Industry News

On the heels of the last unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm update that touched down on October 25th, I am seeing signs of another tremor this morning - October 27th.

Good advice here on when (and when not!) to hire the first product manager in a startup. This is also a good reminder to “let PMs be PMs”…

PMs are the strategy arm of this process, and should be empowered to own the roadmaps for how they’ll better the business, not just the execution of getting things built. In an ideal world, PMs will have better decision-making and execution than you within their domains due to focus and proximity to customer needs. This is how you scale. If you...

I am seeing signs of another possible Google Search ranking algorithm update today that kicked off last night into today (October 24 and October 25). This is an unconfirmed update, Google has not announced any official update yet but maybe this is the first set of tremors post the completion of the Google October 2023 core update and spam update?

Google is testing showing ads within the organic (free) search results. Generally, Google would show the ads at the top of each page set, even within the continuous scroll interface. But now Google has confirmed it is experimenting with showing these ads in additional spots within the search results listings.

There’s some good insights in this year’s 2023 State of DevOps Report. It’s well worth skimming through. Things like this aren’t exactly surprising, but it’s nice to have some data around it:

Teams with generative cultures, composed of people who felt included and like they belonged on their team, have 30% higher organizational performance than organizations without a generative culture.

It took almost the full 14 days, but the Google October 2023 core update is now officially done rolling out. The October 2023 core update started rolling out on October 5, 2023, at 11:54 AM ET and was completed on October 19, 2023, at 11:08 AM ET.

Google has finished rolling out the Google October 2023 Spam Update that started 15 days and 12 hours ago. That update began on October 4th at 12:52 pm ET and is now completed this morning, October 20, 2023, at 1:15 am ET.

Ed Zitron’s newsletter is kind of a hate-read for me because his vitriol knows no end and it can be a lot… but I think he did pretty well in his response to Marc Andreessen’s latest essay:

This is Andreessen’s dream—a continual race to the bottom where the tech industry is incentivized not to solve problems, but to find ways to make already-solved problems cheaper to solve so that venture capitalists can make money.

That’s a good quote, but please don’t stop there. The whole essay is...

This is a thoughtful, well-argued essay by Benedict Evans about where we’re at with LLMs.

Whenever we get a new tool, we start by forcing it to fit our existing ways of working, and then over time we change the work to fit the new tool. We try to treat ChatGPT as though it was Google or a database instead of asking what it is useful for. How can we change the work to take advantage of this?

This is an older post from Lorin Hochstein but it’s new to me, and really insightful. It’s about how to best use our knowledge about the past behavior of a software system to figure out where we should invest our time to improve the system—and how the common method of error budgets is generally not a good way to do this:

I’m skeptical about relying on predefined metrics, such as reliability, for getting insight into the risks of the system that could lead to big incidents. Instead, I...