Industry News

The Google de-indexing bug, which took about 6 days to resolve and is supposedly resolved as of last Thursday is now causing issues within Google Search Console. The coverage and enhancement reports, as well as the URL Inspection tool are all impacted according to Google.

Over the past few months I have become fascinated by what I like to call “crazy-busy PM” thinking in the product management world. I’m sure you’ve seen a few tweets or articles about this yourself, but here’s a small sample, all from fairly big voices/blogs in the industry.

From 15 Things You Should Know About Product Managers:

It is common to go through the whole day as a PM, and get absolutely nothing done. Your calendar is stacked. The meetings are booked. There is a ton of...

Seth Fiegerman’s history of Pinterest and their approach to business and product is a breath of fresh air. In The anti-Facebook: Inside Pinterest’s slow and quiet rise, Fiegerman describes a company whose motto might as well be “move slow and debate things”:

Pinterest resisted throwing money at its problems, debated product tweaks extensively and did not rush to copy features that helped larger competitors achieve viral growth, employees said. Fond of touting itself as an anti-social...

Lenny Rachitsky starts off his article on A three-step framework for solving problems with a really good insight:

Though many factors contribute to a project’s failure, nothing is more certain to cause a project to fail than a misunderstanding of the problem you are solving.

He spends the rest of the article focusing on how to develop and rally around a good problem statement, which is an essential skill to have for any product manager. I really like this framework and am keen to...

Helen Mou and Kevin Ochal share some good tips for remote teams in Making the Dream Work: Leading Distributed Product Teams. Most importantly, I agree that if you are deliberate about how you design your work process, it’s good for the whole team — whether they’re remote or not:

Instead of approaching distributed teamwork with the mindset of “we’re making it work, in spite of…” staying up late, working more hours, and spending more effort to be on a distributed team; we like to look...

Karolina Szczur makes some excellent points about using “technical debt” as an excuse for subpar products in The Technical Debt Myth:

Technical debt becomes a convenient blanket statement entailing frustrations, rushed decision-making, lack of process or architecture, and tedious maintenance tasks — the get-out-of-jail-free card for delivering a subpar experience.

It’s crucial to understand that as software and design grows older, that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re dealing...

One thing SEOs were asking Google for for some time now is a report in Google Search Console that tells you about your traffic from Google Discover. Now we have such a report and it is pretty cool to see this new data.

As you know, we were the first to report the large de-indexing bug where Google was dropping pages out of their index starting as early as a week ago today. Well, last night, after about 6 days of the issue, Google said it has now been fully resolved.

Google announced yesterday a new feature they are "beta testing" to allow searchers to filter their web searches by dates. So they announced a new before: and after: search operator that lets you do this. Then quietly noted that they discontinued the sort by date feature in search.