#22 Product & Engineering Wisdom
#22 Product & Engineering Wisdom
Tips, advice and insight on customer feedback, CI/CD process and tech debt
A free fortnightly email that highlights the relevant tips, advice, and case studies from the world of product and engineering for the SEO community.
Hello new subscribers 👋,
For anyone new to this newsletter this is the fortnightly roundup of posts from the product and engineering community.
You can read more about the different newsletter types on the About page.
I’m currently working on my next column newsletter which will be live soon.
Stay safe and enjoy,
Adam
⚡Post of the Sprint
Why we need to talk about audits - Google Search Central
Reading Time: 34 mins
Summary: Martin Splitt and Bartosz Goralewicz discuss an approach for SEOs to work well with web developers.
The Bottom Line
Although it is not technically from product or engineering community, it is focused on how SEOs can work better with developers (which is what this newsletter is all about).
Both Martin and Bartosz discuss how to talk to developers to get technical recommendations implemented.
They also discuss that SEOs should focus on asking developers questions around technical constraints or implementation details. They explain that if a developer can’t explain things clearly then they don’t know it well enough and might be a flag they haven’t looked into it properly.
I’d highly recommend checking out this video for anyone who wants to approach developers.
✨Product
Effective channels to gain customer feedback - Mind the Product
Reading Time: 5 mins
Summary: A blog post from a Product Manager at Mailtap on the most effective channels to gain customer feedback.
The Bottom Line
Customer feedback is solid gold in product and engineering communities. If used in the right way it can be used to get development teams to make critical technical changes.
Successful product teams spend most of their time focusing on gathering quantiative and qualtative customer feedback. This is one of the key practices I think most SEOs are not spending anytime focusing on.
I highly recommend that any SEO specalist understand how to tap into and analyse customer feedback. It’s one of the data points that lots of non-technical teams use to prioritize and add initiatives into the backlog.
This a great blog post if you want to understand how to gather customer feedback for your own SEO projects.
The value of quick customer feedback - Intercom
Reading Time: 5 mins
Summary: In this blog post a Senior Product Manager at Intercom explains how to rethink customer feedback.
The Bottom Line
Just like the SEO industry, the product managemenr community is constantly learning new techniques to improve products.
This is great example of how out-of-the box thinking can help improve a product by using a tool like Slack to gather customer feedback from customers and allow developers to make real-time changes.
Gaining feedback as quickly as possible is critical to product and engineering teams making high-value changes in the shortest number of releases.
If you want to understand how to use Slack to gather user feedback for your own SEO projects, then this is a great read.
⚙️Engineering
How we ship GitHub Mobile every week - GitHub
Reading Time: 10 mins
Summary: An engineering blog post from GitHub which explains how they use CI/CS automation to release weekly changes to a complex global mobile app.
The Bottom Line
I always enjoy reading engineering blog posts which make their release cycles accessable to non-technical stakeholders.
In the last newsletter I talked about agile iterations, this is a great example of how a weekly iteration works from a developers perspective.
As SEOs we rarely get insight into the processes and practices that developers use during a release cycle. So, blog posts that make it more accessable are always a joy to read (especially if you’re from a product background).
This is a great blog post if you want to understand the details of a weekly release in an enterprise organisation.
Tech Debt and Scaling Slack’s Mobile Codebases - Slack
Reading Time: 15 mins
Summary: An engineering blog post that details the process (from start to finish) of Slack dealing with technical debt in the platform.
The Bottom Line
Technical debt is a word many product, SEOs and marketing teams fear.
It can spell doom for SEO initiatives and cause teams to spend a lot of time looking for hacks to go around problems (rather than tackling them).
This is a great blog post for any technical SEO/marketer looking to better understand technical debt at a large enterprise company AND how they tackled it both as a business and as a engineering team.
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