Industry News

Phil Johnson has some good advice for product managers in The Goldilocks of Process:

Blindly following process is a project-killer—not just in terms of efficiency. The real poison is the mentality: in these cases process became a crutch to lean on, with these individuals no longer thinking critically about their tasks. In many ways, the process became the job, where process really should be what enables the job. This rings doubly true in the software development world.

On any...

I talked about adding friction to products last week, and Kurt Yalcin’s article Against Engagement makes for a great companion piece. He touches on many topics, but I especially appreciate his views on that topic:

Slowing experiences down with intention and adding deliberate requests for user action at critical moments in a user flow makes for better experiences in the long run. Bring a level of consciousness to your designs and address the pressures you may have to reduce friction at...

This morning I clicked on a link to read a blog post, and within 3 seconds of arriving the popup above stopped me in my tracks. I am asked to provide my email address before I’ve had any opportunity to determine if the site might have value to me1. I came to the site to read an article, which means I intended to spend time there. By serving a pop-up just as I enter the site, it is preventing me from seeing any value until I make a decision about whether or not to give them access to my...

I felt it was important to make sure you all read my article on Search Engine Land with statements from Google around the March 2019 core update that started on March 12th. In that article, Google responded do a number of questions we sent them and some questions they just saw lingering on the web.

Emily Tate’s article on the best ways to prioritize bugs comes at the problem with a Scrum lens, but many of the points are more broadly applicable to product management. I particularly like her assertion that there’s nothing “special” about bugs, and as such they should be prioritized just like any other idea/feature:

As product managers, we should always manage our backlog so that the next most important thing is at the top of the list. Many times, the bug you would work on is less...

There is a lot of speculation around the March 2019 core update that started on March 12th that it reversed what the Medic update did on August 1, 2018. While many sites did see gains after dropping from the August 1st update, many did not.

We all know the old enterprise software joke that “no one ever got fired for buying a Microsoft product”. But one of the important points in Auren Hoffman’s post on how Zoom is beating much larger competitors like Google Hangouts and Slack is that larger companies are not that unpleasantly predictable any more:

One of the biggest trends that is driving Zoom’s success is that companies are forgoing the full stack and buying the best-of-breed. The number of vendors the average company...

The March 2019 Google Core update that touched down on March 12th - we covered it before it was confirmed - is still very raw and fresh. So most of you know, when reading some of the early speculation and advice around this update - you need to be very skeptical. I just wanted to share what people are saying so you have it but be skeptical.

There’s an interesting discussion going on in the Elezea Community about “Product Principles”. What they are for, when you need them, how they can be made more useful, etc. A couple examples given are Intercom’s set of guidelines for making decisions, Dan Ritz’s interface design values and my own company’s values.

The biggest challenge I see with principles like these is figuring out how to make them specific enough to help us make decisions. The further I get into reading Good Strategy,...

The first article I published on Elezea was called The dangers of “test and learn”. It was about A/B testing, it was badly written, and it went live on August 3rd, 2009. Since then I posted 1,238 links and articles on this site.

It’s ridiculous to think that Elezea is coming up on being 10 years old. It is not an exaggeration to say that it sparked most of my career development and helped me meet countless people who I would now consider friends. Starting this site was one of the best...