Industry News

An oldie but a goodie from Michael Copeland: Shipping is a Feature—Some Guiding Principles for People That Build Things:

For these five bits of advice, I chose to focus on what I think is the most challenging aspect of being a PM, which is achieving clarity and maintaining a point of view for a product when all forces work against this very thing. What customers value most in a product is that “it just work” or “does what it is supposed to do,” and yet at every step in a product, the...

There is some early chatter of a possible Google search algorithm update touching down last night and this morning, March 26th and March 27th. It might be too early for some people to notice or it might just be a blip. It also might be tweaks and tremors from the March 12th Google core update.

I’m staying out of the “hot takes on that John Maeda interview” genre, but I do want to link to Heather Phillips’s Stop dwelling on being design-led: Focus on the user. She brings up some great points that product managers need to keep in mind as well:

We shouldn’t think about being design-first, or development-first. Instead, we should be thinking about how we can bring our paths closer together. Every business function — including design — should be thinking about the user, first...

I am intrigued by the idea of product-specific wikis, as outlined in North Star Product Management. The idea is to have a living document that explains how each product component works, why it exists, why certain decisions were made, and what the future looks like:

The purpose of North Star Docs is not (at least, not necessarily) to minimize changes — changing the North Star Docs is just fine, and is of course actually encouraged, if we can find a better way to do something....

About ten days ago we began collecting data from you all around the Google March 2019 core update that touched down on March 12th. We collected over 500 responses and I wanted to share the results with you all.

As you know, we had a pretty big Google update that Google confirmed as a core update on March 12th. Around March 20th, 21st and 22nd, I saw the forum chatter spike back up a bit and the tools light up - but it wasn't as huge as that last update and we were busy with the rel=prev/next thing.

This interview with Jonathan Golden, Airbnb’s very first product manager and now Director of Product, is sprawling and worth reading in full. It’s a fascinating look at the company’s philosophy on product and teams.

I was particularly interested in the description of three types of PMs: Pioneers (focused on taking risks and building new things), Settlers (focused on growth and scaling), and Town Planners (focused on infrastructure and platform management). What’s important is the point...

As you know, Google told us they just realized that rel=next and rel=prev is no longer supported for the past year or so. Yea, I know. So now what? How do you ensure Google can find your paginated content? How do you communicate to Google a series of pages is part of a set? Mihai Aperghis asked Google's John Mueller a series of hard questions this morning in the webmaster hangout addressing this.

Phil Johnson has some good advice for product managers in The Goldilocks of Process:

Blindly following process is a project-killer—not just in terms of efficiency. The real poison is the mentality: in these cases process became a crutch to lean on, with these individuals no longer thinking critically about their tasks. In many ways, the process became the job, where process really should be what enables the job. This rings doubly true in the software development world.

On any...