Industry News

These fluctuations won't die down, it seems like we've been reporting these tremors and fluctuations a lot since the beginning of the year and even more so since the release of the March 12th core update. We are seeing more chatter around these fluctuations from around March 29th through today, April 1st - and no, this is no April Fools joke.

I always love a good persona case study, and The Story of Spotify Personas is no exception. But more than the story behind it, I am most interested in how teams use their personas (if at all). So I was happy to see the team devote some time to that towards the end of the article:

For instance, teams that want to create features from scratch can now choose their personas, map out the existing opportunities, pick a direction and start ideating from there. Although personas don’t replace...

Google is testing showing icons in the search bar filters next to the all, news, maps, images, shopping and other buttons. This takes them back to a user interface they had in 2011, which they shortly dropped a year or so later.

Sometimes we can get overly reliant on our frameworks and methodologies to help us make sense of our products and our worlds. Melissa Perri shares some excellent advice about the dangers of this in The Science of Product Management:

These motions, these frameworks, they were made to teach you to think. They were a means to an end, not the end goal itself. They are training wheels. How can they help you understand your work better, so you can DO your work better?

The point of...

An oldie but a goodie from Michael Copeland: Shipping is a Feature—Some Guiding Principles for People That Build Things:

For these five bits of advice, I chose to focus on what I think is the most challenging aspect of being a PM, which is achieving clarity and maintaining a point of view for a product when all forces work against this very thing. What customers value most in a product is that “it just work” or “does what it is supposed to do,” and yet at every step in a product, the...

There is some early chatter of a possible Google search algorithm update touching down last night and this morning, March 26th and March 27th. It might be too early for some people to notice or it might just be a blip. It also might be tweaks and tremors from the March 12th Google core update.

I’m staying out of the “hot takes on that John Maeda interview” genre, but I do want to link to Heather Phillips’s Stop dwelling on being design-led: Focus on the user. She brings up some great points that product managers need to keep in mind as well:

We shouldn’t think about being design-first, or development-first. Instead, we should be thinking about how we can bring our paths closer together. Every business function — including design — should be thinking about the user, first...

I am intrigued by the idea of product-specific wikis, as outlined in North Star Product Management. The idea is to have a living document that explains how each product component works, why it exists, why certain decisions were made, and what the future looks like:

The purpose of North Star Docs is not (at least, not necessarily) to minimize changes — changing the North Star Docs is just fine, and is of course actually encouraged, if we can find a better way to do something....

About ten days ago we began collecting data from you all around the Google March 2019 core update that touched down on March 12th. We collected over 500 responses and I wanted to share the results with you all.