Industry News

Jase Clamp asks, What’s in the DNA of Product People? I especially like his depiction of the complementary forces of empathy and optimism.

This process of synthesis we call empathy. We all know that is what is needed to begin the job of product. But if it stopped there, we’d just be counselors, sitting with people, understanding their pain, and journeying with them.

We harness an opposing force that provides balance — it’s our ability, while reaching into the present to...

Danny Sullivan from Google informed me on Twitter that the June 2019 core update that started to roll out on Monday afternoon, June 3rd, has finished rolling out on Saturday, June 8th. So the process took about five-days to fully roll out, which seems pretty quick to me.

A New Patent on Categorical Quality

Some of the people who write patents for Google tend to stand out to me. One of those is Trystan Upstill. I noticed that he has published another one that looks really interesting, and worth reading. When...

Tremis Skeete has a good write-up of a recent Marty Cagan talk in his post Product vs. Project Managers: Marty Cagan’s Twelve Best Lessons for Product Team Work. His four traits of a competent product manager is something most of us have probably read about before, but it’s a nice refresher. Especially the first two:

The first is a deep knowledge of the users and customers. This seems like a daunting task, but if a product manager just gets out of the office and talks to users and...

In The Importance Of A Clear Career Path For Product Managers the Intercom team links to their Product Manager expectations by level (PDF). It’s a really good resource and fascinating look at their approach to product management. Here’s how they define the role at Intercom:

There are many elements and facets to being a PM at Intercom, but ultimately it comes down to: “Identify the most valuable problems to solve, enable your team to ship and iterate high-quality solutions quickly, and...

Google announced last night, as I covered in detail at Search Engine Land, that they released another update earlier this week that finished rolling out yesterday. This update restricts how many times a search results listing can show in the Google search results for most queries.

Will Larson shares some interesting perspectives on teams in the interview How to Size and Assess Teams From an Engineering Lead at Stripe, Uber, and Digg:

Larson believes that the fundamental challenge — and cornerstone — of organizational design is sizing teams. “The most powerful unit of work is a gelled team. People who know how to work together and are practiced at working together can accomplish truly remarkable things,” says Larson. “When managers design too literally around...

On the Postmark blog I talk about how we use productboard to improve our product planning process. I’ve written before about about what I look for in product management software, and we’ve now been using productboard for a full 3 months at Postmark, so I wanted to write an update on how it’s going, and how we’re using it.

So far, productboard has improved my life significantly. I feel much more comfortable that I have a handle on everything we are working on, what we have to plan for,...

A few months ago I wrote about what I look for in product management software, and mentioned that we’re going to try out productboard and see how it goes. As I mentioned in that post:

In short, I am looking for a better way to plan. JIRA is a great execution tool — I don’t want to change that part. But JIRA is a terrible planning tool. And our current process of using Basecamp and Dropbox Paper for planning works just ok for me. The combination lacks a bunch of things to make it as...