Industry News

Des Traynor shines a light on the unglamorous side of the PM role in Q&A: What does a product manager do?

If you look at how actual product managers work in any company there’s a lot more nitty gritty work. There’s a lot of spreadsheets, wireframes. Google Docs, emails, and oh-so-many Slack channels. And they all exist to research, collaborate, dictate, and document consensus on a direction the product is going. But I think if the role was titled “Direction and Consensus Manager” you...

Tom Dart wrote a really interesting piece on how we change our accents when we talk to machines. From Y’all have a Texas accent? Siri (and the world) might be slowly killing it:

“Most people have what we would call a telephone voice, so they actually change away from their local family accent when they’re speaking on the telephone to somebody they don’t know,” said Alan Black, a Scottish computer scientist who is a professor at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon...

Aaron Bradley spotted and posted on Google+ that Google has opened up a pilot for the search live coverage carousel...

As you expected, Google was going to drop the mobile friendly label. Well, as of this morning, the mobile friendly label is officially gone.

Here is a screen shot showing the before and after...

Google has announced a new way to locate content within apps on Android phones. “In Apps” is a search tab that allows this, a new addition to the Google app for Android.

Google shared the news on its Inside Search blog today, along with an illustration of how it works:

Currently, Google says the feature works with Gmail, Spotify and YouTube. It’s promising that support for more apps will happen in the coming months, including for Facebook Messenger, LinkedIn, Evernote, Google Keep,...

Kashmir Hill writes about How Nextdoor reduced racist posts by 75%. Nextdoor tested a bunch of different approaches:

Some just saw the addition of new language: “Ask yourself: Is what I saw actually suspicious, especially if I take race or ethnicity out of the equation?” Some were asked to say in advance whether they were reporting an actual crime or just “suspicious activity.” Others actually had their posts scanned for mentions of race (based on a list of hundreds of terms Nextdoor...

What if I told you that the future of mobile search was swiping.



I don’t mean that there will be a few carousels of content. Instead I mean that all of the content will be displayed in a horizontal swiping interface. You wouldn’t click on a search result, you’d simply swipe from one result to the next.

This might sound farfetched but there’s growing evidence this might be Google’s end game. The Tinderization of mobile search could be right around the corner. Horizontal Interface...

Chris Jones posted a really solid overview of The Product Designer Role that’s very much worth your time:

Your next task is to define the product design role within your company. This is an important one to get right. You don’t want to simply recreate an internal version of the agency model. The way that products are created has changed dramatically in recent years and new models for design are a critical part of this.

He goes over what he believes are the 5 core responsibilities...

There are a couple of interesting articles about Frank Ocean’s new album and how it’s causing a lot of waves in the music industry. The short version is that Ocean found a clever way to get out of his agreement with his label Def Jam, and sign an exclusive deal with Apple Music instead. As Ben Sisario notes in Frank Ocean’s ‘Blonde’ Amplifies Discord in the Music Business, the labels aren’t happy:

“The unprecedented run of exclusives by digital music services has put a tremendous...

The big news from last week was the new Google penalty coming January 10...