Industry News

I love this bit from Austin Kleon’s Letting books talk to each other:

If you read books on different topics and different genres and different formats at the same time, your brain can’t help but find weird connections between them.

This is one of my favorite things—not just with books, but with articles too. It’s such a good feeling when your brain makes those connections. I’ll add that I think this is what makes blogs like Kottke so effective and compelling. When you are able to...

After a long slow and paused rollout, Google has said that both the December 2022 helpful content update and December 2022 link spam update are now done rolling out. Google said both completed rolling out on Thursday, January 12, 2023.

Good post by Vadim Kravcenko on Things they didn’t teach you about Software Engineering:

Although it may sound surprising, the primary focus of a software engineer’s job is not writing code but rather creating value through the use of software that was written. […] Elegant code, best practices, smart solutions, design patterns — these are done for the sake of your fellow software engineers who will work on the codebase after you rather than helping you fulfill the purpose of bringing...

Here is a good articulation of why I wasn’t as enthusiastic about the Shopify meeting cancelation thing as most everyone else. Something felt… off? Here’s the Raw Signal team in When meetings are outlawed, only outlaws will hold meetings:

But the long-term fix for bad meetings isn’t no meetings, it’s competence. If you run a bad meeting, you need to fix the meeting or cancel it. But if you run a company full of bad meetings that need annual reboots, you need to fix your management...

No matter how well-intentioned you are, enacting change within your first 30 days could jeopardize your trust and standing. So if you feel any of those reasons eating at you, please pause. Spend these first 30 days sitting in on team meetings and talking to everybody on the team.

— Lara Hogan, How to spend your first 30 days in a new senior-level role

John Gruber has some strong B2B product management analysis in Was Salesforce’s Acquisition of Slack a Bust?

I think Slack is to Teams today where Mac OS was to Windows in the mid-1990s: better designed, for sure, but not in a way that makes a difference to the corporate IT decision makers who are making the call on which platform to use.

The key is not merely to be better, on some vectors. The key is to be better on the vectors that people with purchasing power care about....

I see signals, both in terms of SEO chatter and some of the Google Search tracking tools, of more volatility in the Google Search results. The volatility is algorithm update levels and can either be a new Google search ranking algorithm update or it can be the tail-end of the ongoing December 2022 Google helpful content update and link spam updates.

Itamar Gilad recently published a good post on Feature Factories vs. Value Generators. It starts off with some basic definitions that should be familiar to most readers, but the second half expands on the responsibilities product orgs have to ensure a successful transition away from feature factories. We can’t just sit back and hope the rest of the organization goes along—there’s a very important organizational change element here:

The product org needs to stop viewing itself as a...

Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, said on Twitter on Friday afternoon that the December 2022 helpful content update and December 2022 link spam update may take an additional two weeks to complete. He said it will finish "likely within two weeks, maybe only one, but that's not a guarantee. Timings might change."

I am currently reading Nest creator Tony Fadell’s book Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making. I will likely have some longer thoughts on it once I’m done, but I just finished the chapter on product management and it’s so good that I had to write up some quick highlights and notes. I haven’t read something that made me feel this inspired about the importance of what we do in a long time.

First, it’s always fascinating to me how different people define this undefinable...