Industry News

My kids are obsessed with the podcast Wow in the World (and, to be fair, it’s really good). Guy Raz is such a goofball on that show that it was a little weird to see the headline Guy Raz: Five Lessons PMs Can Take From Famous Entrepreneurs. But I thoroughly enjoyed Laura Baverman’s write-up of one his recent talks at the first ProductCraft conference. He gives several recommendations for PMs on how to run successful products, including “Focus on What’s Different, Special, or Better Than...

I really enjoyed Heart-Centered Innovation — a short, from-the-heart essay by Sari Harrison. She talks about how hard it is to see problems from a neutral point of view:

Most people have a center from which they see the problems around them. A sun that everything revolves around. This leaves it up to the person who has the problem to do a lot of filtering among solutions, often with no way of knowing which option is best.

What if we didn’t do that? Instead, looking at all...

Last night at around 8pm ET while in a taxi back to my home from the airport, I wrote on Search Engine Land that Google's indexing issue was back. Google then confirmed a new indexing issue on Twitter at around 2:20pm ET the following morning. But they said this issue is different and not related to the one from Wednesday morning.

Lenny Rachitsky wrote a helpful and comprehensive guide on How To Get Into Product Management (And Thrive). This is a really good resource for any new product manager. I especially liked his section on seven core skills, and how to get better at each of them. One could certainly argue the validity and importance of each skill, but there are lots of good insights here. For example, on “Leadership through influence”:

In order to succeed you need to be able to build trust with your...

Over the past couple of days there has been limited chatter around ranking fluctuations and changes to the Google search ranking algorithm. I am honestly not seeing a huge spike in chatter but the tracking tools are almost all lighting up over the past day or two. So here is what I see.

For years Google has been testing placing the URL at the top of the search result snippet. Google also has been testing favicons near the URL as well for years. Google has also been testing a black ad label. Now it is officially all live in the main mobile search results. And guess what, many in the SEO community believe it was done to confuse the searcher into thinking the ads are organic results.

Yesterday we were the first to report that Google was having an issue indexing the web. Google then confirmed the issue a couple of hours later. It seemed it was resolved around 1pm ET yesterday. Google has confirmed two hours ago that it was indeed resolved.

There may be a serious Google bug or it might just be a interface issue - I am not sure - but if you try to find recent content indexed by Google - Google won't be able to help you out. If you try to search for content in the past hour or so from sites like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal or almost any site, you will be out of luck.

This is a helpful article from Jeff Vincent about the “nth user problem”. This is a not-so-great term for a very real problem: how to make sure you’re able to effectively onboard additional team members on a customer’s primary account. From SaaS has an nth user problem:

A huge driver of churn in the most successful SaaS businesses is loss of champion churn — or when your product’s greatest advocate within a customer company moves on to another job or department and the replacement...

Image Classification in the past

Back in 2008, I was writing about how a search engine might learn from photo databases like Flickr, and how people label images there in a post I wrote called, Community Tagging and Ranking in Images of...