Industry News

Oliver Jay wrote a 3-part essay about what he calls “The PLG Trap”, where product-led growth companies grow to a certain point and then suddenly sees that growth slow with no obvious ways through the slowdown. From the introduction to the essays, Oliver says this usually happens after an initial (and initially successful!) expansion into the enterprise market:

Quite simply, despite the complex security and administrative features you’ve launched, your product has not evolved to becoming...

Some good tips here from Kax Uson on How to receive feedback—especially when you don’t agree with it:

Validate the feedback with other people. There will be times when we don’t really trust the feedback we receive, or in some cases, the people who gave them to us. This is normal. When this happens, it’s worth cross-checking the feedback with the people we trust. I like to think of it as getting a 2nd opinion vs immediately dismissing the feedback or overthinking it.

Ok, here’s the thing. I didn’t share this talk I’m doing on Thursday when it was announced because as much as I tried, I just didn’t feel like the story was coming together. Writing this talk was much harder than some others that I’ve done, but I think I finally got there last night. So with only a few hours to spare, here you go…

In Life beyond OKRs: Tools for goal-setting I’m going to talk about our team’s foundation (principles & values), how we set goals, and how we plan and execute....

Here’s a good post from Gergely Orosz discussing Interesting Learnings from Outages. It covers internal vs. public postmortems, how investing in reliability can have bumps along the way, and how to make the difficult decision to try and fix something on the spot, or to do a lengthy restore. This point stood out to me:

“Move fast with autonomous teams” often builds up infrastructure debt. Reddit is a fast-moving scaleup where teams move fast, and it sounded like they had autonomy in...

Some of the Google Search rank-checking tools are so far off their scales that they look broken to me. Did Google's insane volatility break the automated Google Search volatility tracking tools?

I often post about Google ranking volatility and search ranking algorithm updates but I rarely post about them on a weekend. But I just had to this Sunday morning; the tools are literally all reporting massive and explosive volatility this weekend and the SEO chatter is also very high.

Hey there - it is me again - reporting about another unconfirmed Google search ranking algorithm update. This one seemed to start yesterday, July 12th. I am seeing a lot of chatter amongst the SEO community and the automated Google tracking tools are showing heated volatility as well.

I don’t think that Threads—the new Twitter-like service from Meta—is above critique. It’s noisy, it lacks a lot of features, and there seems to be a lot of desperate land-grabbing going on by various celebrities and brands. You might even say the whole thing feels off—and there is even a fairly academic reason for that feeling. In It’s Not Cancel Culture—It’s A Platform Failure Charlie Warzel reminds us about “context collapse”:

Context collapse occurs when a surfeit of different...

Elena Verna presents a great guide to product-led sales for B2B products here here:

In a traditional top-down sales approach, the sales team is motivated to close the largest and newest deals to account for the high acquisition cost and ensure profitability.

In contrast, in a product-led sales approach, the sales team gets involved with the account much earlier in the problem lifecycle, and the initial contract value is smaller. It’s important to note that in top-down sales, the buyer...

After hearing reports that the Google News team is working on fixing an issue, Google has confirmed it last night. Many publishers were either not showing up in Google News or had limited visibility in Google News over the past few weeks. Google confirmed this is an "ongoing issue with indexing in Google News that's affecting all sites."