Industry News

There’s some really good advice for job seekers in Carilu Dietrich’s post 10 Most Important Metrics For Evaluating a Company:

Net Dollar Retention (NDR) is one of the best ways to see if a tech company is healthy and growing. It measures the expansion or contraction of a company’s existing customer revenue over a given period. NDR takes into account the revenue lost from churn and increased revenue from upselling, cross-selling, and renewals from existing cusomers.

I would also add...

I am seeing some early signs of another Google search ranking algorithm update, as the Google search results seem more volatile than normal and there has been an increase in SEO chatter.

Google has finally launched the perspectives filter in the Google mobile search results. There is a ton of confusion around what perspectives is because Google has released or tested a number of search features over the past year, but the perspectives search filter is now live, the one Google demoed at I/O.

I promise this isn’t going to become an AI blog, but Marty Cagan’s latest on Preparing For The Future has some solid points on how generative AI might change our profession. Here he talks about the impact on QA:

The new generation of AI-based test automation tools has the promise to revolutionize our approach to ensuring the product is behaving properly. On the other hand, our current approach to quality is largely based on deterministic products.  This means that given a set of inputs...

Aniket Deosthali (Head of Product for Conversational Commerce at Walmart) provides a great framework for evaluating AI product opportunities in How to Build AI Products People Want:

The most efficient way to evaluate AI opportunities and unlock the advantages of AI is by using the Consideration x Context framework. Let’s start with some baseline definitions.

Y-Axis = Consideration: The amount of effort required to make a decision.

The more thought you put into a decision, the...

The post 7 innovations that Southwest is testing to improve its crucial turn times is a great real-world example of experimentation in product (make sure your ad blockers are charged for this one, it’s published on The Points Guy…).

Zach Griff goes over several ideas Southwest Airlines are trying to improve the time between when a flight arrives and leaves again. For instance, for when you’re queuing on the jet bridge:

The first is the installation of Bluetooth speakers in the jet...

The Reforge team has a long post on How To Master the Art of Managing Up. I find this aspect especially important:

Those who have mastered managing up will package problems in a way that takes their managers’ constraints into account,  including time, lack of resources, or competing priorities. 

Your approach to packaging and communicating difficult situations can make the difference between managing up effectively and just causing more chaos for your manager.

They go on to...

Google has released its first set of quality updates to the new Search Generative Experience that began to rollout a few weeks ago. The most noticeable update is that it is much faster, in fact, twice as fast, in responding with an AI-generated snapshot/answer.

There’s a lot going on in John Warner’s Speed and Efficiency are not Human Values. It’s primarily a reflection on generative AI tools in the context of being a published author—and well worth reading.

But the reason I am linking to it here is because it gives you an excuse to watch (or re-watch!) what John calls “the greatest guitar solo ever captured on a recording” (he is 100% correct). Here is Prince at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in the year both he and George...