Industry News

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...

I really like this list of heuristics by Itamar Gilad for how much data you should have before launching product features/improvements: Never launch anything solely based on opinions. It’s ok to release minor tweaks based on assessment. Having supporting data (without testing) is enough to launch only very small, low-risk, easy-to-revert changes. Everything else should be validated through tests and experiments. However there are various levels of testing to choose from with different...

Here’s a good theory by Bruce Daisley about the real reason why productivity might be falling in organizations:

If you want to understand why productivity is falling, we need to look first at high levels of employee turnover. If we want to solve productivity issues the first step needs to be to lower the resignation rate.

We all know well when people quit their jobs a period of unproductivity commences: bosses and colleagues need to cover the work of the person leaving, the...

It has actually been a couple of weeks since we last reported on a Google search ranking update, May 22/23rd, so it has been a while. But I am seeing new signs of another unconfirmed Google search algorithm ranking update today, around June 6th.