Industry News

On June 14th we reported on a Google Search ranking algorithm update and since then the Google search results have not stopped with its larger than normal volatility. It is like they put the pot of water on the stove and never turned it off, at least not for the past several days now.

Great points on company culture from the Raw Signal group in You don’t have a culture problem, you have a management problem:

Culture handbooks don’t produce culture, people do. The culture you experience in your organization is a rolling average of the last thousand interactions you’ve had. Every piece of feedback, every conflict, every trade-off is culture. Every hiring, promotion, and firing, too. Those interactions come from everywhere, but a disproportionate number will come from...

This is a fascinating profile of MrBeast and his YouTube empire (NYT Gift Article). It’s extensively researched and presented with a steady hand. The reason I link to it here is I think he would be a pretty good product manager, albeit a litte bit on the obsessive side:

Donaldson stands out for his dedication to understanding how YouTube works. For most of his teenage years, “I woke up, I studied YouTube, I studied videos, I studied filmmaking, I went to bed and that was my life,”...

It might be controversial, but I tend to agree with Kax Uson point about managing feature requests from stakeholders:

I have learned that it’s perfectly alright for stakeholders to have solution requests. And to expect them to bring problems to us is unrealistic.

The post gives some good advice on how to translate solution requests into problems/opportunities that teams can solve:

Speak the language they speak. Talk about the benefits and impact of their requests. If you do build...

There’s some really good advice for job seekers in Carilu Dietrich’s post 10 Most Important Metrics For Evaluating a Company:

Net Dollar Retention (NDR) is one of the best ways to see if a tech company is healthy and growing. It measures the expansion or contraction of a company’s existing customer revenue over a given period. NDR takes into account the revenue lost from churn and increased revenue from upselling, cross-selling, and renewals from existing cusomers.

I would also add...

I am seeing some early signs of another Google search ranking algorithm update, as the Google search results seem more volatile than normal and there has been an increase in SEO chatter.

Google has finally launched the perspectives filter in the Google mobile search results. There is a ton of confusion around what perspectives is because Google has released or tested a number of search features over the past year, but the perspectives search filter is now live, the one Google demoed at I/O.

I promise this isn’t going to become an AI blog, but Marty Cagan’s latest on Preparing For The Future has some solid points on how generative AI might change our profession. Here he talks about the impact on QA:

The new generation of AI-based test automation tools has the promise to revolutionize our approach to ensuring the product is behaving properly. On the other hand, our current approach to quality is largely based on deterministic products.  This means that given a set of inputs...

Aniket Deosthali (Head of Product for Conversational Commerce at Walmart) provides a great framework for evaluating AI product opportunities in How to Build AI Products People Want:

The most efficient way to evaluate AI opportunities and unlock the advantages of AI is by using the Consideration x Context framework. Let’s start with some baseline definitions.

Y-Axis = Consideration: The amount of effort required to make a decision.

The more thought you put into a decision, the...