Industry News

Just to keep you all up to date on the issue with pages dropping out of the Google index starting last Thursday. It is currently still not fully resolved and we are in day five now. But Google seems to be just about done resolving it fully.

Hiten Shah’s deep-dive into the history of Evernote is a very interesting read from a product management perspective. Of particular interest is the immense damage they inflicted on themselves due to a lack of focus on their core mission:

It’s hard to understate the damage that the branded products sold through the Evernote Market inflicted on the Evernote brand. It made absolutely no sense. Users didn’t want Evernote-branded tablet styluses or Evernote Moleskine notebooks or Evernote...

On Friday we reported on an issue where SEOs began noticing that Google was removing tons of pages from their index. It seemed to have started on Thursday but Google did not confirm the issue until Saturday morning. The issue is now into day four or so and it is not yet fully resolved.

Something weird is going on with the Google search index. I am seeing wide spread reports of SEOs and webmasters complaining that their URLs and web pages are being removed from the Google Index. Lots of folks are noticing that a nice percentage of their web sites are no longer coming up for a site command or showing in Search Console as being indexed.

This may have been one of the busiest months for Google SEO related topics we've seen maybe ever? We had several unconfirmed Google updates but also a big core update confirmed by Google on March 12th. Google keeps dropping features from the old Search Console and adding new ones to the new Search Console. Google doesn't support rel=prev/next, stopped supporting the info command and is testing a new icon based search results design.

I’m a big fan of product discovery, and this extensive guide from Tim Herbig is a great resource:

The goal of this guide is to show you the extensive range a Product Discovery can have and how to set up and execute your own Product Discovery process. Which exact phases, tools, frameworks, and participants are needed depends on many individual aspects like the maturity of your product, which stakeholder environment you’re operating in, which resources you have at hand, etc.

I also...

The transcription of Cennydd Bowles’s talk on ethics in technology at SustainableUX 2019 is absolute gold and a must-read:

It’s a mistake to separate technical capabilities from human capabilities. These things act together. They become interwoven, hybridized actors. Things change what people can do and how they do it. It is true to an extent that old sage that guns don’t kill people; people do. But a gunman, the hybrid actor of a human and a technology coming together, sure as hell...

Yana Welinder looks at different areas where PMs need to make sure we don’t let process get in the way of good product sense in her post Product Over Process. On the importance of making sure specs aren’t “set in stone”:

Focusing on product over process during the execution stage means constantly evaluating whether the product does what it’s intended to do. This requires PMs to see the product through the users’ eyes and, more importantly, to figure out ways to do user testing even...

Jeremy Keith writes about the developer community’s need to always talk about new things in Dev perception. I think the same can be said for every other profession, including product management:

It’s relatively easy to write and speak about new technologies. You’re excited about them, and there’s probably an eager audience who can learn from what you have to say.

It’s trickier to write something insightful about a tried and trusted (perhaps even boring) technology that’s been...