Industry News

Bing is going to be updating the Bing Webmaster Guidelines and as part of that process, Frédéric Dubut from the Bing spam team asked what "shady tactics you think are not penalized enough?" In general, he is taking feedback on the current document before he begins.

Brad Frost argues that design tools are holding us back because “they require a specific toolchain in order to function”. Instead, what we need is closer collaboration:

Tooling can help, sure, but it’s not a silver bullet. To truly address the realities of the medium for which you’re designing, designers and developers should collaborate as equals to solve problems together. That means more talking and real-time collaboration and less time spent throwing static artifacts and Zeplin...

I’m not usually a fan of posts like this, but I just couldn’t resist clicking on Pink Floyd Were Masters At Achieving Product-Market Fit. The first of seven “lessons” is the one that stands out for me:

Obtain Customer Feedback Before You Release Your Product

Musicians spend their entire youth writing songs and performing them in front of live audiences, which ensures that their initial album is validated by their fans before they enter the recording studio....

If you try to access the Google Quality Raters Guidelines PDF document, you will be out of luck. The PDF seems to have been removed from Google's servers. This happened before and when that happened it was a mistake, Google fixed it. This time, I suspect it is almost a mistake and Google will fix it.

In 8 essential metrics for measuring product-led growth Katryna Balboni discusses a few important metrics for measuring and monitoring product-led growth (i.e., turning users into advocates so that they can they drive more acquisition and growth). Time to Value is one that seems particularly useful:

Time to value (TTV) is the amount of time it takes new users to realize your product’s value. Your goal should be to reduce time to value as much as possible-the sooner users reach their...

Google's John Mueller talked about YMYL, specific to the health space, and mentioned that it is if you are writing about a topic on health that you are not an expert on then you are starting off already on a "shaky foundation."

What a wild several days with Google updates - we had fluctuations on July 11, 12 and 16th and then some massive chatter and Google search result fluctuations on July 18th or so. Google would not confirm or deny these updates, so it was named by the community the Google Maverick Update.

What is going on? Again, three times in about a week, we are seeing increase chatter and the tools are lighting up around a Google search ranking algorithm update. Yesterday morning the chatter once again spiked up and also many of the tools are showing huge fluctuations in the Google rankings.

This was fun. I got to talk to the productboard team about our values and how we approach product strategy at Postmark. Here’s an excerpt from the article For Postmark, Product Excellence means enabling startups and developers to build great things:

For every feature that goes into delivery, and when considering Postmark’s product as a whole, Rian aims for customers to have two primary responses. One is: “Well that was easy.” The second is: “I don’t mind paying for this at all.”...