Industry News

I am seeing a much bigger spike in chatter within the SEO community this morning around another Google search ranking algorithm update. It might be related to the ongoing Google February 2023 product reviews update or it might be something new. Right now, the tools and the chatter within the community are pretty extreme.

I’m sure every generation writes lots of articles like Freddie deBoer’s It’s So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive. But hear me out. This is the impassioned, forceful, yet balanced Gen X take I wish I had the skill and wherewithal to write. It is a balm to the nostalgic soul in a way that somehow doesn’t feel like cringey old-person fanfic.

Here he is on the experience of visiting a record store:

When you were...

Well, this last February 2023 product reviews update has been pretty volatile and we have seen some significant ranking changes and the chatter within the SEO community has been pretty wild. This product reviews update seems to be much more widespread than previous product review updates and some SEOs think something is off with this update.

Maybe 10 years ago I would’ve gotten upset about an article like Spencer Fry’s No PM, no problem: how we ship great products fast, in which he explains why they don’t have product managers at Podia and how great that is. Luckily I’m now too old to stay up late just because I think someone’s wrong on the internet. Instead, I approach articles like these—ones I viscerally disagree with right off the bat—with a bit more curiosity. What is the source of the author’s assumptions? What is the data...

When we measure how quickly teams ship stories & code, we’re measuring speed—how quickly they move. It’s only when we measure the effect it has on the target metric—the value that we’re after—that we’re actually looking at velocity.

It doesn’t matter how much you ship if the end result doesn’t deliver value to your customers and your company. If you’re measuring story points, you’ve fallen into the trap of measuring outputs, not outcomes. When we talk about slowing down to speed up,...

In You can’t stand under my umbrella the Raw Signal teams makes the case for when it’s not appropriate for managers to be “sh*t umbrellas” for their teams:

When things are steady, and people know the right things to work on, teams are constrained by velocity. We know the course we’re racing, the question is just how fast we can go. In that context, it makes sense for a manager to clear every obstacle out of our way. But during times of significant change, teams are constrained by...

Mike Fisher argues that we should rebrand technical debt as “product debt”, and I think it’s a good argument! That said, I’d like to add some considerations to two of his points. First:

We usually think of refactoring as “cleaning up” code, where we change the code to be more easily understood, perform better (faster or more efficiently), or follow current conventions/standards. The goal of refactoring is to change the code without changing its functionality; it should continue to...

Google, at about 5pm ET last night on February 21, 2023, has unleashed the sixth product reviews update. This is named the February 2023 product reviews update and it expands to several more languages in addition to just English.

A major quality improvement should be coming to the new Bing AI Chat feature on Thursday, February 23rd said Mikhail Parakhin, the CEO of Advertising and Web Services at Microsoft.

Every product, every feature even, serves a function in your business. It has one of three jobs: Acquire new users or customers Retain those users or customers Expand engagement or revenue per user or customer

— Frank Tisellano, The Cynical PM Framework, a business-first approach to product.