Industry News

45 days ago I wrote that Google is going to be cracking down on sites that lease out its own subdomains and subfolders so that other companies can rank their content better on leased domains. Google now officially posted on Twitter about the topic.

Ted Bauer and Michael Boykin take on daily, synchronous standups in their article The Daily Standup is Broken, What Should You Do Now?

Asynchronous daily standups or check-ins help to put an end to boundless, traditional standup meetings and get the whole team on the same page with fewer meetings. And corresponding written status updates within a team coordination tool or platform — something that allows every team member to share and review updates from today, yesterday, or even last...

Yesterday Google posted an explanation or post mortem of the indexing issues the company has experienced over the past few months. I am happy the company posted something but to be honest, I find it to be a weak post mortem at best.

Matt LeMay’s post on how to build safety into team communication might not immediately seem that relevant to product management, but Why is Psychological Safety at Odds With the way we Work? is an excellent reminder for all of us:

Now let’s talk about the product managers who are willing to take on the individual risk that comes with creating psychological safety for their teams. These product leaders often don’t have the opportunity to step into those big “visionary” roles – not...

Paul Ford’s Carrot Centralization is a great plea for the importance of user research, but I think he also inadvertently came up with an excellent definition for product management:

You might think our job is to build software but just as often it’s to help you avoid building the wrong software. And when you build, build carrots.

Because, as he says earlier in the post:

Carrots work. Sticks don’t. Computers can’t make people do things. They have to want to do things....

Danny Sullivan from Google told me on Twitter that Google will share more details about the indexing issues, where Google was not able to index new content for about an 24-hour period. He said Google will post time frames and post notes about the impact in Google Search Console after Google does its internal assessment of the issue.

Yesterday, Google was not indexing new content from many sites - including this one, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and many others. Google confirmed the issue but has not yet confirmed the indexing issues were resolved yet. It does seem to me that the indexing issues are indeed recovering.

Sachin Rekhi reviews April Dunford’s book Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It in his post Positioning for Product Managers:

While 2000’s Differentiate or Die spoke at length on why positioning is important, it never really went into detail on how to actually go about developing your product’s positioning. The traditional approach is to develop a positioning statement. While useful as an output to your positioning process, it really...