Industry News

This may have been one of the busiest months for Google SEO related topics we've seen maybe ever? We had several unconfirmed Google updates but also a big core update confirmed by Google on March 12th. Google keeps dropping features from the old Search Console and adding new ones to the new Search Console. Google doesn't support rel=prev/next, stopped supporting the info command and is testing a new icon based search results design.

I’m a big fan of product discovery, and this extensive guide from Tim Herbig is a great resource:

The goal of this guide is to show you the extensive range a Product Discovery can have and how to set up and execute your own Product Discovery process. Which exact phases, tools, frameworks, and participants are needed depends on many individual aspects like the maturity of your product, which stakeholder environment you’re operating in, which resources you have at hand, etc.

I also...

The transcription of Cennydd Bowles’s talk on ethics in technology at SustainableUX 2019 is absolute gold and a must-read:

It’s a mistake to separate technical capabilities from human capabilities. These things act together. They become interwoven, hybridized actors. Things change what people can do and how they do it. It is true to an extent that old sage that guns don’t kill people; people do. But a gunman, the hybrid actor of a human and a technology coming together, sure as hell...

Yana Welinder looks at different areas where PMs need to make sure we don’t let process get in the way of good product sense in her post Product Over Process. On the importance of making sure specs aren’t “set in stone”:

Focusing on product over process during the execution stage means constantly evaluating whether the product does what it’s intended to do. This requires PMs to see the product through the users’ eyes and, more importantly, to figure out ways to do user testing even...

Jeremy Keith writes about the developer community’s need to always talk about new things in Dev perception. I think the same can be said for every other profession, including product management:

It’s relatively easy to write and speak about new technologies. You’re excited about them, and there’s probably an eager audience who can learn from what you have to say.

It’s trickier to write something insightful about a tried and trusted (perhaps even boring) technology that’s been...

These fluctuations won't die down, it seems like we've been reporting these tremors and fluctuations a lot since the beginning of the year and even more so since the release of the March 12th core update. We are seeing more chatter around these fluctuations from around March 29th through today, April 1st - and no, this is no April Fools joke.

I always love a good persona case study, and The Story of Spotify Personas is no exception. But more than the story behind it, I am most interested in how teams use their personas (if at all). So I was happy to see the team devote some time to that towards the end of the article:

For instance, teams that want to create features from scratch can now choose their personas, map out the existing opportunities, pick a direction and start ideating from there. Although personas don’t replace...

Google is testing showing icons in the search bar filters next to the all, news, maps, images, shopping and other buttons. This takes them back to a user interface they had in 2011, which they shortly dropped a year or so later.

Sometimes we can get overly reliant on our frameworks and methodologies to help us make sense of our products and our worlds. Melissa Perri shares some excellent advice about the dangers of this in The Science of Product Management:

These motions, these frameworks, they were made to teach you to think. They were a means to an end, not the end goal itself. They are training wheels. How can they help you understand your work better, so you can DO your work better?

The point of...