Industry News

I think most of us know by now that merely copying competitors’ features or business models is a bad idea. Jesse Weaver’s Emulation Is Not a Product Strategy does a very good job of explaining why this approach almost never works, and what to focus on instead. One example:

In focusing their efforts on emulation, product managers stop considering options that could enhance what is unique about the company and its customer base. They miss chances to deliver something powerful and...

Product Management podcasts are a bit hit and miss, but this week there were two discussions that I found really interesting and useful.

First, on the Product Science Podcast, an interview with Teresa Torres on continuous product discovery:

Teresa Torres is a product discovery coach and the author of the Product Talk Blog. She spends most of her time coaching cross-functional product teams on how to adopt continuous discovery practices. On this episode of the Product Science...

This interview with former Google and Flipkart product leader Punit Soni covers a lot of ground and is interesting all the way through. His thoughts on the importance of a go-to-market strategy is so important, and a trap many product managers fall into:

When an idea is finally in sight, it may be tempting to jump feet first into product building. According to Soni, founders need to resist the impulse to obsess over product to the exclusion of everything else at the very beginning....

I sound like a broken record but I am once again seeing chatter and signals of yet another Google search ranking algorithm update. This one starting around March 5th and continuing through today. There is chatter in the WebmasterWorld forums and also signs from the various tracking tools.

I really like Vrushali Paunikar’s approach to onboarding new product managers in an organization. In particular, the focus on three different time horizons with distinct goals is very important:

The first 30 days are about breadth. Put together a 30-day checklist broken up by people, product, and process to help your PM gain context and develop peace-time relationships.

The first 3 months are about perfecting execution. Give your PM projects she can actually launch within the...

In Egoless Innovation Sari Harrison reminds us that ideas are not personal. As product managers our goal should always be to get the best outcome, not to win or be right or for everyone to “just get along”:

When the idea you are advocating for gets challenged, an egoless innovation mindset means choosing to see the challenge as a gift to the innovative outcome which the idea hopes to someday become. It means looking objectively at the input, responding to it authentically, saying...

On Friday afternoon, March 1st, maybe going through Saturday, March 2nd, there may have been yet another Google search ranking algorithm update. We had one on February 27th and February 22nd and now another unconfirmed one on March 2nd. They seem like tremors, maybe tweaks to previous updates. We have both chatter and trackers showing the updates.

Herb Caudill’s Lessons from 6 software rewrite stories is an extensive analysis of the rewrite projects of companies like Basecamp and Trello, why they succeeded or failed, and what we can learn from them:

Once you’ve learned enough that there’s a certain distance between the current version of your product and the best version of that product you can imagine, then the right approach is not to replace your software with a new version, but to build something new next to it — without...

I am seeing some new chatter and most of the tools are backing up the chatter around another Google search ranking algorithm update that started around yesterday, February 27th. The chatter is pretty limited and fresh but I suspect it will pick up soon in the ongoing WebmasterWorld forums.