Industry News

I am seeing some early signs that there is a Google search ranking algorithm update happening today. Most of the signs are coming out of the UK, because maybe they have had time to process the changes. Are you noticing changes as of this morning with your Google rankings and organic search traffic?

Google announced pretty big news for most of the readers here related to the performance report in Google Search Console. Starting the end of next month, the data in the performance report will be based on the canonical URL, which means the AMP, mobile, etc will all be counted towards the main URL's data in the performance report.

In Four Key Product Principles from WeChat’s Creator, Connie Chan outlines how Allen Zhang, the Chinese programmer known for creating WeChat and Foxmail, thinks about Product:

The backbone of Allen’s product philosophy is thinking about users as his friends. This means designing products with sincere best intentions for the users and putting their interests above all others — even company stakeholders. For Zhang, the importance of always putting the user first is very simple: “Only...

“Cause & Effect and Product Risk” is a good good post by Scott Sehlhorst on the importance of moving to an outcome-based approach when evaluating and planning product features. He also discussed how to use Impact Mapping to do it:

When we collaborate to develop a shared understanding that explicitly connects “building X” with “realizing benefit Y” we address the first problem. Impact maps are great for this, because in the process of creating the connections, we intentionally...

Remote product management is something I’ve written about before, so I read Julie Caprio’s Four Keys to Successful Remote Product Management with interest. In general I agree with the advice she gives in the article, but there is one section that I wanted to respond to briefly:

Product management, on the other hand, was more of a struggle. A PM needs to set strategy and come up with a vision for the product. Without the potential for spontaneous in-person conversation and even...

In The Misunderstood World of Product Growth Joe Van Os makes some great points about the importance of focusing on making your product resilient to negative impacts:

Since it is impossible to forecast when positive opportunities will appear, it is important to be in a position to take full advantage of them when they do. If a product team is in fire-fighting mode (dealing with the fallout of negative circumstances), opportunities with plenty of upside may be missed.

Limiting...

Product ops builds a foundation for excellence by reinforcing product strategy with metrics, infrastructure, business processes, best practices, budgeting, and reporting.

— Shaun Juncal, The Rise of Product Ops: Supporting Product Excellence at Scale

I’m adding Good Strategy/Bad Strategy to my reading list, based on some of the quotes in this review:

Every organization faces a situation where the full complexity and ambiguity of the situation is daunting. An important duty of any leader is to absorb a large part of that complexity and ambiguity, passing on to the organization a simpler problem — one that is solvable. Many leaders fail badly at this responsibility, announcing ambitious goals without resolving a good chunk of...

It was a busy January with a few unconfirmed Google algorithm updates around the 15th, 9th and 6th of January. Google also said the next 50% of mobile-first indexing will be the hardest.

This essay about the building blocks of the web by Rachel Andrew is really important. From HTML, CSS and our vanishing industry entry points:

There is something remarkable about the fact that, with everything we have created in the past 20 years or so, I can still take a complete beginner and teach them to build a simple webpage with HTML and CSS, in a day. We don’t need to talk about tools or frameworks, learn how to make a pull request or drag vast amounts of code onto our computer...