Superhuman & the Productivity Meta-Layer

…Makes me wonder if the path to truly win the modern “productivity app” category is launching an underlying set of APIs for every aspect of project management + personal productivity with a wide and evolving set of products and interfaces (native ones and third-party creations) that users can switch between (and, in the process, endure a light “cle... See more

This isn’t to say that there cannot be a horizontal collaboration app that is core to the productivity workflows. But it likely cannot be blocking to productivity. It can’t be a peer level app that is standalone. Instead it must work across and within each productivity app. Standalone messaging is not what ties all apps together. It is a peer level... See more

Superhuman is productivity software, but I'm really a gamer at heart — and I've built a framework for applying game design to business software.

Employees would work out of Slack, periodically moving to whichever app they were needed in, before returning to Slack. But productivity *isn’t* separate from collaboration. They are the two parts of the same loop of producing work. And if anything collaboration is in *service* of team productivity.

In the last few decades we have seen tremendous technical breakthroughs in the latencies and tooling possible to remove these constraints. Across the world, whether in productivity apps or in national governance, there will be a transition period as our norms and processes adapt to this tightening of the collaboration feedback loop. But perhaps I r... See more

The Superhuman “product market fit test"went viral a few years ago, but I think this was a distraction from Superhuman’s even more interesting insight – how to incorporate game design into a productivity tool. This is huge and can basically serve as a roadmap on how to incorporate game design into a NoCode/LowCode platform.