Industry News

I love the point Simon Sarris makes here about the importance of reading fiction, and how it’s useful for work purposes as well:

I also tend to stress fiction because I think, especially among my professional peers in the industry of software, that there is too great a fondness for non-fiction. I think this arises from a belief that superior knowledge of the world comes from non-fiction. This thought is attractive to people who build systems, but over-systematizing and seeing systems in...

Allie Conti frames the remote work debate really well in this post. In short, how someone feels about remote work and “return to office” is extremely personal:

I’ve given you this narration of my personal experience because, for all the talk of productivity and metrics and company culture, the topic of returning to the office is intensely personal. My needs and desires, for a variety of reasons relating to my age, finances, circumstances, health situation, and lifestyle, might be very...

Josephine Conneely has some excellent thoughts on the feared P-word in How Process Impacts Your Culture. I especially like going back to the purpose of adding process when evaluating what you have in place:

The aim of process in its purest form is to: Facilitate ease of doing work: Design methods for teams to effectively work together, make decisions, and achieve their goals. Reduce risk: Ensure company doesn’t fall foul of legal & compliance obligations or go bankrupt. Ensure...

For the past few months, Google's search results have been very volatile, but over the past couple of days, it seems, at least to some rank-checking tools, the volatility is cooling and calming.

I think everyone in our industry is surprised we have not had a confirmed Google search ranking update since April 2023. But you should expect Google to confirm a search ranking algorithm update before the summer is up.

Oliver Jay wrote a 3-part essay about what he calls “The PLG Trap”, where product-led growth companies grow to a certain point and then suddenly sees that growth slow with no obvious ways through the slowdown. From the introduction to the essays, Oliver says this usually happens after an initial (and initially successful!) expansion into the enterprise market:

Quite simply, despite the complex security and administrative features you’ve launched, your product has not evolved to becoming...

Some good tips here from Kax Uson on How to receive feedback—especially when you don’t agree with it:

Validate the feedback with other people. There will be times when we don’t really trust the feedback we receive, or in some cases, the people who gave them to us. This is normal. When this happens, it’s worth cross-checking the feedback with the people we trust. I like to think of it as getting a 2nd opinion vs immediately dismissing the feedback or overthinking it.

Ok, here’s the thing. I didn’t share this talk I’m doing on Thursday when it was announced because as much as I tried, I just didn’t feel like the story was coming together. Writing this talk was much harder than some others that I’ve done, but I think I finally got there last night. So with only a few hours to spare, here you go…

In Life beyond OKRs: Tools for goal-setting I’m going to talk about our team’s foundation (principles & values), how we set goals, and how we plan and execute....