The next great products will let us go.
For twenty years we rewarded technology for keeping us. I think the next twenty will reward the technology that gives us back to each other.
By Cynthia Perry Benjamin
For most of my career, I’ve watched people use technology. In living rooms, in conference halls, across a table from someone telling me how something actually felt.
The pattern is simple. People rarely want more of what’s on the screen. They want what the screen was supposed to help them reach.
At Dreamforce, 170,000 attendees didn’t ask us for more features. They asked for a day that works: time to walk between sessions, a real lunch, someone to meet. At Meta, the question underneath every community, in seven markets, was the same one. When does a stranger’s post feel worth trusting? At Zillow in 2023, my squad spent four months asking where AI belonged in one of the biggest decisions of a person’s life. Our answer kept people first. It never shipped. I’m still proud of the questions we asked.
Then I stepped away, and I got to answer my own questions.
Match My Logic started as my idea, on our couch. It’s a card game about seeing how someone else thinks. The morning our Kickstarter launched, our email service blocked us, so we reached out to people one by one. We hit our goal, and for a day it still felt like failing. Months later an order came in from a stranger on the other side of the country. I’ll never forget that feeling.
Pop In exists because we wanted to see our friends more. The rule at its center is that your friends on it are people you’ve actually met. You say what you’re up to, and your people pop in. It’s built to get you off your phone and into someone’s living room.
Pannall exists because twice a year, people sit down and try to rebuild a whole year of their work from memory. The quiet work is the first thing to disappear. Feedback captured in the moment means your work gets seen while it’s still true.
What’s coming
The last twenty years paid companies for how long they could hold us. Time spent. Daily actives. Streaks. A lot of money was made from our attention, and some of it from our loneliness.
AI will make that kind of product cheaper to build and harder to put down. It will also make the opposite possible: tools that take on the sorting, the scheduling and the remembering, so people can do the parts only people can do. Show up. Notice each other. Make something with their hands, and find the person who wants it.
Picture a Saturday a few years from now. The assistant on your phone has already handled the errands, the bills and the back-and-forth of the group chat. What’s left is the part that was always the point. Who are you going to see? What are you going to make? The products that help with that part will be the ones people love, and the ones worth paying for.
The next great products will be measured by how well they give people back to their lives.
I believe technology should solve real problems for people, and a business should be rewarded for solving them, not for creating them. That isn’t a soft position. It’s a bet on where value is going. When anything can be generated, what people will pay for is what’s real. A game night that actually happened. A friend you finally saw. A review that told the truth about your year. A stranger’s order that made someone’s month.
That’s the work I want to do next. Listen closely. Find what’s underneath the numbers. Help build things people are glad they used, and glad they could put down.
If you’re building toward that future too, I’d love to hear what you’re seeing.