from that API?" or "are we missing any endpoints to integrate with this service?"), so I can have a useful, focused conversation with a developer 9. Optimising MySQL queries (eg. working around timeouts, extracting specific data, splitting data requests into batches, etc.) 10. Creating a custom GPT which knows our db schema and API, so I can ask it questions about how to find answers to my data questions, rather than bother a developer 11. Getting Terminal commands to test 3rd-party APIs with cURL 12. Manually scraping web pages by stripping out HTML and leaving the content 13. Re-formatting data (eg. changing date formats, using abbreviations) Previously 5 of these were *impossible* for me, because I lack the hard skills. The rest of them would often take too much time to be worthwhile, or require me to invest time learning additional skills – or ask for a colleague's time to make progress. That's why I want to see how others are changing and adapting: https://lnkd.in/eWJEXfPK

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🚀 How User-Centered Design Transforms Business Results 🌟 In today’s digital world, delivering intuitive and engaging experiences is key. Here's why User-Centered Design (UCD) is a game-changer: What is User-Centered Design? UCD places the user at the core of the design process, focusing on their needs, behaviors, and pain points. From research to implementation, it’s about creating solutions for people, with people. Why UCD Matters for Your Business 📌 Higher User Satisfaction 🚀 Tailored, intuitive designs lead to happier users. Result: Stronger brand loyalty and increased retention. 📌Builds Brand Loyalty & Trust 🤝 A user-focused approach demonstrates care and adaptability. Result: Trust boosts loyalty and turns users into advocates. Reduces the Need for Future Redesigns 🔄 Early research and testing inform smarter decisions. Result: Fewer costly and time-consuming redesigns later. 📌Ensures Inclusivity & Accessibility 🌍 Considers all users, regardless of ability. Result: Broader reach and a stronger brand reputation. 📌Better ROI & Cost Savings 💸 Proactive investment in UCD prevents expensive fixes. Result: Higher ROI with products that align with user needs. 📌Drives Conversions & Retention 📈 Seamless, user-friendly designs improve engagement. Result: Higher conversion rates and repeat users. The Bottom Line Investing in User-Centered Design means: A smoother customer journey Higher retention rates A stronger brand reputation When you invest in User-Centred Design, you’re investing in a smoother customer journey, higher retention, and a stronger brand reputation. 🧩✨ Curious how UCD can enhance your business? Let’s discuss putting your users first! Drop a comment or connect with me. #UserCenteredDesign #UIUX #ProductDesign #BusinessGrowth #CustomerFirst #DigitalExperience #UXResearch #Accessibility #BrandLoyalty

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I'm planning my next speaking engagements and would like to get your input on: 1. What conferences would be good to present my evolved forms of UCD. I would prefer US based events. 2. What user groups or regular meetings would like me to speak at one of their meetings (group name and city) 3. What topics from my book would you be more interested in hearing: a. More actionable Personas, AKA User Knowledge Profiles b. Designing knowledge into a design c. Task Analysis, better than journey maps and JTBD d. Purpose-built AI, going well beyond ChatGPT

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When I've helped companies become more outcome/product oriented, often I've found myself moving them away from 'epics' and 'user stories' and towards things like one-pagers, opportunities and hypotheses. Why? Because they’re better tools for facilitating outcome thinking and experimentation. I've seen too many places get stuck in the hamster wheel arguing over: - What an Epic is? - Epics vs Initiatives vs User Stories? - Is an Epic a Feature or an Opportunity? - Can an epic span multiple quarters? - Who owns what? - etc... Now imagine if we just 'called a spade a spade' and we started talking about: - the outcome - the problem we're trying to solve - opportunities - a feature - an experiment And then put all that effort arguing over 'epics vs initiatives' into defining those outcomes, exploring opportunities and running experiments? Not to mention that more often than not I see projects renamed as 'initiatives' Epics and User stories as containers for work and little to now talk about outcomes, experiments, problems or the customer besides the 'As a....' statement in their User Story template. If any of this resonates... perhaps it's time to 'Ditch Epics & User Stories and Focus on Outcomes' 👇 https://lnkd.in/gDkGn6cW

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So, Here's the #3 Roast. For a Cleaning Company. Should I share the purpose behind each section of this UCD following our Power Strategy? #buildinpublic weroast.design

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Real user data is great. Actionable real user data is better! Great post from Tim Kadlec showing how to make more meaningful, intuitive attributions for your RUM metrics (including Core Web Vitals) – making it easier for you to home in on #webperf issues. https://lnkd.in/gadCMd9A #corewebvitals #sitespeed #pagespeed #ux #webperformance

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The AI Sovereignty Paradox: A Tightrope Walk for SMEs Klarna's recent move to ditch Salesforce and Workday isn't just another tech headline - it's a canary in the coal mine for a seismic shift in how businesses approach AI and data infrastructure. The Sovereignty Spectrum - One end: Full outsourcing, plug-and-play AI solutions - Other end: Complete in-house development, à la tech giants Most SMEs instinctively lean towards the quick solutions end. It's faster, cheaper (initially), and doesn't require building a tech empire. But here's where it gets tricky: 1. Data Dependency: Your AI is only as good as your data. When you outsource, you're often feeding your most valuable asset into someone else's system. 2. Algorithmic Lock-in: As these systems learn and adapt to your business, switching costs skyrocket. You become tethered to your provider's roadmap. 3. Competitive Homogenization: When everyone uses the same tools, where's the edge? The Klarna Conundrum Klarna's shift isn't just about cost-cutting. It's a bet on AI sovereignty. By bringing core functions in-house, they're saying: 1. Our data is too valuable to entrust entirely to third parties 2. We need the flexibility to pivot faster than SaaS product cycles allow 3. Our competitive advantage lies in how we uniquely apply AI to our business problems The SME's Dilemma Most SMEs aren't Klarna. You don't have hundreds of engineers to build custom AI systems. So what's the play? 1. Hybrid Approaches: Start with off-the-shelf solutions, but invest in the capability to customize and extend them. 2. Data Ownership: Ensure your contracts allow for data portability and algorithm transparency. 3. Skill Investment: Even if you're not building from scratch, having AI-literate team members is crucial for strategic decisions. 4. Niche Focus: Instead of trying to build everything, focus on developing AI solutions for your core competitive advantage. The Real Paradox The true AI sovereignty paradox isn't just about build vs. buy. It's about balancing immediate needs with long-term strategic positioning. SMEs that crack this code - leveraging external AI while building internal competencies - won't just survive the AI revolution. They'll lead it. What's your take? Is AI sovereignty a pipe dream for SMEs, or the only path to long-term viability in an AI-driven world? #AISovereignty #SMEStrategy #FutureOfWork

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Bag is packed, and I'm heading off to HLTH Europe 🎉 HLTH Vegas was my first taste of the HLTH experience, so expectations are high for what Henry Stoneley and the team have crafted over in Amsterdam. The official agenda is appetising (https://lnkd.in/e3Y87Z8Z), with multiple stages themed around the senses. What am I looking forward to? 🪩 MAIN STAGE 18th: Ali Parsa talking about Babylon and his latest venture. Essential stuff 19th: "Transforming Perspectives on Psychedelics: A Journey Beyond the Trip" fits the tolerant and broad-minded nature of our host city well. 👁 SIGHT 19th: We have "Ghosts in the machine: Empowering healthcare to capitalise on GenAI", "Blinded by AI: The Turing Test live" and "Safekeeping: Is trust AI’s biggest hurdle?" all on the 19th * I'll be appearing on the live Health Tech Talk Show with Lisa B. and Kat McDavitt 👂🏼 SOUND STAGE 18th: Listening to the latest on Mental Health at "Navigating depression: New pathways in mental health"- supporting Erin Sivyer Lee and Team Flow Neuroscience 19th: Having wrapped my head around longevity tech in ArabHealth earlier this year, I'll be checking out "Beyond the Fountain of Youth: Unlocking the secrets of longevity" 20th: The Middle East summit takes over the stage * I'll also be catching up with Christophe Jauquet Mo Zouina and Aline Noizet to record some special Healthusiasm content 👃🏼 AROMA STAGE 18th: ChatGPT and Hospitals? IM IN 19th: Debate time! "This house believes there’s no role for government in healthcare" - I smell smoke... 20th: Data might be the new oil, but not all oils are the same "Goldmine or fool’s gold? Extracting value from health data" 👇🏻 TOUCH STAGE 18th: "Eighths and pains: The ongoing trials and tribulations of cannabis in healthcare" wins for the pun alone - 18th 19th: As a GP, I'll be cheering along to this one: "Undervalued, underinvested: Why keeping primary care as an afterthought costs lives" 20th: My mind was opened by recent talks from ☀️Maneesh Juneja. "Greener, leaner, cleaner: Healthcare's role in global warming" gets my vote 👅 TASTE HLTH do food really well: Survivors BBQ is locked in. 🌍 EVERYTHING ELSE There's the Startup Stage, HealthXL Global Gathering on Monday, AlbionVC mixer, Philips welcome reception, HLTH Networking party, and goodness knows what else. This is Amsterdam after all. 🌶️ For all of my neurospicy sisters and brothers, I'm bringing a wee gift for you. Let's stay hydrated and pace ourselves folks, we have a big week ahead of us! Anushka Patchava MD, MBA Darshak Sanghavi Adel B. Hassan Chaudhury Michael Watts Dr Cos Fantis Rochelle Morris Dr Dom Pimenta M.D. Dr Rizwan Malik Sam Shah Haris Shuaib Dr Harpreet Sood plus many, many more

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Alistair Gray gave a great talk at Write The Docs Portland, going into detail about our investment in Internal Docs at Stripe. He breaks down our thoughts about issues of fragmentation, discoverability, and document quality - and how we’ve tried to build great tools to improve the state of internal docs at Stripe across all of these axes. In Q&A, he touches on an important theme which is essentially “how do we convince engineers to use the tooling we build.” The answer really boils down to “ruthlessly build what engineers want” while maintaining our core primitives (eg, ownership, doc quality) that we know are vital to the health of Stripe’s knowledge base all-up. Let me know if y’all have any questions - happy to expand more on these themes! https://lnkd.in/em4QRFmH

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I had to chuckle about the comment in today's Fortune Term Sheet from a VC saying platform teams are BS. With Chatham House rules, we don't know the context behind the hot take, but my guess is whomever said it is secretly jealous they can't offer these kinds of services to their investments. Maybe that's why you believe the "most valuable support is often simply having access to the partners." Entrepreneurs, if you're not going to have access to the partners at a firm, don't take the money. Since capital is still relatively accessible, find a VC that is going to give you their time and money. Some of a VC's time may come from a broader team of experts they've hired to help you out. These platform / value-add services are not a replacement for doing the work yourself, but I don't know any entrepreneurs who would turn down the offer of more hands to help out, or guidance from operator who has "been there, done that." Would love to hear from founders and portfolio companies if you think platform services from your VCs are worthless. https://lnkd.in/gepWTQ2m

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After watching the GPT-4o demos and reflecting on "The Great Flattening", it's clear that we are in an amazing time to be building new products. What was once infeasible is now viable, which opens the door to more useful products for more people. However, this new opportunity comes with change and new risks. Product managers can't simply slap an LLM on their product and call it a day. Nearly every product manager I talk to are being asked to hook a bot into their product, whether it's valuable to users or not. Adding shallow functionality to an LLM and hoping to survive is not the answer either. As Sam Altman puts it, you're going to get steamrolled. To succeed, we need to research and empathize with people and how they will adapt with ubiquitous compute. #itstimetobuild #productmanagement

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At Doss we're going to try something unconventional... We're re-branding the "Product Manager" title internally and are trying to find people who are bought in on this idea 👀 Some context... we're experiencing a bit of a “lift-off” moment 🚀 it’s been 2yrs since Arnav Mishra and I started the company and raised our seed. For the first time, we are struggling to keep up with customer onboarding. 1. We’ve built a lightweight ERP. It’s very cool to be working on this now, but it’s not an overnight product — the surface area of what we’ve built is massive. Most deals are split 50/50 between net new installs and rip-and-replace. 2. Right now we’re building out a small team of extremely competent consulting / IB / ops leads to help us speed-run implementations. The idea is that we consume a ton of professional services spend while also laying the framework to automate the deployment of instances of DossARP (our platform) with generative AI. It’s already working extremely well -- we can already go-live with customers in just a couple of weeks. 3. TBH we’re taking a pretty unconventional approach with this. I’m thinking of this as a Product role more than anything else… it’s a perfect on-ramp into working as a PM on core product, running BizOps, or going into Sales. I’m hoping our Product role turns out like a better “APM program”, where you onboard customers, immerse in the product and industry, and then graduate out into something else in the business that is more building or selling leaning, with very few people staying in the onboarding function. If you’ve been thinking about making a change I’d love to jump on a call and give you a hard-sell on why Doss + why now. Here's a link to the JD -> apply, drop me an email, DM me, whatever https://lnkd.in/g8uBZyAj #hiring #erp #product #pm

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📝 A Cautionary Tale: The "Oasis Effect" on SaaS Pricing 🚨 Imagine this: you're a die-hard fan, eager to see your favourite band at their long-awaited reunion tour at Croke Park, Dublin. While I wouldn’t quite describe myself as a die-hard fan, I was keen to buy two tickets for a band we both enjoy, for a concert that will no doubt be a great gig next year. Like thousands of others, I spent four hours on Saturday in an online queue, constantly refreshing the page, eyes glued to the screen, only to be met with ticket prices that felt more like a mortgage payment. Frustration levels? Off the charts. Trust in the vendor or brand? Completely shattered. Now, let’s draw a parallel with the world of SaaS. Many SaaS vendors start with an attractive price – a “too-good-to-be-true” entry-level offer that draws you in. But as your needs grow, so do the costs. Suddenly, essential features are locked behind paywalls, usage fees skyrocket, and hidden charges appear out of nowhere. What began as a promising partnership turns into a financial burden you weren’t prepared for. This is the "Oasis Effect" in SaaS pricing – an enticing initial offer followed by a sense of being “priced out” or misled. The impact? Lost trust, customer churn, and a damaged reputation that no business can afford. What’s the lesson here? 1. Transparency is Essential: Make your pricing clear, fair, and predictable. Customers need to know what they’re committing to from the start. 2. Focus on Value, Not Just Price: Deliver genuine value rather than hiding key features behind premium tiers. 3. Trust is Paramount: Building trust with your customers is far more valuable than any short-term gain from hidden fees or sudden price hikes. #SaaS #PricingStrategy #CustomerExperience #Transparency #Trust #CautionaryTale

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In case you missed it while prepping for Flag Day 🇺🇸 Happy State of Engineering Management Report Day happened this week! The annual thought leadership piece from Jellyfish has dropped. Hear from Engineering leaders, managers and frontline ICs .... we cover a range of topics that matter to great R&D leaders. Key Points: 1️⃣ Engineers are now strategic partners! 🙌 2️⃣ Burnout continues to be a challenge 😱 3️⃣ The talent shortage is spiking back up. 4️⃣ Many teams have embraced #AI 🧠 5️⃣ Others have legit concerns about AI ⁉ If #developerproductivity #genAI #engineeringexcellence are important to you .... have a read! (link in the Comments)

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One of the things I ❤️ about my job is being able to walk to work on our days in the office. Trivial? If you've ever commuted a long distance, you may agree walking as your commute is appealing, and can play a role in overall job satisfaction and mental health. The choice of #Oakland HQ was the decision of Everlaw CEO & Founder AJ Shankar who years ago identified a tech talent pool that prefers the East Bay over Silicon Valley. An unorthodox approach like that can bring great rewards. AJ has thought through many decisions with a strategy that often bucks a trend to deliver long-term and deeper value both to our employees and customers. One of those decisions -- perhaps the biggest for the company -- is how we develop software. In his new byline in The New Stack, AJ reveals for the first time his unorthodox approach. He argues that sprinting slows you down in software development. He shares Everlaw's way in hopes that other companies might adopt this methodology. The company manifesto says, “Our long-term philosophy impacts many aspects of how we do business: how we market, how we sell, how we close deals, how we support our clients, and more. Perhaps the largest impact is in how we develop the Everlaw platform...” A core reason I enjoy my work at Everlaw is its focus on long-term excellence and its deeply held values that play out in myriad of ways. The nice part is I get to think about this and more on my walk to work 😎 #Grateful #Buildforthelongterm #Leadership

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📣 I come to you today to discuss policies. Waaait, don't scroll away. When was the last time you thought of your organisational policies? 🍪 The EU 'cookie law' is arguably the most ignored policy on the internet. Not ignored by companies mind you, they do go through the trouble of showing you a banner. Ignored by the consumers for the most part, either because they accept or because they don't know what they're actually protecting. ❌ There will be folks that will argue that it provides some protection, it had good intentions, etc. At this stage, I consider it a failed policy because it requires great design and good defaults (from the individual point of view). And most websites fail hard at this - most show you the most asinine cookie banner. It sucks for everyone. 🔥 I have no hope of cookies being fixed any time soon. As a manager have you thought of the policies that aren't working for anyone/most people, but you still keep them around because you think there were good intentions behind them?

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You cant ignore your last line of defence, your customers. Tools like New Relic and Datadog are great for when your team ships a bug and you need to hear about it fast. But what happens when someone else ships a bug? At the end of the day things will fall through the cracks. This was expressly highlighted when CrowdStrike went down wreaking global havoc. Unfortunately for many teams, their systems quietly errored and their customers are the ones that brought the issue to their attention. Qvasa found out about the issue 4 minutes after it happened. Our AI tags and reads tickets in realtime and alerts you when things go awry. There is a wealth of data to be extracted from your customers, you just need to start listening easy with Qvasa!

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