Industry News

Helen Mou and Kevin Ochal share some good tips for remote teams in Making the Dream Work: Leading Distributed Product Teams. Most importantly, I agree that if you are deliberate about how you design your work process, it’s good for the whole team — whether they’re remote or not:

Instead of approaching distributed teamwork with the mindset of “we’re making it work, in spite of…” staying up late, working more hours, and spending more effort to be on a distributed team; we like to look...

Karolina Szczur makes some excellent points about using “technical debt” as an excuse for subpar products in The Technical Debt Myth:

Technical debt becomes a convenient blanket statement entailing frustrations, rushed decision-making, lack of process or architecture, and tedious maintenance tasks — the get-out-of-jail-free card for delivering a subpar experience.

It’s crucial to understand that as software and design grows older, that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re dealing...

One thing SEOs were asking Google for for some time now is a report in Google Search Console that tells you about your traffic from Google Discover. Now we have such a report and it is pretty cool to see this new data.

As you know, we were the first to report the large de-indexing bug where Google was dropping pages out of their index starting as early as a week ago today. Well, last night, after about 6 days of the issue, Google said it has now been fully resolved.

Google announced yesterday a new feature they are "beta testing" to allow searchers to filter their web searches by dates. So they announced a new before: and after: search operator that lets you do this. Then quietly noted that they discontinued the sort by date feature in search.

Just to keep you all up to date on the issue with pages dropping out of the Google index starting last Thursday. It is currently still not fully resolved and we are in day five now. But Google seems to be just about done resolving it fully.

Hiten Shah’s deep-dive into the history of Evernote is a very interesting read from a product management perspective. Of particular interest is the immense damage they inflicted on themselves due to a lack of focus on their core mission:

It’s hard to understate the damage that the branded products sold through the Evernote Market inflicted on the Evernote brand. It made absolutely no sense. Users didn’t want Evernote-branded tablet styluses or Evernote Moleskine notebooks or Evernote...

On Friday we reported on an issue where SEOs began noticing that Google was removing tons of pages from their index. It seemed to have started on Thursday but Google did not confirm the issue until Saturday morning. The issue is now into day four or so and it is not yet fully resolved.

Something weird is going on with the Google search index. I am seeing wide spread reports of SEOs and webmasters complaining that their URLs and web pages are being removed from the Google Index. Lots of folks are noticing that a nice percentage of their web sites are no longer coming up for a site command or showing in Search Console as being indexed.