Industry News

Elena Verna presents a great guide to product-led sales for B2B products here here:

In a traditional top-down sales approach, the sales team is motivated to close the largest and newest deals to account for the high acquisition cost and ensure profitability.

In contrast, in a product-led sales approach, the sales team gets involved with the account much earlier in the problem lifecycle, and the initial contract value is smaller. It’s important to note that in top-down sales, the buyer...

After hearing reports that the Google News team is working on fixing an issue, Google has confirmed it last night. Many publishers were either not showing up in Google News or had limited visibility in Google News over the past few weeks. Google confirmed this is an "ongoing issue with indexing in Google News that's affecting all sites."

I think all of us could do with a bit of help increasing our intellectual humility, since “when it comes to our beliefs and opinions, most of us are much more confident than we should be”.

People who are intellectually humble know that their beliefs, opinions, and viewpoints are fallible because they realize that the evidence on which their beliefs are based could be limited or flawed or that they may not have the expertise or ability to understand and evaluate the evidence. Intellectual...

Matt Rickard reminds us that it’s worth considering the long-term effects that putting public APIs behind paywalls might have on search engines:

Large models are trained on public data scraped via API. Content-heavy sites are most likely to be disrupted by models trained on their own data. Naturally, they want to restrict access and either (1) sell the data or (2) train their own models. This restriction prevents (or complicates) Google’s automatic scraping of the data for Search (and...

Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, posted that Google's core advice around how to rank well in Google Search has not changed in two decades. Google showed a screenshot of its advice from 2002 where it wrote, "Make pages for users, not for search engines."

I am finally catching up on the big “Airbnb canceled PMs” debate of 2023, and like most online arguments the whole thing seems pretty silly to me. First, here’s a good overview from Aatir Abdul Rauf, in which he publishes the full quote from CEO Brian Chesky:

“…The designers are equal to product managers. Actually, we got rid of the classic product management function. Apple didn’t have it either.

5-second applause

(smiling) Let’s be careful. Hold on.

We have product...

Here’s some great advice from Robin Sloan on how to find good educational content on YouTube:

These days, when I’m investigating a subject, I tend to go straight to Low View Count Scholarly YouTube, which is of course the version of YouTube you get when you append the term “lecture” to your search. When you hit a tranche of videos between forty and ninety minutes long, with between 500 and 5000 views, you know you’re in the right place.

This is great post by Will Larson on the difference between personal (and organizational) “brand” vs. “prestige”—and why focusing on building the latter is way more important for your career than the former.

First, this reminder:

The majority of successful executives I’ve worked with don’t write online. They won’t post on Twitter or Mastodon. They haven’t written a book. They don’t speak at conferences. In your engineering leadership career, you will at times be immersed in the...

Why Do Developers (Actually) Hate Marketing? The Heavybit team has some good advice in this post: Don’t: Create product-led content that shoves the product into your reader’s face. Do: create a transparent guide to what your product can and can’t do. But make sure you don’t over-promise (or even sound like you’re overpromising). Don’t: Write thought leadership content that relies on cheesy trend predictions. Do: Create thoughtful, technical essays based on experiences from engineers and...

Good advice here from Kyle Poyar on how to optimize your pricing page, including a reminder to emphasize benefits, not features:

Did your feature matrix get dumped on your pricing page as-is, leading to confusion and eye-rolls across your target buyers? Don’t do that. Tell a story about what the customer can do with the feature.