Natasha Murashev argues that with AI making feature work cheaper, the exciting frontier is hyperpersonalized product experiences—building solutions and UI for the long tail of individual user needs.
I once worked as a mobile developer for a company where my job was to work on a new mobile app for a widely successful web product. The founder wanted me to implement a super obscure feature that I learned only about 1% of users actually use. The founder was the 1% of the users for this feature and wanted it in the app. I found this super frustrating and too much “feature creep” that went against the minimalist and straight-forward UI of mobile apps. Needless to say, I didn’t work long at this company.
Cue to now, and I’m realizing that AI reframes product development to building for ALL the 1% use-cases. That is what products like Instinct, GrokBot, and Muse are doing! This also applies to open-source libraries. Whenever I needed only one small feature from the library, I pretty much always downloaded the whole library anyway as it was usually too hard to pull out only one feature. Now, AI can easily help pull out or build just the one feature I need.
So now the challenge becomes - how do you build a UI that can serve the super long-tail use-cases of every user of your product. Especially in the case of mobile apps. I think people still like having a UI (otherwise nobody would bother to buy the extremely expensive iPhone Duo!), but the UI has to now adjust to the 1% use-case that this one specific user wants. And I don’t think Siri is the ultimate solution. The way App Intents are set up is extremely limiting. It doesn’t work for that 1% use-case.
While many people are scared that AI will take away our jobs and all that, I think it just pushes us to the edge of building. We no longer have to worry and spend so much time on building basic features and fixing bugs. That’s not the hard part. The hard part is expanding our human builder potential to think and create something new that caters to the long-tail that was literally not truly possible before now!