Industry News

Steve Denning’s Forbes essay Understanding Fake Agile is the most useful thing I’ve read about the state of Agile in a long time. It starts off extremely strong, with his “three laws of Agile”: The Law of the Customer — an obsession with delivering value to customers as the be-all and end-all of the organization. The Law of the Small Team — a presumption that all work be carried out by small self-organizing teams, working in short cycles and focused on delivering value to...

Google announced this morning that starting on July 1, 2019 they will begin to index new web sites, not yet discovered by Google, using mobile-first indexing by default. Old web sites not yet in mobile-first indexing still won't be switched until they are ready but brand new sites, not yet indexed by Google, will come right out of the gate as using mobile-first indexing.

One of the issues that’s often lamented about the product management profession is that it is not well understood. I think one of the big reasons for that is that we try to put too many different jobs in the same category. I have come around to the viewpoint that product manager roles should be classified in terms of the type of goals they are trying to accomplish. I like Saeed Khan’s breakdown in 5 Steps to Building a Great Product Management Organization:

Roles in Product Management...

Google has confirmed yesterday that they fixed the indexing issue that started Thursday night with Google indexing new content. It is a similar issue from the day prior to that where Google stopped indexing new fresh content as well. Both are now supposedly fixed and fully resolved.

This is a good write-up of Alice Newton-Rex’s talk on Setting Goals for Product Success. She explains some of the key principles for effective goal-setting from a product perspective. One section I found particularly useful is her point that metrics and goals are very different depending on the phase a company is in. For example, for a brand new product, she advises not to create traditional “growth” metrics:

But, in my experience, these goals aren’t so useful for new products. It’s a...

My kids are obsessed with the podcast Wow in the World (and, to be fair, it’s really good). Guy Raz is such a goofball on that show that it was a little weird to see the headline Guy Raz: Five Lessons PMs Can Take From Famous Entrepreneurs. But I thoroughly enjoyed Laura Baverman’s write-up of one his recent talks at the first ProductCraft conference. He gives several recommendations for PMs on how to run successful products, including “Focus on What’s Different, Special, or Better Than...

I really enjoyed Heart-Centered Innovation — a short, from-the-heart essay by Sari Harrison. She talks about how hard it is to see problems from a neutral point of view:

Most people have a center from which they see the problems around them. A sun that everything revolves around. This leaves it up to the person who has the problem to do a lot of filtering among solutions, often with no way of knowing which option is best.

What if we didn’t do that? Instead, looking at all...

Last night at around 8pm ET while in a taxi back to my home from the airport, I wrote on Search Engine Land that Google's indexing issue was back. Google then confirmed a new indexing issue on Twitter at around 2:20pm ET the following morning. But they said this issue is different and not related to the one from Wednesday morning.

Lenny Rachitsky wrote a helpful and comprehensive guide on How To Get Into Product Management (And Thrive). This is a really good resource for any new product manager. I especially liked his section on seven core skills, and how to get better at each of them. One could certainly argue the validity and importance of each skill, but there are lots of good insights here. For example, on “Leadership through influence”:

In order to succeed you need to be able to build trust with your...

Over the past couple of days there has been limited chatter around ranking fluctuations and changes to the Google search ranking algorithm. I am honestly not seeing a huge spike in chatter but the tracking tools are almost all lighting up over the past day or two. So here is what I see.