Industry News

Jeff Gothelf addresses a very common problem in his post on the perils of fixed time, fixed scope projects. This point on what it means when you “launch” a product is so important:

Deadlines imply that if we don’t get the product right on the day we launch, we’re doomed. This is an antiquated point of view. Launching publicly simply begins the process of learning how right (or wrong) our assumptions were. It is the start of a continuous conversation with your target audience and the...

A week ago we reported on chatters and signals of a Google search ranking algorithm update. That died down a bit shortly after we wrote about it but over the past couple days I am seeing chatter and signals of another Google update.

I have Thoughts about the term “Product Thinking”. But as a general progression, I think Sebastian Saboune is right that as an organization grows, product management has to evolve from a thing we do, to a thing we help the entire company do:

Our understanding of our craft has come a long way since 2015. I believe that it is now a good time to evolve product management into product thinking. A philosophy, mindset, a common knowledge. But primarily, something that can be acquired by...

Marty Cagan’s article on the characteristics of a good One on One meeting is great advice for managers, but it also includes some excellent points about what makes a good product manager in general. Here, for example, is a section on what it means to think like a PM:

What does it mean to think like a PM? It means focusing on outcome. Considering all of the risks – value, usability, feasibility and business viability. Thinking holistically about all dimensions of the business and the...

As you know, the Google Indexing API only is reserved for job posting URLs and live stream events. But that might change as we have been speculating for a while. Gary Illyes from Google in his Reddit AMA also mentioned that Google is testing this as well.

Understanding query syntax may be the most important part of a successful search strategy. What words do people use when searching? What type of intent do those words describe? This is much more than simple keyword research.

I think about query syntax a lot. Like, a lot a lot. Some might say I’m obsessed. But it’s totally healthy. Really, it is. Query Syntax

Syntax is defined as follows:

The study of the patterns or formation of sentences and phrases from words

So query syntax is...

Itamar Gilad shares a healthy critique of the Impact/Effort prioritization matrix that is so ingrained in every product manager’s brain:

As straightforward as this all seems, there are major problems with Impact/Effort prioritization that cause us to pick the wrong winners. Most importantly Impact/Effort analysis requires us to make somewhat reliable predictions on future events — the effort we will require to complete a task and the value that will be delivered to users and/or to the...

Kellan Elliott-McCrea has an excellent list of questions a team should answer before they decide to adopt a new technology in their software development process. For example:

If this new tech is a replacement for something we currently do, are we committed to moving everything to this new technology in the future? Or are we proliferating multiple solutions to the same problem? (aka “Will this solution kill and eat the solution that it replaces?”)

As he mentions in the post, these...

Design is only as “human-centered” as the business model allows.

— Erika Hall, Thinking in Triplicate.