My Favorite Products of 2023

One of my favorite questions is “What’s a product you’ve been enjoying recently?” Here are my favorite products of 2023.

Summary

Here are my favorite products of 2023:

Notion — For massively increasing my productivity as a product leader and entrepreneur.
TikTok — For joy, entertainment, laughter, learning, and wonder. And a delightful user experience.
ChatGPT — For quick task completion, creativity, and exciting new tech.
Yeti Cup — For keeping my tea at the optimal drinking temperature for longer.
E Collar — For the peace of mind gained when you can fully trust your dog off-leash.

Intro

One of my favorite questions is “What’s a product you’ve been enjoying recently?”

As the year winds down, I thought it’d be fun to reflect on and share my top products of 2023.

Notion

Notion is a productivity tool where I keep my to-dos, documentation, notes, and project management workflows. As a product leader and entrepreneur, Notion has increased my productivity more than any other product in 2023. It excels at centralizing, categorizing, and presenting knowledge in a completely flexible, customizable way. Its best uses have been 1) creating a continuous product discovery system — which helps me stay extremely customer-centric and 2) creating a product development roadmap — which enables my team to plan much more effectively.

Notion does have a major drawback. It’s difficult to use for beginners, especially for those less tech-savvy. This drawback has been a big barrier to my team’s adoption of Notion. Notion is hard to use because it’s extremely flexible and un-opinionated by design. To some extent, it forces you to build your own documentation and project management workflows from scratch. However, this is EXACTLY why it’s such a huge productivity unlock — because the workflows I’ve custom-built for myself are optimal for me. With small iterations over time, I can build the perfect workflow, which no other productivity tool can offer.

Fun fact: Notion was my #1 most used product during work hours for 2023. (Source)

TikTok

In 2023, TikTok inspired me to bake more creatively, amazed me with jaw-dropping extreme sports, made me laugh out loud at Tears of the Kingdom constructs, and taught me better dog training and sauce reduction techniques. For that and so much more, it’s one of my top products in 2023.

I was skeptical of TikTok for a long time. I didn’t really “get it” from the descriptions I read nor did I want to support a product that’s a subtle distribution vehicle for pro-China content. But TikTok is an incredible product.

I would’ve never tried TikTok without my friend’s introduction. He started showing me TikTok when we were hanging out and sending me links. He explained how he uses his phone settings to limit TikTok to a 5-minute timer. After experiencing the awesome content firsthand and learning how to manage my usage responsibly, I started using TikTok and became hooked.

The joy, entertainment, laughter, learning, and wonder that TikTok elicits per minute of use is extremely high. The product is completely focused on presenting the best bite-sized content for you. It achieves this to a great extent and with impressive simplicity from the perspective of the user. All I have to do is swipe up, watch the clips that interest me, and then my content gets better as I use it. The 5-minute-per-day timer helps me use TikTok super intentionally — it nudges me to skip through low-quality clips and find the most rewarding content as quickly as I can. Without the timer, I fear I could easily spend more time on TikTok and would feel guilty about it. If you haven’t tried it already, I can’t recommend TikTok (with a 5-minute timer) enough!

ChatGPT

It feels super cliche to be a tech bro talking about how great ChatGPT is… except that it is pretty great!

Like Notion, ChatGPT has been a huge boost to my productivity. I think of it as a better version of Google search. With a bit more context than a search, ChatGPT can give me more personalized and thorough results that take me from 0% to 80% task completion with little effort. I’ve used ChatGPT to… create a Frequently Asked Questions doc for beta testers, brainstorm a roadmap for our platform engineers, and code a script to automate data entry. In each case, ChatGPT wasn’t perfect, but with a few prompt teaks and revisions to its output, I’m able to get things done significantly faster than had I not used ChatGPT.

ChatGPT is also just fun to use! You can get creative with how you use it, such as for cooking inspiration based on what’s in the fridge or to illustrate a picture book for a friend. In 2023, we’ve seen an explosion in ChatGPT active users (100 million users two months after launch!) and products built with Large Language Models (LLMs). It’s not without its faults, I’ve had some embarrassing ChatGPT fumbles like when it failed to correctly count the number of months between two dates… But overall it’s a great product and I haven’t been more excited about a new technology since the iPhone.

Yeti Cup

I love sitting down at my desk at the start of my workday with a hot cup of tea. Switching to a Yeti Cup for my tea has made this ritual so much better by extending the window when my tea is the perfect temperature to drink.

I used to have a favorite mug — a homemade gift from a friend — and I would make myself a big cup of morning tea. Then, I started using a Yeti, and slowly realized what a difference it makes. With my old mug, drinking tea was a race to finish before it got too cold. I’d burn my mouth, or finish too quickly and have to pee, or not finish fast enough and waste cold tea. With my Yeti, my tea stays hot for a long time and I can sip at my own pace. It does take longer for tea to cool down from boiling to drinkable, and I miss the hand-feel and warmth of my old mug. But it’s worth it. My Yeti cup also comes with a nice lid that makes my tea portable for morning walks or as a sideline drink when playing sports in the cold.

E Collar

Like most dog people, I think my dog is the best. Zana is a Pomsky (Pomeranian x Husky mix), which means she’s super smart, energetic, and independent. When we got Zana three years ago as a puppy, she was an adorable little terror. Because she’s such a quick learner, training with her has been super fun and rewarding, but it took a while for her to consistently make “good” choices. Until recently, we had never fully trusted her off leash as she didn’t reliably come when called and has a tendency to wander off.

This year, we got an E Collar specifically for off leash training. Rather than paying $2.5k for an E Collar bootcamp, we decided to train Zana ourselves from YouTube. We had a rocky start. Her Husky fur meant that normal prongs wouldn’t reach her skin, so we had to buy an attachment (E Collar Wings). We finally got her to feel the stimulation, but when she did she ran into a corner of the house and cowered in the most pitiful, heart-wrenching way. What worked for us was to do Long Leash E Collar training at a local park. She quickly learned that stimulation means “come here”. After that breakthrough, she was hiking off leash with just her E Collar later that same weekend and coming when called reliably. I knew this was working when she took off after a flock of birds, I called her back, and she immediately turned around mid-sprint and came back to me. The peace of mind gained when you can fully trust your dog off leash is an incredibly satisfying feeling. For that, the E Collar is one of my top products of the year.

Zana is far from perfect. We still need to work on her not chasing deer and not destroying women’s underwear when home alone… But to me, the best dog got even better in 2023 thanks to her E Collar training.

Honorable Mentions

Some of these products are new to me in 2023 and others are great products I’ve been using for a while that made 2023 special.