Industry News

Jade Rubick resurrects an old engineering concept (and dead Wikipedia page!) in Steel threads are a technique that will make you a better engineer:

A steel thread is a very thin slice of functionality that threads through a software system. They are called a “thread” because they weave through the various parts of the software system and implement an important use case. They are called “steel” because the thread becomes a solid foundation for later improvements.

With a Steel...

We’re shipping rafts this year, not boats is a sobering read from Nate Jones that covers 8 principles for product teams who had to make a shift to short-term growth projects in 2023. An example:

It’s long-term if it’s short-term. That’s two principles for the price of one. First, realize that building to keep the business going today is long-term. That can help product teams recognize they have a long-term role to play. Second, any product plays with long-term payoff have to also...

In How to organize your B2B growth marketing team Emily Kramer explains growth marketing in a way that I think I finally understand:

To support full-funnel marketing, multiple GTM motions, and all of the data and tools available, 4 sub-functions of growth-marketing are needed: Demand Gen, Inbound & Web, Lifecycle Marketing, and Ops & Analytics.



Emily also touches on the many ways that this team ideally works with Product and Engineering. It’s a highly recommended overview of...

Since the Google February 2023 product reviews update on February 21st, we've been seeing some pretty big swings in the search results - a lot of volatility, more than the norm. And that continued through the past weekend.

The FAA outage in January that caused the first nationwide ground stop of all flights in the US since 9/11 is kind of old news now, but there’s one detail that I can’t stop thinking about. In the aftermath of the incident the cause was determined to be a database sync issue:

The F.A.A. said in a statement that the workers had been trying to “correct synchronization” between the main database for the Notice to Air Missions alerts and a backup database when the files were mistakenly...

The African Bricks 3. Mosaic artworks inspired by the culture and beauty of Africa, by Charis Tsevis.

The Cello in Soho Square. I like this description by Michael Lopp of the difference between “dabblers” and “S-tier” people (who are the absolute best at something): “There is an infinite list of exciting things to learn, but the Dabbler knows they have finite time, so they dabble. They get 80% of the juice, and they move on. Respect. S-Tier knows the last 10% of the challenge is the...

In Meaningful metrics: How data sharpened the focus of product teams Erin Gustafson goes into detail on how Duolingo grew their Daily Active Users (DAUs) by 4x since 2019. It all starts with the growth model they built:

The Growth Model is a series of metrics we developed to jump-start our growth strategy with data. It is a Markov Model that breaks down topline metrics (like DAU) into smaller user segments that are still meaningful to our business. To do this, we classify all Duolingo...

Here is the big Google webmaster report for March 2023, where I cover all the most important things that happened with Google search over the past month. The highlights include the Google product reviews update and a few unconfirmed updates. Of course, the Google Bard tease and AI content guidelines for Google Search, plus much more.

Open Circuits is “a photographic exploration of the beautiful design inside everyday electronics. Its stunning cross-section photography unlocks a hidden world full of elegance, subtle complexity, and wonder.”

Good conversations have lots of doorknobs. This is a fascinating essay about the elements of good conversation and the difference between “takers” who keep things going, “givers” who tend to ask a lot of questions, and how the wrong match-up can cause a conversation to stall....