Industry News

I sound like a broken record but I am once again seeing chatter and signals of yet another Google search ranking algorithm update. This one starting around March 5th and continuing through today. There is chatter in the WebmasterWorld forums and also signs from the various tracking tools.

I really like Vrushali Paunikar’s approach to onboarding new product managers in an organization. In particular, the focus on three different time horizons with distinct goals is very important:

The first 30 days are about breadth. Put together a 30-day checklist broken up by people, product, and process to help your PM gain context and develop peace-time relationships.

The first 3 months are about perfecting execution. Give your PM projects she can actually launch within the...

In Egoless Innovation Sari Harrison reminds us that ideas are not personal. As product managers our goal should always be to get the best outcome, not to win or be right or for everyone to “just get along”:

When the idea you are advocating for gets challenged, an egoless innovation mindset means choosing to see the challenge as a gift to the innovative outcome which the idea hopes to someday become. It means looking objectively at the input, responding to it authentically, saying...

On Friday afternoon, March 1st, maybe going through Saturday, March 2nd, there may have been yet another Google search ranking algorithm update. We had one on February 27th and February 22nd and now another unconfirmed one on March 2nd. They seem like tremors, maybe tweaks to previous updates. We have both chatter and trackers showing the updates.

Herb Caudill’s Lessons from 6 software rewrite stories is an extensive analysis of the rewrite projects of companies like Basecamp and Trello, why they succeeded or failed, and what we can learn from them:

Once you’ve learned enough that there’s a certain distance between the current version of your product and the best version of that product you can imagine, then the right approach is not to replace your software with a new version, but to build something new next to it — without...

I am seeing some new chatter and most of the tools are backing up the chatter around another Google search ranking algorithm update that started around yesterday, February 27th. The chatter is pretty limited and fresh but I suspect it will pick up soon in the ongoing WebmasterWorld forums.

I agree with Chris LoSacco that “Why Not?” is a dangerous questions to ask for any product team:

Often stakeholders assume that if their ideas aren’t bad, they should be on the roadmap. “This isn’t hard; let’s get it in front of the engineers.” But the burden of proof is the other way around — ideas should get turned down unless they clear a high hurdle.

Just because a feature is easy or obvious doesn’t mean you should build it. This is why I prefer the question “Why Now?”:...

Google has officially launched Domain Property in Google Search Console the day after they announced the closure of the Property Set feature. Overall, the concept behind Domain Property is similar to Property Set, it lets you combine multiple properties in Search Console into one, to see an aggregate view of the data.

This is an incredibly brave and insightful post by Erin Chan that I think every product manager should read. In The Hard Thing About Complex Products & How I’ve Grown as a PM she describes a long, failed project at Shopify in detail, and what she learned. The section on creating “tripwires” for complex projects is something I’m going to start using immediately:

A tripwire is a mechanism or an indicator that you define, and when it gets triggered, flags are raised.

For example,...

I’ve had this vague sense for a while that I need to dig into the product management software space a lot more. So on Friday I just did it — I signed up for a bunch of accounts and started playing around. As I went through each product I realized two things: I didn’t know what I was looking for. Most of the products I was looking at didn’t know why they wanted me to use it either. The landing pages are all great, but once I was in the product, it was like a different (and very confusing)...