#23 Product & Engineering Wisdom
Tips, advice and insight on sprint costs, server-side rendering and ways to effectively communicate with developers.
A free fortnightly email that highlights the relevant tips, advice, and case studies from the world of product and engineering for the SEO community.
I don’t talk about politics but I think this is different. If you want to support Ukraine I found the following article to be useful.
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.
Be safe everyone,
Adam
⚡Post of the Sprint
📖 From engineering to product management at Google
Reading Time: 60 mins
Summary: This fireside chat from Mind the Product spoke to Stephanie Hannon Senior Director of Product Management at Google.
The Bottom Line
If you want to understand how product management works at a company like Google this is a great webinar to listen to.
Stephanie goes through some amazing stories of the day-to-day of being a product manager and how to prioritise in fast-paced environments.
One of the most important topics that is raised is immersion.
Immersion is the practice of getting PMs/Marketers to work directly with the users who they are trying to solve problems. This helps provide empathy and knowledge for PMs on how they can really solve problems.
The practice of immersion is something Stephanie really pushes for her teams to complete before building a product.
A useful listen for anyone wanting to know more about the reality of being a senior product manager.
✨Product
📟 Effective communication with software engineers
Reading Time: 10 mins
Summary: Simon Muno provides tips on how product managers can effectively communicate with engineering teams.
The Bottom Line
Successful product managers understand how to communicate effectively with their engineering team.
This blog post is very useful for SEO specialists (especially in-house SEOs) who want to understand how to improve how they communicate with development teams.
💰 How Much a Sprint Costs
Reading Time: 2 mins
Summary: Simon Schreiber explains the cost of an engineering resource working in a Sprint and quickly highlights the importance of teams working on high-value ROI items.
The Bottom Line
The truth is there is never enough engineering resource to solve all business and customer problems (tech debt, customer feedback, bugs, etc.).
Any business only have a finite number of resources and time to release code to production. This means any business can only do X number of Sprints per business year to both solve customer and business problems.
One key lesson I learned as a product manager was the importance of prioritisation of these problems into clear roadmaps that align with the business vision (see Outcome Driven SEO Roadmaps).
This is a very quick blog post but an important concept for SEOs to grasp is to make sure items in the backlog are high value.
⚙️Engineering
💻 Server-Side Rendering at Scale at Yelp
Reading Time: 8 mins
Summary: Connor Worley and Kedar Vaidya, Software Engineers at Yelp discuss the migration of server-side rendering system so it can scale.
The Bottom Line
Technical debt can happen to any company, especially for businesses who have complex tech stacks.
What is interesting is that technical debt can happen very quickly in any organisation. Tackling this either known or unknown high value technical debt quickly can help scale any CMS or system.
This blog post will be interesting to SEOs who work with React.js websites who use SSR.
✅ Incident report: increased error rate on GOV.UK on 5 January 2022
Reading Time: 4 mins
Summary: GOV.UK support team investigates an error rate on 0.5% of users that visited the government website.
The Bottom Line
Triage processes are an important part of engineering teams solving technical problems.
This is a great example of a team using a triage processes to quickly identify and solve customer problems (and being honest and open about it).
As SEOs we deal with crawling and indexing errors from code releases all the time. Using these triage and investigation thinking I’ve worked with developers to solve crawling and indexing issues.
I’d recommend reading this if you’re a technical SEO specialist or SEO Product Manager working with developers to solve errors.
That's it! Please share this newsletter if you find it interesting 👇.