Discussion
Jack Dorsey says Block employees now bring prototypes — not slide decks — to meetings
pwarner: I work at a less innovative place, and I see out product managers coming with prototypes, at least solid mock ups rather than just a jira. They socialize it with potential users, they iterate, they find missing requirements, it's pretty powerful. The net result is we're building better features faster.
game_the0ry: This is the way.
hapless: After his stunt with the mass firings "because of AI," employees now bring prototypes, not slides, to meetings with Jack Dorsey.These clowns live in a dreamworld created by their PAs and cronies
0xy: If Block were experiencing rapid productivity improvements from AI why is their flagship Square product still worse than Toast? Toast is eating their lunch day after day.
FromTheFirstIn: And why is Tidal’s library so much smaller than Spotify’s? And why would I use Cash App if they’re going to try to make it “an interface for AI”?
FromTheFirstIn: How can you be less innovative than Block? Their products are 100% ripoffs of better products
buildbot: Block signed a friend of mine, they quit their other job, then block was like whoops layoffs including people like this person who hadn’t even started. Super unethical.
ed_elliott_asc: I’ve been in IT for 25 years, it has happened to me once, unfortunately it isn’t that uncommon.
buildbot: In the USA at least sure. This was in a country with lightly better employment protections so it’s quite uncommon.
kangraemin: The "prototypes not slides" rule works great for product decisions where the devil is in the interaction details. You can't really argue about a flow in a slide deck — once someone clicks through a prototype, the discussion shifts from opinion to observation.But I wonder how they handle discussions that are inherently abstract — pricing changes, infrastructure migration plans, org restructuring. Forcing a prototype there would just produce theater. The real insight is probably not "prototypes good, slides bad" but "stop presenting things that should be experienced.
risyachka: I bet, considering the massive skill needed for it: "hey claude, turn this presentation into a prototype".
just_once: I'm not sure what the flex is here.Is the idea that prototypes give the Permission Granter more fidelity into a proposal and therefore can make better decisions? Whereas before, with Slide Decks, the Permission Granter couldn't experience certain things and therefore couldn't make as good decisions to grant permissions?So in effect this remains a billionaire figure speaking from their own perspective and we're supposed to care?
techblueberry: "Just two months ago every meeting that we would have, you see a presentation or a Google Doc and we go through it," Dorsey said.2 months ago they were still using PowerPoints? Jesus no wonder they had to lay so many people off. What the fuck is going on over there?
tdeck: [delayed]
lokar: Or new infrastructure. You bring a demo of a new distributed transaction manager?
zoklet-enjoyer: That's so messed up. I hope they're doing ok.
mrits: I prefer prototyping to slides. The reason is it helps me understand the problem and edge cases better. Getting AI to build means you could potentially understand it even less than if you put the slides together.Hiring talent that is passionate about delivering a quality product is more important than ever considering there are so many ways to take shortcuts now that might not be obvious until later.
convexly: At face value this seemed cool, but the more I think about it slides or prototypes are the same thing, just a different kind of theater.
malfist: > theaterThat's exactly what you have to do for the CEO class
Ozzie_osman: I listened to his podcast episode on the Sequoia podcast a few days ago. Interestingly, his argument was "we don't need middle managers" and he plans to have all 6000 employees eventually report to him.In other words, companies don't need managers anymore. Except for one manager. Him.
Esophagus4: I think Google tried this a while ago (flattening the org).It didn’t work, so they went back to having managers.
Ozzie_osman: They did, I actually worked there at the time, my manager had 140 directs. It obviously didn't work.But this time it will work. Because, AI, of course.
cassianoleal: I went to a meeting with a prototype once. It was a single happy path with stubbed data, coded in the most naïve way possible. It was, after all, a prototype just to give a feel for what the interactions would be like.It put enormous pressure on delivery, since leadership had "already seen it working, how hard could it be to make it to production?"Never again.
wil421: Did the same thing early in my career. Built a quick bootstrap website with like 5 pages and all the data was static. The backend was a year off. It was great for end users but the non-IT managers were dumb. Same issue about seeing something working and expecting the world.
eptcyka: I wouldn’t say “Never again”, unless you put in the caveat that you shouldn’t do this again for the same leaders.
lvl155: Prototypes of what? What new products came out of Block in the past six years since pandemic? This makes it sound like Block is a place of innovations when it’s just a rent seeking enterprise.
kace91: I've come to realize a lot of business trends can be reduced to "higher ups are now convinced that x is not actually necessary".See "we don't need managers" (flat orgs), "we don't need infra" (DevOps philosophy), "we don't need QA" (devs handling testing), "we don't need product" (product engineering), "we don't need frontend devs" (no code generators) and of course all the AI related workforce reduction.To me, it says something about how detached leadership is from how the sausage is made.
Esophagus4: Wow, holy smokes… 140 directs. Kind of curious: what did the differences look like on a day to day in that sort of org structure?
Aurornis: Counterintuitively, systems with heavier employment protections can make it more common to cut recent hires.Employment protections usually come with a probationary period before they kick in, so employers can remove bad hires early. This creates an incentive to remove new hires before their probationary period is up if they're showing any signs they might not be the best candidate for the job.Even when new hires are good and the company wants to keep them, heavy employment protections favor longer term employees. If the business environment changes and they need to reduce headcount their hands may be tied in ways that require cutting the new hires before the tenured employees. This happens a lot in labor unions, too, where tenured employees have greater standing than new hires when push comes to shove and someone needs to go, regardless of performance.
samtheprogram: Sounds like Apple under Steve Jobs.
