Industry News

I agree with Chris LoSacco that “Why Not?” is a dangerous questions to ask for any product team:

Often stakeholders assume that if their ideas aren’t bad, they should be on the roadmap. “This isn’t hard; let’s get it in front of the engineers.” But the burden of proof is the other way around — ideas should get turned down unless they clear a high hurdle.

Just because a feature is easy or obvious doesn’t mean you should build it. This is why I prefer the question “Why Now?”:...

Google has officially launched Domain Property in Google Search Console the day after they announced the closure of the Property Set feature. Overall, the concept behind Domain Property is similar to Property Set, it lets you combine multiple properties in Search Console into one, to see an aggregate view of the data.

This is an incredibly brave and insightful post by Erin Chan that I think every product manager should read. In The Hard Thing About Complex Products & How I’ve Grown as a PM she describes a long, failed project at Shopify in detail, and what she learned. The section on creating “tripwires” for complex projects is something I’m going to start using immediately:

A tripwire is a mechanism or an indicator that you define, and when it gets triggered, flags are raised.

For example,...

I’ve had this vague sense for a while that I need to dig into the product management software space a lot more. So on Friday I just did it — I signed up for a bunch of accounts and started playing around. As I went through each product I realized two things: I didn’t know what I was looking for. Most of the products I was looking at didn’t know why they wanted me to use it either. The landing pages are all great, but once I was in the product, it was like a different (and very confusing)...

Over the weekend I have been tracking a lot of chatter within the SEO community on WebmasterWorld and other channels of a Google update. Many of the automated tracking tools also show significant changes in the Google rankings starting on Friday, February 22nd through the weekend.

I am so so so tired of covering this topic, we've covered it for well over a dozen years and I just covered it a week or so ago. Google doesn't use CTR, click through data, to rank their search results. But of course, Google posted something that is driving huge confusion again around the topic.

Google is now sending out what I believe are new notifications when a site verified in Google Search Console has seen a drop in clicks, impressions, etc. This alert communicates to the site owner or webmaster that there may be an issue.

Related to the podcast discussion I shared the other day, Andy J. Ko wrote a really good essay called The problem with “learnability” in human-computer interaction. He argues that most software is learned socially, not independently:

We just have to think about our own personal experiences to see that nearly everyone learns how to use all but the simplest software socially, not in isolation. Our friends and family introduce us to new software and teach us how to use it. Our parents...

The Google white paper I just covered mentions explicitly that Google's algorithms can detect if a query is related to YMYL, your money your life, related content and then adjust the weights of the ranking algorithm for those specific queries. There has been some debate in the SEO industry if Google is indeed doing this so now this should clear that up.