Industry News

I am seeing some limited chatter around a possible Google search algorithm update around May 9th, maybe starting May 8th. The chatter and signals are not super high, like some other updates, but there is enough for me to bring this to your attention.

I’m a big fan of the product forces aspect of the Jobs-to-be-Done framework to help teams think through the challenges they need to overcome to get customers to adopt their product. In Product adoption: how to get customers to embrace your product the Intercom team discusses the product forces, as well as some strategies for overcoming those forces. For example, on decreasing attachment to the status quo:

What can you do to draw your prospects’ attention to your benefits over their...

Google UX Designer David Hogue shares his thoughts on How to Reverse Over-Complication in Product Design and How to Avoid It Altogether. It’s a very good read for product managers. Here he describes how do build a process to avoid over-complication:

Critically evaluate every new and existing feature for the value it provides weighed against the costs of including in a product or service. Does a feature introduce friction or ambiguity? Does adding something more make flows, paths, and...

Training company Onfielder published a comprehensive list of learning resources for new product managers called PM Starter Pack. Topics include what the role is about, overviews of the skills required (such as strategy, user experience, and analytics), and how to apply a job hunting strategy. Each section provides an overview of the topic as well as links to external resources. Highly recommended for new product managers.

It’s pretty interesting to see how different industries are adopting the product management role. In Product teams have taken national news organizations by storm. What’s happening locally? Christine Schmidt discusses how product is impacting newspapers and magazines:

“Product managers are the ones trying to think holistically and bring people together on how to move forward with a big idea,” Becca Aaronson, Chalkbeat’s director of product, said. “Anyone in a newsroom can do product...

Probably the biggest news for the SEO industry out of Google I/O yesterday was that Google said Googlebot is now evergreen, meaning it will stay up-to-date with the latest version of Chromium, their popular Chrome browser. This brings thousands of new features to Googlebot for crawling purposes.

The past month in terms of Google search, SEO and webmaster related topics can be summed up into two primary categories. First is the massive number of bugs and the second is about new features and tools...

I like the reframing Sherif Mansour does in his talk Popular Misconceptions of the Product Craft. For example, here is his response to the common misconception that marketing-driven development is always bad:

As product managers we should always educate our teams on the value of great marketing, embrace the art of storytelling that infuses our marketing teams, and think about how we can bring that back to our teams. Whether you follow Amazon’s press release method, mock-up landing...

Remember those Google Search Console bugs that we thought was related to the indexing issue? Google said it was resolved mostly with the exception of the backlink report, which should be resolved soon. Well, resolved means that the data was completely lost for all reports excluding the performance report and filled with data from April 26th instead.

Just when you thought the bugs were over, we have a new batch of them within Google Search Console. This one is specific to the manual actions viewer. Google's John Mueller confirmed this morning after numerous reports starting yesterday afternoon that there is something wrong with the manual action viewer.