Industry News

It looks like we may have had another tremor or Google search ranking algorithm update kickoff yesterday, Wednesday, January 18th. We just had one this weekend after the December 2022 helpful content update and December 2022 link spam update finished on January 12th and now we have this, again.

It seems like the topic of meetings is on everyone’s minds again as we start the year. Will Larson has some good perspective from the engineering org viewpoint:

Some engineers develop a strong point of view that meetings are a waste of their time. There’s good reason for that perspective, as many meetings are quite bad, but it’s also a bit myopic: meetings can also be an exceptionally valuable part of a well-run organization. If you’re getting feedback that any given meeting isn’t...

When I arrived at Wildbit in 2016 as Postmark’s first product manager, my initial job was to work with the team to create a formal vision and strategy for the product. I wrote about that process in How we built a product vision and roadmap so I’m not going to spend much time on that.

The focus of this post is on how and why we redeveloped and implemented our Product Strategy after 6 years, and how we used it to create a prioritized product plan. I hope this will be helpful as a guide for...

I enjoyed this post by Yuhki Yamashita (CPO at Figma) about how design is always “Work in Progress,” and how to deal with that:

Our work never feels done because it isn’t. Our collaborators jump in and out of files, leaving feedback and iterating on designs while we’re creating them. Many of us can ship whenever, so it’s hard to know when new designs are actually ready. It’s the chaotic reality of modern product design and development.

He gives some really good recommendations...

This is an interesting interview with Richard Culatta, author of Digital for Good: Raising Kids to Thrive in an Online World. They discuss how to help kids bridge the gap between physical and digital spaces, how to model good technology behavior, and more. This is such a good point:

By focusing on screen time we miss the far more important concept that we should be teaching our kids; screen value. Some digital activities are just not a good use of a kid’s time (eg. playing a...

Just a couple of days after the December 2022 helpful content update and link spam update finished, we are now seeing another update, an unconfirmed update that seemed to have hit on Saturday, January 14th.

I agree with Bruce Daisley in The Death of Hybrid Work Is Greatly Exaggerated:

The focus for organisations in 2023 shouldn’t be on mandating a return to the office, but on working out how to build strong cultures in a new, sustainable way. Some of that is about optimising the time that teams spend together, curating rather leaving it to chance. If we’re to get the best out of work culture then we all need to accept that this is the moment to reinvent the construction of it.

It’s...

My friend Allan sent me an article about the city of Brasília, and how its architecture affected the recent insurrection (Ryan wrote the best overview about what happened that I’ve seen). I have long been fascinated with Brasília, every since I researched it for a product management article called Usable yet Useless: Why Every Business Needs Product Discovery:

A “shiny citadel” from far away, as The Guardian once wrote, up close Brasília has “degraded into a violent, crime-ridden...

I love this bit from Austin Kleon’s Letting books talk to each other:

If you read books on different topics and different genres and different formats at the same time, your brain can’t help but find weird connections between them.

This is one of my favorite things—not just with books, but with articles too. It’s such a good feeling when your brain makes those connections. I’ll add that I think this is what makes blogs like Kottke so effective and compelling. When you are able to...

After a long slow and paused rollout, Google has said that both the December 2022 helpful content update and December 2022 link spam update are now done rolling out. Google said both completed rolling out on Thursday, January 12, 2023.