Jack Dorsey says Block employees now bring prototypes, not slides, to meetings

delphic-frog

I feel like he's just doing it for attention.

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.

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.

altmanaltman

> "I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking," Jobs once said, according to a book published last month by David Pogue. I wonder what he'll think about these vibecoded prototypes and if it's more thinking or less thinking

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.

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?

risyachka

I bet, considering the massive skill needed for it: "hey claude, turn this presentation into a prototype".

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.

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?

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.

puttycat

"CEO said a thing" journalism, discussed on HN very recently: https://karlbode.com/ceo-said-a-thing-journalism/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47577735

dwedge

Musk taking over Twitter took a lot of the spotlight off of Dorsey, as though it wasn't already a toxic plaxe. He got a second chance in the public eye to be the visionary that's "one of us" and he's doing his best to blow it

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.

samtheprogram

Sounds like Apple under Steve Jobs.

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.

fredgrott

I have to speak up.... Maybe if he had one freaking friend he would realize how effing stupid he has become... BTW, the easiest way to get fired right now...is to over-use AI in an attempt to fool a domain expert.....or in short do not use it to perform in senior position interviews! Yes, there is even a compliance post(podcast) about Delve talking about that context aspect of it...

al_borland

If I showed upper management a functional prototype in a first meeting about a future product, they would assume it was already done and ask when it could ship, while not accepting any dates further out than a month in the future. No way I’d set myself up for failure like that.

loteck

Since the crux of this seems to be about replacing middle managers, what do people think prevents AI from successfully managing 140 direct reports on day to day operations on behalf of a lone CEO? I'm reading "it doesn't work," but that sounds like more of a potential opportunity to me than a truism.

iainctduncan

And this is better how exactly? If you're running a business, do you not want to catch employees mistakes as early as possible ? Most ideas are crap. I'd way rather they get elimated after someone spent an hour making slides than a day vibecoding a prototype. And then there is the problem that vibecoding is addictive so the more one has done of it on the prototype, the worse one's judgement of whether it's actually something worth building...