Industry News

This was fun. I got to talk to the productboard team about our values and how we approach product strategy at Postmark. Here’s an excerpt from the article For Postmark, Product Excellence means enabling startups and developers to build great things:

For every feature that goes into delivery, and when considering Postmark’s product as a whole, Rian aims for customers to have two primary responses. One is: “Well that was easy.” The second is: “I don’t mind paying for this at all.”...

Google has yet to confirm the July 11/12 search ranking update that we reported on, but it does seem to have some legs. Meaning, the chatter has 100% spiked up a lot after the weekend and it seems to be related to a core update. But again, Google has not confirmed this update.

The co-founder and CEO of knowledge sharing tool Guru shares some great advice on product development in Mastering the Art of the Outcome: How Guru Turned Customer Success Into a Company Cornerstone. I especially appreciate his point on the importance of making customer success integral to the company very early on:

“Most young companies will hold off on investing in a customer success manager before they reach a certain annual recurring revenue. You’ll see founders working off of...

Although I am tired of Google saying they make thousands of changes per year to search, I do like when they release updated numbers here. Yesterday, Danny Sullivan from Google published a blog post saying Google made 3,200 changes to its search systems last year.

I am seeing some limited chatter within the SEO community about a Google algorithm update happening around July 11 and 12th. The chatter, to be honest, is not that huge but it is 100% more than normal. Plus the automated tracking tools are showing signs of an update as well.

In The Slackification of the American Home Taylor Lorenz and Joe Pinsker look at how some households are starting to operate more like businesses:

Incorporating Trello, along with Gmail, into the Parker family’s life has been a godsend, in Tonya’s view. It streamlined family communication, helped keep everyone organized, and added a layer of accountability to tasks. Now, instead of wondering if her children forgot to do something, Parker says she can ask, “How are you doing on your...

Philipp Krehl has a very thorough, practical article up on Mind the Product called Product Discovery or Product Delivery: How do you Decide? His main thesis is that figuring out when it’s safe to move to the build/delivery phase of a project is all about your level of certainty about the problem you’re solving. He proposes a simple rubric to calculate your comfort level with different product risks:

If you and your team have marked every answer a 3 or below, it confirms that you have...

Dejan posted a Twitter poll the other day and it received almost 600 responses from within the SEO community. The question was "Good UX impacts rankings." The responses available were "directly," "indirectly," or "neither."