Shaping the Era of AI-Driven Presentations with Head of Product at Tome
First thing first:
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Now on to the case study:
This issue, I’m speaking to Sam Stone, Head of Product at Tome, an AI-powered storytelling format that gives your work the edge it deserves. Prior to Tome, Sam was the Senior Director of Product Management at Opendoor.
If you missed our conversation, you can watch the full recording here.
Shyvee: What inspired the creation of Tome, and what problems in the market was Tome aiming to solve?
AI summary of Sam’s response: In discussing the inspiration behind Tome, Sam highlighted the company's origin rooted in addressing widespread frustrations with storytelling, especially in creating presentations. The challenges identified included the complexity of existing presentation software, which often features a daunting array of functionalities, and the unsatisfying output constrained by outdated slide formats unsuitable for modern mobile viewing. This issue was compounded by the fixed-length nature of slides, which doesn't accommodate varying content sizes effectively. Recognizing these pain points, Tome aimed to introduce a solution through a more flexible format, a design system ensuring visually appealing outputs regardless of users' design skills, and AI integration to facilitate co-creation. This AI would understand users' intentions and apply design and storytelling principles, aiming to enhance the effectiveness of any story being told.
See a demo of Tome’s functionality live here and give Tome a try here!
Shyvee: If you were to classify Tome’s development into a few phases, what were some key milestones in Tome's development?
AI summary of Sam’s response: Sam outlined Tome's development through three distinct phases:
1. Initial Demand and Launch (2022 - Spring 2023): The first phase focused on establishing whether there was a market demand for an improved presentation tool. This period involved developing the new presentation format and initial AI components, culminating in the release of a free version of Tome. The overwhelming response, with over 10 million users by spring 2023, confirmed the widespread need for such a tool, validating the company's perception of market pain points.
2. Understanding Power Users and Monetization (Summer 2023 - Fall 2023): The second phase aimed to identify and understand the power users and their needs, alongside introducing a paid plan. This period was crucial for refining Tome's offerings based on user feedback, particularly emphasizing the importance of desktop over mobile creation despite the initial hypothesis favoring mobile. Additionally, this phase revealed challenges in managing user expectations around AI's capabilities, prompting a strategic shift to better align product development with user expectations and needs.
3. Focus on Power Users and Team Expansion (End of 2023 - Present): The third phase has been about concentrating efforts on power users and leveraging their feedback for team and product expansion. This phase signifies a transition from individuals using Tome for personal projects to broader adoption within teams, enhancing productivity. Moreover, it marks a shift from novelty to utility, aiming to meet a higher standard where AI-co-created presentations are deemed suitable for professional contexts, such as presentations to bosses or prospective customers. This phase underscores the company's commitment to delivering real value beyond mere entertainment, focusing on serving users engaged in substantial work.
Shyvee: Can you share some of the biggest challenges you faced while building Tome, and how you overcame them?
AI summary of Sam’s response: Sam identified two primary challenges in developing Tome, reflecting both the complexity of product development in the AI space and classical product management dilemmas:
1. Integrating Multiple Modalities in Presentations: The first significant challenge arises from the inherent diversity in presentation content, including text, images, charts, and drawings, each requiring different technical approaches and AI models. Determining which content types to prioritize and how to effectively integrate them poses a continual challenge. The complexity is compounded by the need for AI to understand and excel in handling these varied modalities, despite the technical differences in optimizing models for each type of content.
2. Managing User Requests and Feature Complexity: The second challenge focuses on navigating the vast array of user feature requests. With a backdrop of existing presentation tools often being feature-dense, the difficulty lies in deciding which features to implement that will benefit a significant portion of the user base, rather than catering to the niche demands of a vocal minority. This challenge is twofold: firstly, balancing the need to innovate and enhance the product against the constraints of startup resources and time; secondly, maintaining the product's simplicity and usability while adding powerful features, avoiding the pitfall of becoming an overly complex tool.
Sam emphasizes the ongoing nature of these challenges, indicating a commitment to continuous improvement and the strategic navigation of product development hurdles to achieve a balance between power, simplicity, and user satisfaction in Tome's evolution.
Shyvee: How does Tome identify who are the power users? And how do you prioritize user feedback to increase the signal to noise ratio?
AI summary of Sam’s response: Sam delineated the process of identifying and prioritizing key users for Tome, focusing on founders, salespeople, and marketers due to their high standards for storytelling and the direct impact of their presentations on revenue generation. These user groups were pinpointed through a combination of analytical methods—evaluating their engagement depth, frequency of product use, and sharing behavior—and qualitative feedback, noting that these users provided insightful critiques that pushed the Tome team's understanding of their product further.
In addressing how to prioritize user feedback, Sam emphasized the absence of a silver bullet, advocating for a nuanced approach that goes beyond taking user suggestions at face value. Instead, he suggests a deeper analysis of the root causes of user frustrations. This approach involves a critical examination of feedback, particularly in the context of AI-generated content, where immediate solutions might not address the fundamental issue. By understanding the actual needs of users, the team can make informed decisions on feature development and improvements, ensuring that the product not only meets but anticipates user requirements.
Shyvee: As Tome grows, what strategies are you implementing to scale the product? What are some effective growth strategies?
AI summary of Sam’s response: Sam discussed Tome's growth strategies, emphasizing the importance of addressing a widely felt and deeply experienced pain point as foundational for growth. He underscored the necessity of creating a product compelling enough to generate word-of-mouth promotion, a potent yet often underestimated growth mechanism. Sam highlighted that products achieving a certain level of excellence and utility prompt users to share their experiences, driving organic growth.
For more tactical growth strategies, Sam outlined several approaches:
1. Ease of Access and Quick Value Realization: Tome has streamlined the signup process and allows users to quickly experience its value proposition—creating multifaceted presentations rapidly. This immediate demonstration of utility is designed to lead users to an "aha" moment, enhancing retention and encouraging further exploration.
2. Facilitating User Transition from Viewer to Creator: Recognizing that stories involve both creators and viewers, Tome focuses on converting viewers into creators. This strategy hinges on ensuring viewers are impressed by the content they see, subtly encouraging them to explore creating with Tome themselves.
3. Content and Substance Focus: Addressing potential users' needs beyond just the search for a better presentation tool, Tome leverages templates as a growth strategy. By offering templates for specific content needs, like marketing pitches, Tome attracts users who may not initially be looking for a new presentation tool but are seeking solutions to content creation challenges.
Shyvee: How does Tome position itself to stand out in the crowded space of productivity and presentation tools?
AI summary of Sam’s response: Sam articulates Tome's differentiation strategy in the crowded productivity and presentation tools market by emphasizing its unique presentation format and the powerful, flexible AI that assists users in content creation. He acknowledges the importance of staying vigilant and competitive, particularly through:
1. Continuous Evaluation of Competitors: Sam keeps a close watch on both startups and incumbents, focusing on understanding what differentiates their products and their target user bases.
2. Development Velocity: A key competitive strategy for Tome is maintaining a high development velocity, aiming to outpace competitors in both feature releases and quality. Sam uses the progress of other companies as a motivator to accelerate Tome's own development efforts, striving to be the fastest-moving team in the sector.
3. Challenging Incumbents through Better User Experience: Sam is particularly mindful of the distribution strategies and user retention tactics employed by incumbents like Microsoft and Google. He recognizes the dissatisfaction many users feel with these traditional tools and sees it as an opportunity for Tome. Despite the vast user base of these incumbents, Sam notes a significant demand for alternatives, driven by users' desire for a tool that offers a faster and more satisfying creation experience. This dissatisfaction, he suggests, is not merely functional but emotional, indicating a deep-seated need for innovation in the space.
Shyvee: What are some “moats” Tome are building to defend itself for long-term sustainability?
AI summary of Sam’s response: Sam Stone outlined several strategic "moats" that Tome is building to ensure its long-term sustainability and competitive edge:
1. Proprietary Data: A core aspect of Tome's defensibility lies in the sophisticated use of user-generated data, especially the prompts users input. The challenge and value come from interpreting what constitutes a "good" output based on these prompts, requiring an analysis of user edits, shares, and other interactions to understand and define quality. This nuanced understanding of user expectations and satisfaction becomes a significant asset.
2. Unique Format: Tome's presentation format itself acts as a moat. It diverges from traditional tools by offering a more opinionated and restrictive yet flexible design environment. This approach not only ensures content looks good by design but also distinguishes Tome in the user experience. The difficulty for incumbents to adopt such innovative formats, given their legacy user bases and file formats, further solidifies Tome's unique position.
3. AI Specialization in Storytelling: The AI developed by Tome, designed specifically for work-related storytelling, embodies a multi-modal, persuasive capability focused on communication, design, and editorial principles. This AI understands a wide array of content types beyond text and images, including charts, diagrams, and tables, and leverages a proprietary language for efficient and powerful content creation. This specialization in storytelling for professional contexts, coupled with the technology's inherent flexibility and understanding, provides a significant competitive advantage.
Shyvee: How do you envision the future of presentation with AI, and what role do you hope to see Tome play in that future?
AI summary of Sam’s response: Sam envisions a transformative future for presentations augmented by AI, characterized by deeper co-creation, aesthetic sensibility, and data integration:
1. From Cold Initiations to True Co-creation: Sam anticipates a shift away from AI attempting to deliver complete solutions in one go, towards a more iterative process where AI and users collaborate closely. This approach ensures the AI never loses track of the user's intent, allowing for continuous refinement and a high likelihood that the final output precisely meets the user's needs.
2. AI with Good Taste: He foresees AI developing an aesthetic understanding and the ability to cater content to specific audiences, enhancing storytelling across diverse contexts. This involves AI assisting users not only with design but also with tailoring presentations for various audience types, whether engineers, investors, or colleagues, embodying a broader definition of taste that addresses both form and substance.
3. Integration with Users' Proprietary Data: Sam is excited about AI's potential to leverage users' proprietary data, such as customer information from CRMs, to create highly personalized and effective presentations. This capability would allow AI to perform background research akin to a knowledgeable colleague, significantly streamlining the preparation process for targeted pitches and presentations.
In this envisioned future, Sam hopes Tome will play a pivotal role by embodying these advancements, making it a forefront platform that not only streamlines presentation creation but also elevates it to new levels of personalization, effectiveness, and aesthetic appeal.
Shyvee: Were there any pivotal moments or significant learnings during your 10-month building Tome that you'd like to share?
AI summary of Sam’s response: Two learnings that reshaped Sam’s approach to product development and understanding of generative AI:
1. Working Forwards from Technology: Contrary to the traditional approach of working backwards from user pain points, Sam found value in working forwards, starting with the technological capabilities of generative AI. This approach acknowledges the rapid advancements in AI technology and explores how these can create new opportunities for users.
2. The Importance of Prototyping: Sam emphasized the necessity of prototyping in the development of creative applications using generative AI. This process involves experimenting with prototypes to gauge what works well and what doesn’t, before finalizing specifications. He suggests that in the realm of AI, where possibilities are rapidly expanding, a more flexible and iterative approach to product development is crucial, allowing for adjustments based on hands-on experience with the technology.
When it comes to deepening understanding of generative AI without a technical background, Sam recommends product builders to use AI-driven products and critically evaluate their features and user experience. He also recommends subscribing to newsletters and blogs from thought leaders like Ben Thompson and Jack Clark provides strategic perspectives on AI and technology trends.
I hope you enjoyed reading my conversation with Sam and learned something from it. If you want to learn more about frameworks to think through which use cases should use generative AI and how gen AI companies can build moats. Check out my latest book, “Reimagined: Building Products with Generative AI”. Featuring over 150 real-world examples, 30 case studies, and 20+ frameworks, “Reimagined” offers an extensive guide for integrating generative AI into product strategy and careers. Grab your copy on Amazon: https://a.co/d/btmnJfu.
If you have any questions, feedback, or suggestions on how to make this series better and interesting people or companies that I should talk to, please reach out! I’d love to hear from you.
Thanks for reading,
Shyvee