Industry News

I have a few product-related articles that I wanted to reflect on and write more about, but I just don’t think I’m going to get to it. They’re all really good though, so instead of just archiving those notes I wanted to share them so you can check it out. 1.

Here’s some solid advice from Jason Knight on what to do when your product is a mess and you have to fix all the things all at once:

In a situation like this, you’re going to have to get super-pragmatic. You’ve got lots of...

On Thursday, January 26th, there were some signs of a possible Google search ranking algorithm update. The signals and chatter I was tracking, honestly, were not at super high levels. However, now that I see Glenn Gabe shared some really shocking charts of sites previously impacted by Google updates but now seeing a big swing. This is not necessarily a product reviews update but rather sites in the product reviews space that are seeing massive swings on the 26th.

Yandex had a boatload of its source code across all its technology allegedly leaked by a disgruntled employee and part of that was the source code for Russia's largest search engine - Yandex. As you can imagine, SEOs and others are diving in and seeing what they can learn from the source code.

I love when people get obsessed with a topic and then turn that obsession into an “iterative project” where they do the same thing over and over until the topic has nothing left to give. An example: my friend Dave watches sci-fi movies hundreds of times and obsesses about the typography for his blog Typeset in the Future. I think his post on Alien is my favorite:

The opening credits for Alien are nothing short of a typographic masterpiece. You can watch them in their entirety on the...

The Minimalist Photography Awards for 2022 are out. The Cause of Depression Is Probably Not What You Think. “Depression has often been blamed on low levels of serotonin in the brain. That answer is insufficient, but alternatives are coming into view and changing our understanding of the disease.” The Battle Over Bike Lanes Needs a Mindset Shift. “Installing protected routes tends to boost local shops. But many store owners remain attached to their street parking—and fight to protect it.”...

Some great tips here from Will Larson on how to improve internal communications as a leader. I especially like “Maintain the drip”:

These updates establish a persistent drip of information from you to the wider organization. Some weeks you might have a light update, but rather than folks thinking that you’re not doing much, they’ll be reassured that they are up-to-date on what’s important. Dense updates are good, but it’s the brief updates that reassure the team that you would have...

I enjoyed David Pereira’s breakdown of The Three Phases of Product Managers—and not just because he got me with his jazz reference. The third phase:

A Product Manager acting as a Jazz Player will set the context, and team members will build upon it. They relentlessly search for opportunities to create something innovative and outstanding. This scenario is more or less like the following: Context: Product Managers bring the proper context to the team. Goal, audience, value...

Surreal Animal Mashups by Ingo Lindmeier. This one lives up to the title. Interesting research on Time Savings When Working from Home and what we’re spending that extra time on. It’s mostly for more work! “The average daily time savings when working from home is 72 minutes in our sample. […] Workers allocate 40 percent of their time savings to their jobs and about 11 percent to caregiving activities.” See also: Why 2023 Could Finally Be the Year of the 4-Day Workweek. “Among the reporting...

In his article Engineering Maturity Model Mike Fisher shares how he thinks about the importance of different team capabilities when building software organizations. Despite how some maturity models—such as the Capability Maturity Model (CMM)—have been misused in the past, Mike encourages us to look past the process and focus on the principles. Here’s the important part:

[The layers] aren’t stages in that you’re never really finished with any of them but you do need to have the ones at...