Industry News

I am finally catching up on the big “Airbnb canceled PMs” debate of 2023, and like most online arguments the whole thing seems pretty silly to me. First, here’s a good overview from Aatir Abdul Rauf, in which he publishes the full quote from CEO Brian Chesky:

“…The designers are equal to product managers. Actually, we got rid of the classic product management function. Apple didn’t have it either.

5-second applause

(smiling) Let’s be careful. Hold on.

We have product...

Here’s some great advice from Robin Sloan on how to find good educational content on YouTube:

These days, when I’m investigating a subject, I tend to go straight to Low View Count Scholarly YouTube, which is of course the version of YouTube you get when you append the term “lecture” to your search. When you hit a tranche of videos between forty and ninety minutes long, with between 500 and 5000 views, you know you’re in the right place.

This is great post by Will Larson on the difference between personal (and organizational) “brand” vs. “prestige”—and why focusing on building the latter is way more important for your career than the former.

First, this reminder:

The majority of successful executives I’ve worked with don’t write online. They won’t post on Twitter or Mastodon. They haven’t written a book. They don’t speak at conferences. In your engineering leadership career, you will at times be immersed in the...

Why Do Developers (Actually) Hate Marketing? The Heavybit team has some good advice in this post: Don’t: Create product-led content that shoves the product into your reader’s face. Do: create a transparent guide to what your product can and can’t do. But make sure you don’t over-promise (or even sound like you’re overpromising). Don’t: Write thought leadership content that relies on cheesy trend predictions. Do: Create thoughtful, technical essays based on experiences from engineers and...

Good advice here from Kyle Poyar on how to optimize your pricing page, including a reminder to emphasize benefits, not features:

Did your feature matrix get dumped on your pricing page as-is, leading to confusion and eye-rolls across your target buyers? Don’t do that. Tell a story about what the customer can do with the feature.

The Homework Apocalypse is an interesting post by Ethan Mollick on how educators can prepare for (and, to a degree, embrace) the incoming prevalence of LLMs in schools:

Students will cheat with AI. But they also will begin to integrate AI into everything they do, raising new questions for educators. Students will want to understand why they are doing assignments that seem obsolete thanks to AI. They will want to use AI as a learning companion, a co-author, or a teammate. They will want...

Michael Lopp discusses how communication works in large organizations. I’ve been thinking about the culture on anonymous workplace app Blind as “Nextdoor for companies”, but this is a way better description:

The Whisper Network is a rich tapestry of partially true information. My gut is to call this the Gossip Network, but gossip is just one of the information types that traverse this network. The Whisper Network is a semi-deliberate construction of humans who might trust each other but...

I am really trying to not cover the Google search ranking volatility and not report on another Google search ranking update but today things got super heated again. And don't get me wrong, the Google search results have been very heated for over a month but today, things spiked above those new normal levels.

On Monday, I reported that Google stopped crawling and indexing Twitter content after Twitter made it that unregistered (signed-out) users were not able to see tweets. Well, Twitter made a change in the past 24 hours or so that now Google and unregistered users can see the tweet but there is a modal that overlays asking users to sign up for Twitter.

If I had to sum up this month, I'd call it the month of way too many unconfirmed Google search ranking updates. I wrote about five of these, but it felt like there were even more. Google pushed a quality update for its Search Generative Experience. Google dropped a ton of SEO topics and finally launched the perspectives filter.