Industry News

Emile Ledure tries to answer the question, “how do you build products that stick and last in a healthy way?” I really like his approach in Healthy Retention: What Makes People Keep Coming Back? I especially appreciate the principle “Have fewer but better interactions”:

You don’t necessarily build retention by pushing people to use your product every day, you do it by bringing high value every time they need it — even if it means being absent most of the time. So don’t be greedy. […]...

Google, in a rare move, pre-announced that they are going to be rolling out a core update tomorrow. They are calling this Google search algorithm ranking update the June 2019 Core Update and sometime tomorrow, Google will be rolling this update out.

Christine Itwaru writes about Servant Leadership for Product Managers:

Reflecting back, there’s one critical thing I didn’t recognize until I was in the thick of it. I realized those in product management — from product owner to chief product officer — are never individual contributors. Instead, they’re in a position to become true servant leaders.

I would only clarify one thing, and that is that PMs are, for the most part, never individual contributors only. We still do a lot of...

I usually stay away from article titles like these, but I thoroughly enjoyed Chris Cannon’s What a Journalist Can Teach Lean Startups about Customer Interviews. If you talk to customers at all as part of your work, in any context, this is a goldmine of good advice:

Problems are stories — it’s a dull tale that has no conflict to resolve. The customer on the other side of that table is the protagonist in their own adventure. We’ve selected them as a persona that might be interested in...

I am seeing very early signs of a Google search ranking update that started last night and has been fluctuating in and out this morning into the various Google data centers. The automated tracking tools aren't really showing much yet but the WebmasterWorld forums has some early chatter from the SEO community.

Steve Denning’s Forbes essay Understanding Fake Agile is the most useful thing I’ve read about the state of Agile in a long time. It starts off extremely strong, with his “three laws of Agile”: The Law of the Customer — an obsession with delivering value to customers as the be-all and end-all of the organization. The Law of the Small Team — a presumption that all work be carried out by small self-organizing teams, working in short cycles and focused on delivering value to...

Google announced this morning that starting on July 1, 2019 they will begin to index new web sites, not yet discovered by Google, using mobile-first indexing by default. Old web sites not yet in mobile-first indexing still won't be switched until they are ready but brand new sites, not yet indexed by Google, will come right out of the gate as using mobile-first indexing.

One of the issues that’s often lamented about the product management profession is that it is not well understood. I think one of the big reasons for that is that we try to put too many different jobs in the same category. I have come around to the viewpoint that product manager roles should be classified in terms of the type of goals they are trying to accomplish. I like Saeed Khan’s breakdown in 5 Steps to Building a Great Product Management Organization:

Roles in Product Management...

Google has confirmed yesterday that they fixed the indexing issue that started Thursday night with Google indexing new content. It is a similar issue from the day prior to that where Google stopped indexing new fresh content as well. Both are now supposedly fixed and fully resolved.

This is a good write-up of Alice Newton-Rex’s talk on Setting Goals for Product Success. She explains some of the key principles for effective goal-setting from a product perspective. One section I found particularly useful is her point that metrics and goals are very different depending on the phase a company is in. For example, for a brand new product, she advises not to create traditional “growth” metrics:

But, in my experience, these goals aren’t so useful for new products. It’s a...