Industry News

I listen to The Product Experience podcast every week, so it was such a treat for me to be on the show this week to talk about Crazy Busy Product People. At first I didn’t know what to do — I’m so used to hearing Lily and Randy’s voices that it didn’t seem right to talk back, because that’s now how it usually works! But I did eventually find my feet (I think), and I’m overall pretty happy with how this turned out.

We spend most of our time discussing my article The dangerous rise of...

I have been watching the chatter this morning from the SEO community on WebmasterWorld and social media and I am seeing an increase in signals that there may be a Google algorithm and ranking update rolling out this morning.

Google announced it has removed the preferred domain setting from the old Google Search Console interface. It is gone - I don't see it anymore and you can no longer set this in Google Search Console.

Jonas Downey argues that nobody really owns anything in a product made by a team. I agree with both his argument, and with how difficult it can be for product managers to make this shift. He gives some advice on how to get used to the idea:

The trick is to change how you evaluate forward progress: the long-term survival of your own contributions is irrelevant. The important thing is that the product is evolving into the best version your team can create together.

The more you...

Danny Sullivan from Google said on Twitter over the weekend that the Google core updates are not like the old or new Google Panda algorithms. He said "the core update isn't like Panda of old (and no, it's not like Panda of new, either)."

When a Google Patent uses the word “Content” they often mean advertisements, rather than just the content on a website. That was true when I wrote about a Google patent about combining advertisements and organic results in the post Google to...

We all know that Google has said numerous times that you cannot fix core ranking algorithm updates. But John Mueller from Google this morning said in a webmaster hangout that there is a reason for this - he said it is not just one thing to fix but many fundamental issues you need to fix or improve on your site so Google can trust the site.

Thales S. Teixeira distills years of research on how companies are disrupted in his HBR article Disruption Starts with Unhappy Customers, Not Technology:

For eight years I’ve visited leading companies in more than 20 industries around the world that claimed to be in the process of being disrupted. Each time, I’d ask the executives of these incumbent companies the same question: “What is disrupting your business?” No matter who I talked to, I would always get one of two answers:...

Jase Clamp asks, What’s in the DNA of Product People? I especially like his depiction of the complementary forces of empathy and optimism.

This process of synthesis we call empathy. We all know that is what is needed to begin the job of product. But if it stopped there, we’d just be counselors, sitting with people, understanding their pain, and journeying with them.

We harness an opposing force that provides balance — it’s our ability, while reaching into the present to...