On Wednesday, July 24, Bubble held its first-ever Product Sesh, hosted by Director of Product Marketing & Content Carly Rosenkranz, VP of Product Allen Yang, and Director of Platform Engineering Payam Azadi. The team led a live walk-through of Bubble’s key product strategies and shared what’s on the roadmap for next quarter.
Catch the full replay below or keep reading to see what you missed:
📺 Don’t miss an update. Subscribe to Bubble’s YouTube channel for how-tos, product updates, and more live events like this.
Bubble’s roadmap strategy (3:54)
Allen kicked things off with a look at the mission behind Bubble’s product strategy, MVP to IPO. “In the future, any founder will be able to create technology and scale from MVP to IPO on Bubble,” he said. “For a long time, those outside of the community have thought of us as a great MVP builder or a tool just for prototyping, but if you’ve ever built something on Bubble you know how much more powerful this platform and community are.”
To realize that vision, Bubble is focused on four key areas in Q3:
Scale, stability, and speed: ensure your apps run smoothly and quickly
Improved usability: make Bubble easier and more intuitive
Artificial intelligence: give new and experienced users a faster start on building apps on Bubble
Native mobile apps: Bubble will be the most powerful way to build both web and native mobile apps on one platform.
The event focused primarily on scale and usability, but Allen said that big updates about AI and mobile would be unveiled at BubbleCon in October.
Platform reliability (7:37)
Payam then took the stage to talk about Bubble’s focus on platform reliability. He shared his experience with high-scale platforms and acknowledged some of Bubble’s recent challenges. “Our entire focus right now is in the proactive, not reactive, work of building a new, fortified foundation that you can bet on.”
He likened Bubble’s platform work to a power grid. “Imagine what would happen if everyone in New York City plugged in their vacuum cleaner at the same time. It could create electrical surges, fires, and undercurrents that would lead to chaos,” he said. “That’s the type of reliability issues we’ve been working through and steadily improving upon.”
The work ahead isn’t just putting out fires. “We’re transforming the power grid itself,” said Payam.
Here’s what that work will look like:
Breaking up our monolith for better engineering velocity
New cloud foundation for enhanced scalability
Improved dedicated environments and backend workflow reliability
Modernizing the editor (18:41)
Allen returned to talk about making the Bubble editor more modern, streamlined, and intuitive. We're updating the new editor based on three principles:
Keep users in their flow: Whether we’re helping users learn a new part of the platform, troubleshoot an issue, or navigate the complexity of their app, Bubble never leaves users asking, “Now what?”
Don’t say it, show it: Bubble’s UI communicates visually through iconography, color, imagery, and more, embodying a ”what you see is what you get” experience and minimizing cognitive load.
Everything, just not all at once: Show users only a few of the most important features at the start. Introduce advanced or rarely-used features later to make the learning process easier.
He shared some sneak peeks, including a revamped workflow tab and improved information architecture.
Workload tooling enhancements (23:56)
Allen also discussed the evolution of workload tooling. Since transitioning to a usage-based pricing model called workload, Bubble has been helping users understand, track, and optimize their workload consumption. “Workload focuses solely on resource usage, not capacity limits,” Allen explained. “Think of workload as the fuel for your car — you’re paying for the gas, not how fast you can drive.”
He also shared Bubble is making it easier to understand and optimize your workload usage, including:
A reorganized workload section in the Bubble Manual
A new cost estimator tool for better financial planning (coming soon)
Enhanced app metrics and custom WU notifications
Lightning round: Bubble Boosts and community involvement (29:16)
Carly wrapped up with a lightning round of quality-of-life improvements shipped during our first-ever Bubble Boost Day. The team will host the next Boost Day in December — make sure to submit your feature ideas to the Ideaboard.
She also shared two new ways to get involved in the community: The Bubble Early Testing Advisory (BETA) program, our network of alpha and beta testers (launching in August), and the Bubble Ambassador (BAM) program, a new way to represent the Bubble community. Ambassadors organize meetups, moderate our forum, and meet with the Bubble team to share and discuss feedback.
🚀 Want to stay updated? Subscribe to our newsletter and register for BubbleCon to be the first to know about product news.
Closing and Q&A (32:45)
Allen and Payam returned for a Q&A with the audience. They covered:
What type of speed improvements will we see, and will this benefit page load speed? (32:45)
With the new database and cloud build, will lists of things scale better? (34:10)
When will new native mobile and AI features be available to the public? (35:00)
What is the timeline on editor design improvements? (36:00)
Are there plans to work on PWA as well as native mobile applications? (36:30)
When can we expect to be able to run loops? (37:00)
When can we expect more CSS capabilities? (37:30)
Are there any plans to introduce free-flowing canvas (à la Figma) to the new workflow tab? (38:40)
Will database improvements lead to faster and more powerful filtering capabilities on the server side? (39:15)
Any updates for designing environments in the future? (39:50)
Are there any plans for backend workflows being able to return data to the app frontend? (40:50)
Are there plans to have a step between being on the main cluster and dedicated? (41:30)
Stay connected
This is just the start of many exciting updates to come — including more on native mobile and AI at BubbleCon. Whether you tuned in live or are catching up on the recap, thanks for joining us for the first Bubble Product Sesh. We can’t wait to share what’s to come. Happy building!
💡 Join us at BubbleCon October 1–2, 2024 for exciting product news, workshops, and community events. Register now.