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- Product & Design Pulse v67
Product & Design Pulse v67
The Season to be Thankful for Product Features 🦃
Malcom Jones
November 24, 2025
Welcome to this week’s edition of Product & Design Pulse, where we explore the latest in tech, product, design, and innovation! Meta’s surprising move into power trading underscored how AI growth is now tightly bound to energy strategy, while CoreWeave’s financial strain highlighted the risks hiding beneath the AI-infrastructure boom. A major Cloudflare outage reminded everyone just how fragile the internet’s backbone can be, as Ben Thompson explored how robotaxis could reshape the economics of suburban living. Meanwhile, product teams across Snapchat, Spotify, Meta, Google, and Amazon shipped a wave of new features—from AI-powered video recaps to accessible smart glasses and improved content controls. With CES and ProductCon on the horizon, the momentum shows no signs of slowing.
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For those who don’t have time to read 😁 |
Last week…
Meta Enters Power Trading to Support AI Expansion
Meta is stepping into the electricity-trading business, aiming to accelerate the build-out of power plants needed for its AI data-centers. By committing to long-term power purchase contracts and seeking wholesale electricity market access, Meta is shifting from pure consumer tech into energy infrastructure. The move underscores how energy supply is becoming a strategic competitive asset for AI-driven companies, not just a cost line item.
Meet CoreWeave: The Data-Center Company Under Strain
CoreWeave has rapidly scaled by building AI-compute data-centers and leasing them to major AI players, yet it’s now burdened by massive debt and unclear profitability. While the AI-infrastructure boom gives the company high visibility and revenue growth, analysts suggest its financial structure makes it vulnerable if market conditions slow. The piece warns that AI-infrastructure may face a sharp reckoning, with CoreWeave portrayed as a “poster child” of risk hiding behind the boom.
Cloudflare experienced a major network disruption on November 18, 2025, triggered by a bug in its Bot-Management feature that caused widespread service failure across global internet traffic. The outage impacted many high-profile platforms, underscoring how deeply internet infrastructure companies are central yet also brittle in supporting today’s digital ecosystem. The incident serves as a reminder that even “invisible” infrastructure risks can ripple into major outages and raise questions about resilience in the cloud era.
“Robotaxis and Suburbia” – Rethinking Urban Mobility
In the latest Stratechery essay, Ben Thompson argues that autonomous-vehicle fleets could reshape suburban life far more than urban cores, potentially weakening the economic dynamics of cities (and companies like Uber). He points out that robotaxis may reduce the value premium of dense urban living, making suburbs more viable and transforming how mobility, delivery, and residence interact. The piece raises provocative questions about the future of urbanism, infrastructure tax bases, and how tech disruption might reinstate suburban advantage rather than erase it.
