Industry News

Philipp Krehl has a very thorough, practical article up on Mind the Product called Product Discovery or Product Delivery: How do you Decide? His main thesis is that figuring out when it’s safe to move to the build/delivery phase of a project is all about your level of certainty about the problem you’re solving. He proposes a simple rubric to calculate your comfort level with different product risks:

If you and your team have marked every answer a 3 or below, it confirms that you have...

Dejan posted a Twitter poll the other day and it received almost 600 responses from within the SEO community. The question was "Good UX impacts rankings." The responses available were "directly," "indirectly," or "neither."

Shaun Juncal makes a compelling argument in Product Accessibility Shouldn’t Be an Afterthought:

But addressing accessibility early and often—if not making it an ongoing pillar of product quality—is a best practice every product team should embrace. Accessibility enables the maximum number of potential users to engage with products, increasing the total addressable market and avoiding frustrated customers from getting tripped up on accessibility shortcomings. […]

When a product...

Ben Nadel proposes A Good Samaritan Law For Engineers At A Software As A Service (SaaS) Company:

How can we instill in our people the unwavering conviction that they have the freedom to create a better user experience?

One idea that popped into my head was to create a Good Samaritan Law For Engineers: an explicit promise by the company that no engineer will ever be fired for attempting to, in good faith, help a user or create a better user experience. And, I don’t mean as an...

I used to believe that effective prioritization is the hardest part about being a product manager. I don’t think that’s true any more. I now believe the hardest part about being a PM is that there is no way to shorten the time and dedication it takes to become your product and its industry’s most knowledgeable and empathic expert.

But I kind of skipped over some things there. Let’s step back a bit. Realization 1: it’s not about prioritization

If you put a bunch of product managers...

The SEO community is buzzing about how Google seems to have removed Bing's Discover section from the Google search results index. Edd Wilson tweeted about it on July 4th and then several sites picked it up. Bing Discover is a portal on Bing.com that had a lot of Google referral traffic.

Katy Cowan’s interview with Frank Chimero is really great from start to finish, and covers so much ground on design and technology and how to think about our work. Frank’s view on the importance of not overworking yourself is refreshing, and we’ll hopefully continue to see more of this kind of thinking:

It’s really easy to think that not working full bore is somehow failing your teammates or that withholding effort is poor work ethic and moral weakness. That thought is worth...

Megan Quinn’s post on Development Cadence starts off really strong:

The hallmark of a well-run development engine is a development cadence that is brisk in bringing new products to market without burning out its builders.

And then it only gets better from there. Her point about being “flexible on scope, fixed on time” is spot on:

One way to establish a good development cadence is to commit to a predictable launch schedule and avoid slipping by pushing out features, not...