Author | Lightnews

Rich Holmes

@richeholmes.bsky.social

870 followers 52 following 510 posts

I write about product, tech, AI and more for 48,000+ readers on my Substack: https://departmentofproduct.substack.com/ Ex PM: shutl, ebay, C4, fintech / banking.

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Rich Holmes @richeholmes.bsky.social · Nov 18

Hey everyone, I'm Rich Holmes and I write the Department of Product Substack for 45,000+ readers.

Since X hates Substack, I thought I'd try out BlueSky to see if this might be a great place to connect with other tech folks 👋

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Rich Holmes @richeholmes.bsky.social · May 18

Catch up with everything you need to know in product, AI and more this week:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9Tb...

Spotify’s new AI feature, Perplexity’s new browser launch date and Microsoft’s big announcement

YouTube video by Department of Product

www.youtube.com

Rich Holmes @richeholmes.bsky.social · May 17

Here’s a snapshot from that research:

Rich Holmes @richeholmes.bsky.social · May 17

On first glance I thought maybe this was a little step too far in the Gen-Z direction that could alienate older users.

But Google’s product teams say the design system actually enabled older users to spot key interactive elements on the screen just as fast as younger users across 10 apps tested.

Rich Holmes @richeholmes.bsky.social · May 17

Google unveiled its new Material Design Expressive system this week.

The new version of Material Design uses bold, expressive colors including pinks, purples and oranges, new physics for UI interactions and an expansive new library of shapes.

Rich Holmes @richeholmes.bsky.social · May 6

Multi-agent architectures involve multiple AI agents working collaboratively, each specializing in specific tasks, to solve complex problems more efficiently than a single AI agent.

Here’s a snapshot of how companies are using them in the real world:

Rich Holmes @richeholmes.bsky.social · May 6

This is the new big tech flex...

Rich Holmes @richeholmes.bsky.social · May 5

departmentofproduct.substack.com/p/how-do-age...

How do Agentic Payments work?

🧠Knowledge Series #71: Your ultimate guide to AI agent payments. The technology behind this new, emerging AI-powered payment method explained.

departmentofproduct.substack.com

Rich Holmes @richeholmes.bsky.social · May 5

In the latest Knowledge Series, I explore how AI Agent Payments work, including:

- A closer look at Visa, Mastercard and PayPal’s new AI agent payment capabilities
- Key technologies involved including tokenization, MCP and more
- Real world use cases and opportunities for product teams

Rich Holmes @richeholmes.bsky.social · May 5

If you buy into the hype, the way users make payments could be about to change forever.

This week, Mastercard revealed its new AI agent payment feature called Agent Pay, Visa announced a full AI agent payment framework and PayPal unveiled an entire new product stack for agentic payments

Rich Holmes @richeholmes.bsky.social · May 5

Contractors are losing their jobs to Al at DuoLingo.

It's not difficult to see why.

Here's a comparison of the time it took to complete 100 vs 150 courses with and without AI:

Rich Holmes @richeholmes.bsky.social · May 2

Plus, DuoLingo’s CEO jumps on the AI-first bandwagon with a memo published on LinkedIn that unveils how the company plans to implement its own AI policies (it’s not good news for contractors). And the latest release from Mastercard that takes the application of AI agents to the next level.

Rich Holmes @richeholmes.bsky.social · May 2

This week, I explore the latest predictions from Meta’s CTO about the impact of AI, a new tool that will transform how you do presentations and a huge study from KPMG which reveals how we’re really using AI at work - with some surprising results.

departmentofproduct.substack.com/p/briefing-d...

Briefing: DuoLingo goes AI-first and Meta’s CTO predicts the end of Apps

Plus, how to turn your users into a community, Lyft’s new AI Assistant, new MCP servers

departmentofproduct.substack.com

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Rich Holmes @richeholmes.bsky.social · Apr 29

I hope this means we’ll finally be able to delete the circle that haunts me across every Meta app.

Rich Holmes @richeholmes.bsky.social · Apr 28

Plus:

- the impact of AI on SaaS

- a new open-source alternative to ElevenLabs that sounds seriously impressive - with audio examples

- new tools you can use, including a new way to conduct user research and a browser plugin to stop you opening too many new tabs

Rich Holmes @richeholmes.bsky.social · Apr 28

In this week’s YouTube version of the weekly briefing, I take a look at Perplexity’s new Voice Assistant on iOS.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hAK...

Perplexity vs Siri, Grok gets eyes and Google declares the start of the Era of AI Experience.

YouTube video by Department of Product

www.youtube.com

Rich Holmes @richeholmes.bsky.social · Apr 28

Google’s experiments with new Search UX seems to be paying off.

According to their latest earnings report:

- Circle to Search usage is up 40% in the current quarter
- AI Mode queries are twice as long as traditional Search queries
- Visual searches with Lens is up five billion since October

Rich Holmes @richeholmes.bsky.social · Apr 25

With many vibe coders finding out the hard way about the importance of security, Lovable has announced a new “Security Scan” feature that highlights an potential vulnerabilities in your app before its shipped.

Let’s see if this puts a stop to some of the horror stories we’ve read about lately…

Rich Holmes @richeholmes.bsky.social · Apr 25

This is where AI models won’t rely on human data any more; instead, it will physically interact with the real world to generate new insights from the data it generates.

"Ultimately, experiential data will eclipse the scale and quality of human-generated data," Silver and Sutton write.

Rich Holmes @richeholmes.bsky.social · Apr 25

A new research paper from Google suggests that the “Era of Experience” is upon us.

The researchers suggest that AI has evolved from the simulation era where it played games like chess and the era of human data where it consumed human data for training purposes to now enter the era of experience.