---
title: "Latest reads"
description: "The engineering internet, summarised so you can actually read it."
---

# Latest reads
> The engineering internet, summarised so you can actually read it.

## Articles

### [Clearleft's Andy Budd on designing for users - The Intercom Blog](https://yomu.fyi/post/clearleft-x27-s-andy-budd-on-designing-for-users-the-intercom-blog.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 13, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Andy Budd, co-founder of Clearleft, discusses why design is a critical differentiator for startups, noting that companies like Slack and Dropbox succeeded through superior user experience rather than being first to market. He advises hiring the best designers you can afford early to solve existential business problems, then bringing in a more junior team to evolve and maintain the product. Consumer expectations for digital design have risen greatly, but startup budgets haven’t kept pace because few designers hold budget-making positions, creating a misalignment. Agile development has a place, but companies must balance it with longer-term systems that make design, technology, and products scalable. For voice-activated interfaces, designers will still need to define decision trees and logic, shifting from graphic design to conversational and personality design, as seen with tools like x.ai’s Amy.


### [Tomasz Tunguz on Venture Capital - The Intercom Blog](https://yomu.fyi/post/tomasz-tunguz-on-venture-capital-the-intercom-blog.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 13, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Tomasz Tunguz, a partner at Redpoint Ventures, discusses the key metrics he looks for in potential investments, including sustainable competitive differentiators and revenue benchmarks. He identifies three types of sustainable competitive advantage: a founder’s market discovery, difficult-to-replicate technology, or a new distribution mechanism. For Series A investments, he typically partners with companies at $50,000-100,000 MRR, but also invests in pre-revenue ideas, noting that 27% of Series A rounds had no revenue. He looks for short sale cycles under 45 days and negative net churn as signs of product-market fit, and advises founders to always have a plan to reach profitability on current cash. Investors view businesses as collections of risk, and founders should address how they will mitigate major risks in their pitch.


### [Stop focusing on the next big thing - The Intercom Blog](https://yomu.fyi/post/stop-focusing-on-the-next-big-thing-the-intercom-blog.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 13, 2026
- Type: Problem & solution

The post criticizes the tendency of product people to fetishize emerging trends like AI, VR, and AR without stepping back and asking why, latching onto hype rather than focus. It argues that this ‘Next Big Thing-ism’ is rooted in short-term jostling and FOMO, not focus, leading to products that seek quick exits, as seen at CES or on Product Hunt. The author advocates for a humbler, more considered approach that treats product building as an opportunity to gradually influence the future, perhaps by kicking stones in its path, rather than leaping forward for a secret advantage. This involves designing the rudder, not the boat, and recognizing that there is no inevitable endpoint in design, only hypotheses about what could come next. As Brian Eno said, the aim is to make things that belong to the future we would like to live in, not to chase hype for competitive advantage.


### [Unflattening design - The Intercom Blog](https://yomu.fyi/post/unflattening-design-the-intercom-blog.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 13, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Design problems are inherently multi-dimensional and require multiple perspectives to understand fully, as a single viewpoint flattens the challenge. The post uses the metaphor of ‘unflattening’ from Nick Sousanis’ graphic novel to argue that designers must break out of habitual, flat viewpoints to see a richer picture. It recommends alternating between open exploration and closed execution, and using techniques like changing context, applying constraints such as mobile-first design which led Uber to strip back to one-button ordering, and zooming in and out on problems to see both details and the big picture. Borrowing mental models from others and externalizing ideas through artifacts like Post-it notes, storyboards, or prototypes helps clear the mind to make room for new insights, as Sousanis explains that recognizing our solitary standpoint is limited. Ultimately, design is a modeling activity that benefits from constantly manipulating and enriching one’s perspective to create better decisions.


### [Intercom's Paul Adams on product - The Intercom Blog](https://yomu.fyi/post/intercom-x27-s-paul-adams-on-product-the-intercom-blog.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 13, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Paul Adams, VP of Product at Intercom, shares product management principles from his experience at Google and Facebook, where he worked on Gmail, YouTube, and Facebook Ads. He advocates for small, resource-constrained teams with a 1:1:5 ratio of product manager, designer, and four to five engineers, arguing that limited resources force focus on what matters. Adams introduces a ‘666 roadmap’ framework: a six-year vision, six-month strategy, and six-week execution cycles to balance long-term goals with daily work. He emphasizes aiming for 10x improvements rather than incremental 10% gains, and predicts a shift from app icons to apps as services, citing WeChat as an example. For startups, he advises ignoring annual tech predictions and instead focusing on long-term vision to avoid distraction.


### [MarketingProfs' Ann Handley on content marketing - The Intercom Blog](https://yomu.fyi/post/marketingprofs-x27-ann-handley-on-content-marketing-the-intercom-blog.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 13, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Handley, Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs, was an early practitioner of content marketing to engage customers. She emphasizes empathy, thinking from the customer’s point of view rather than the company’s. For B2B marketers, she advises telling a bigger story beyond the product, citing Slack’s podcast about work culture and innovation. She recommends measuring content quality by whether customers would thank you for it, a simple test that clarifies value. Handley also highlights writing with personality and the label-off test, where stripping branding reveals if content sounds distinctive, and her book “Everybody Writes” inspires companies to use words better as ambassadors for their brand. The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing and should be content people want or enjoy.


### [Design is a conversation - The Intercom Blog](https://yomu.fyi/post/design-is-a-conversation-the-intercom-blog.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 13, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Conversational interfaces represent the next step in removing abstraction between humans and machines, moving from punch cards to command lines to multitouch and now to dialogue. Bots are software agents that run inside messaging apps, performing tasks like ordering a taxi through simple text commands, and are straightforward to write as simple scripts. This shift is compared to the Web 2.0 API revolution, where bots become a platform for building new user experiences, similar to how APIs transformed websites into services. Designing conversational UIs draws inspiration from interactive fiction and text adventure games, which used branching conversation trees, but the post notes these are only starting points. The post argues that conversation as a user interface creates new opportunities and challenges for designers, with messaging apps becoming the layer through which daily life is conducted, as evidenced by six of the top ten apps being primarily for messaging.


### [Why continuous deployment just keeps on giving - The Intercom Blog](https://yomu.fyi/post/why-continuous-deployment-just-keeps-on-giving-the-intercom-blog.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 13, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Intercom has practiced continuous deployment since its early days, deploying code automatically after each merge to master. The pipeline uses GitHub, Codeship for the test suite, and an internal tool called Muster to push code to production EC2 instances, typically in under ten minutes. The company now deploys over 80 times a day, aiming for 100 by end of 2015, and a dashboard tracks this history over three years. This rapid feedback loop allows engineers to iterate features through internal, beta, and public stages, learning how people use the feature and how code performs in production. The automated system helps new engineers ship code on their first day and a feature in their first week by removing deployment barriers, and they demo their work at Friday sessions. Additionally, a fast and reliable deployment process discourages engineers from bypassing it during critical bug fixes, reducing risky behavior.


### [Podcast: Margaret Gould Stewart on designing at scale](https://yomu.fyi/post/podcast-margaret-gould-stewart-on-designing-at-scale.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 13, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Margaret Gould Stewart, Facebook’s Director of Product Design, discusses the challenge of designing products for over a billion users, citing Google Search, YouTube, and Facebook as examples of universal human needs. She emphasizes balancing audacity with humility, taking oneself out of the design process to focus on user needs. User research remains critical, using both quantitative data and ethnographic studies across different cultures and regions, with products tested extensively before release. For business products, usability must come before beauty, but delight on top of a usable foundation is powerful, as seen in consumer expectations. Stewart also highlights the importance of diverse teams and inclusive hiring programs like Facebook University to better represent the global user base.


### [How ProfitBooks used Intercom to increase renewal rates by 40% - The Intercom Blog](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-profitbooks-used-intercom-to-increase-renewal-rates-by-40-the-inte.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 13, 2026
- Type: Problem & solution

ProfitBooks, an Indian cloud accounting startup, faced a fragmented toolchain as it rapidly grew to over 1,000 customers. They previously used separate solutions for customer support (Zendesk), email marketing (Mailchimp), feature tracking (Asana), and a self-built CRM, resulting in low customer engagement. After adopting Intercom as a unified platform for support, email marketing, and sales, their customer message volume increased 15 times, revealing previously hidden user feedback. Intercom’s automated messaging and user segmentation enabled targeted emails, boosting open rates from 7% to 45% and driving measurable business impact. By sending a payment reminder one day before account expiration, ProfitBooks achieved a 40% increase in renewal rates, and a follow-up promo converted 18% of churned trial users.


### [Brian Balfour on creating meaningful growth - The Intercom Blog](https://yomu.fyi/post/brian-balfour-on-creating-meaningful-growth-the-intercom-blog.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 13, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Brian Balfour, VP of Growth at HubSpot, defines a growth team as distinct from product and marketing, focusing on getting the target audience to experience core product value quickly and often. He argues that the lines between marketing and product have blurred due to technical, data-driven marketing and accelerating growth speeds, necessitating a new team structure. Growth teams should not build core product value but rather optimize the funnel, such as onboarding, referral, and engagement, using a rapid experimentation process. Balfour warns against chasing vanity metrics and emphasizes that growth is a mentality and process, not just tactics, and that the right time to build a growth team is after clear product-market fit, typically around Series B. He recommends getting executive buy-in, educating across teams, and securing early wins with data to overcome skepticism and establish the growth team’s value.


### [Beware of icebergs - Inside Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/post/beware-of-icebergs-inside-intercom.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 13, 2026
- Type: Explainer

The post warns that features like search, rich text editing, and email processing are ‘icebergs’ whose visible simplicity belies weeks of development work. Search requires deciding what to index, whether to segment results, and whether to pre-index, making it far more complex than a text field suggests; frequent search requests often indicate a different need, such as quickly finding a specific user. Rich text editing, even when limited to bold and italics, causes maintenance problems when content moves between app, email, and mobile, and the HTML produced is often poor. Email processing involves two icebergs: detecting when users have read notifications to avoid re-notifying, and handling replies by parsing inbound email with context and signatures. The author recounts a ‘Merge accounts’ button that required six weeks of work and was scrapped, illustrating the hidden cost of seemingly small changes, and advises planning for all cases.


### [Has visual design fallen flat? - The Intercom Blog](https://yomu.fyi/post/has-visual-design-fallen-flat-the-intercom-blog.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 13, 2026
- Type: Explainer

The post surveys the flat design trend of 2013-2014, characterized by flat rectangles, minimal shadows, large photography, bold typography, and slick animations, inspired by iOS 7 and Material Design. It argues that while this minimalist style brings clarity, its ubiquity has created an aesthetic monoculture where many products look indistinguishable, making design a commodity. The author draws a parallel to Le Corbusier’s modernist architecture, warning that repeated simplicity can become lifeless, and cites Jane Jacobs on the value of organic diversity. He speculates that future design diversity may be driven by new technologies, cultural influences from a growing global online population, or a backlash against flatness. The post concludes that flat design may persist but will likely eventually give way to new styles, though it offers no definitive prediction.


### [This is not a map - The Intercom Blog](https://yomu.fyi/post/this-is-not-a-map-the-intercom-blog.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 13, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Intercom added a map feature showing customer locations worldwide, kept it live for three years, and recently sunset it despite its popularity because the use case was unclear. Customers primarily used the map to show off at conferences, on Twitter, and to investors, not for geographical analysis. Realizing the map’s true job was as a showpiece, Intercom shifted improvement focus from cartographical accuracy, clustering, and borders to aesthetics and shareability. They redesigned the map to automatically hide sensitive data, look impressive, and provide a unique shareable URL, making it easier to show off. This approach resulted in a geographically inferior map that better served customers’ actual needs, proving that understanding usage trumps the feature category.


### [How to predict technology flops - The Intercom Blog](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-to-predict-technology-flops-the-intercom-blog.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 13, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Technology flops share a common trait: they fail to perform a clear job for customers. The Segway, for instance, offered marginal speed and height advantages that only appealed to niche markets like tourists and security guards, not the global walking market it targeted. Google Glass and Google Wave also suffered from impressive technology without a defined use case, leaving them without a job to be done. In contrast, disruptive products like modern weather apps succeed by precisely understanding the simple jobs customers actually need, such as knowing if it will rain soon. Game-changing products like the iPhone combine new technology with concrete, useful applications, focusing on what users can do rather than what the product does, and 47% of first movers fail because they cannot explain their product’s job.


### [Why happiness at work really matters - The Intercom Blog](https://yomu.fyi/post/why-happiness-at-work-really-matters-the-intercom-blog.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 13, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Research from the University of Warwick found that happy workers are about 12% more productive, and Shawn Achor quantified benefits including 37% higher sales and 31% higher productivity. However, the post argues that common perks like free food and high salaries are overrated because humans quickly adapt, citing a study where lottery winners were no happier than accident survivors. Instead, factors such as meaningful work, recognition, and strong relationships are more critical, supported by Gallup research on engagement. Alexander Kjerulf, a management consultant, recommends five practices including random acts of kindness, hiring for attitude as Pret A Manger does, and celebrating mistakes like Ben & Jerry’s flavor graveyard. The post concludes that making staff happy is about offering meaningful work, not expensive benefits, and that any company can afford that.


### [On magical software... - Inside Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/post/on-magical-software-inside-intercom.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 13, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Product design is a cost-benefit analysis, and software feels magical when it dramatically reduces user effort relative to the value delivered. The post identifies three modern sources of magic: Uber-fication, which reduces repeated tasks to a single tap; eliminating data entry by pulling existing data from external services; and ambient awareness, which delivers insights automatically without user action. Uber-fication requires unbundling complex products into single-purpose apps, as Facebook did with Messenger, and using context-aware defaults based on time, location, and previous actions. Eliminating data entry involves connecting to services like Facebook for friends, email for receipts, or Stripe for revenue, rather than asking users to input information. Ambient awareness means designing systems that push valuable analysis to users, such as Intercom’s daily report on new users and slipping customers, rather than requiring them to log in.


### [Is asking why always the best strategy? - The Intercom Blog](https://yomu.fyi/post/is-asking-why-always-the-best-strategy-the-intercom-blog.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 13, 2026
- Type: Explainer

The post argues that asking ‘why’ repeatedly in product design interviews is not always the best strategy because digging too quickly to the deepest reason can miss valuable insights. Instead, the author recommends exploring three productive layers: usefulness (what the tool does), usability (the result of using it), and desirability (the emotional outcome), each revealing different design opportunities. For example, with an electric drill, the usefulness layer suggests power and speed settings, the usability layer suggests lighter weight and prescriptive settings, and the desirability layer suggests a docking station or attractive design. The author cautions that going beyond these three layers, such as asking why a more personal home matters, becomes too abstract and rarely actionable for product design. Taking time to explore each layer thoroughly yields more actionable and interesting insights than rushing to the root cause.


### [Doubling down on content - The Intercom Blog](https://yomu.fyi/post/doubling-down-on-content-the-intercom-blog.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 13, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Intercom hired John Collins, a former print journalist with 20 years at The Irish Times, as managing editor to lead its content efforts. The company’s blog, Inside Intercom, has been a key driver of its success by sharing insights on web design, search, and business evolution, not just product features, and increasingly reflects the views of its customers. Intercom avoids typical content marketing tactics like link baiting or artificial publishing schedules, instead focusing on evergreen content that builds a lasting knowledge base and gets referred to weeks and months after publication. This approach allows direct engagement with customers without intermediaries like PR agencies or trade magazines, which have declined, and the company is not setting up a corporate newsroom. The company views this as an experiment putting a journalist among engineers and designers to create content that attracts and engages prospective customers on its own terms.


### [How we do product design at Intercom – Inside Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/post/how-we-do-product-design-at-intercom-inside-intercom.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Published: Oct 13, 2026
- Type: Explainer

In a 2014 email to Intercom’s design team, Paul Adams shares a deliberate ten-step process focusing on deep problem understanding. Designers must first read all research and customer feedback, consult the Customer Success team for clarification, and use product instrumentation to avoid assumptions about user behavior. They are instructed to generate at least three or four different solutions, research how other products solve similar problems, and iterate through feedback from multiple designers. Work proceeds systematically through four design layers: outcome, structure, interaction, and visual, with the principle of not mixing levels and always optimizing for simplicity. After shipping, designers must proactively measure success against defined metrics, talk to the Customer Success team, and learn from mistakes, as truly great designers are dogged in understanding problems even after a solution ships.


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