Industry News

Will Larson shares some interesting perspectives on teams in the interview How to Size and Assess Teams From an Engineering Lead at Stripe, Uber, and Digg:

Larson believes that the fundamental challenge — and cornerstone — of organizational design is sizing teams. “The most powerful unit of work is a gelled team. People who know how to work together and are practiced at working together can accomplish truly remarkable things,” says Larson. “When managers design too literally around...

On the Postmark blog I talk about how we use productboard to improve our product planning process. I’ve written before about about what I look for in product management software, and we’ve now been using productboard for a full 3 months at Postmark, so I wanted to write an update on how it’s going, and how we’re using it.

So far, productboard has improved my life significantly. I feel much more comfortable that I have a handle on everything we are working on, what we have to plan for,...

A few months ago I wrote about what I look for in product management software, and mentioned that we’re going to try out productboard and see how it goes. As I mentioned in that post:

In short, I am looking for a better way to plan. JIRA is a great execution tool — I don’t want to change that part. But JIRA is a terrible planning tool. And our current process of using Basecamp and Dropbox Paper for planning works just ok for me. The combination lacks a bunch of things to make it as...

It is probably a bit too early to make any definitive statements but so far what I am seeing from the community is that this June 2019 core update - a Google search algorithm update - that was pre-announced and rolled out on June 3rd - it is a big one. Not only is it a big one but it is not done rolling out yet.

As expected, Google told us yesterday afternoon that the June 2019 core update has started to roll out. It may take several days to roll out to all of Google's data centers but the process has started yesterday afternoon.

Emile Ledure tries to answer the question, “how do you build products that stick and last in a healthy way?” I really like his approach in Healthy Retention: What Makes People Keep Coming Back? I especially appreciate the principle “Have fewer but better interactions”:

You don’t necessarily build retention by pushing people to use your product every day, you do it by bringing high value every time they need it — even if it means being absent most of the time. So don’t be greedy. […]...

Google, in a rare move, pre-announced that they are going to be rolling out a core update tomorrow. They are calling this Google search algorithm ranking update the June 2019 Core Update and sometime tomorrow, Google will be rolling this update out.

Christine Itwaru writes about Servant Leadership for Product Managers:

Reflecting back, there’s one critical thing I didn’t recognize until I was in the thick of it. I realized those in product management — from product owner to chief product officer — are never individual contributors. Instead, they’re in a position to become true servant leaders.

I would only clarify one thing, and that is that PMs are, for the most part, never individual contributors only. We still do a lot of...

I usually stay away from article titles like these, but I thoroughly enjoyed Chris Cannon’s What a Journalist Can Teach Lean Startups about Customer Interviews. If you talk to customers at all as part of your work, in any context, this is a goldmine of good advice:

Problems are stories — it’s a dull tale that has no conflict to resolve. The customer on the other side of that table is the protagonist in their own adventure. We’ve selected them as a persona that might be interested in...