#26 - Product & Engineering Wisdom
#26 - Product & Engineering Wisdom
Tips, advice and insight on being a great product manager, how-to treat content as a product and delivering projects.
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.
Stay safe and enjoy,
Adam
⚡Post of the Sprint
📟 What it takes to be a great Product Manager
Reading Time: 42 mins
Summary: Lily Smith, Head of Product Growth at Bower Collective, is interviewed in a podcast and goes through what it takes to be a great product manager.
The Bottom Line
In this podcast where Jason Knight (host) interviews Lily Smith (the other host) and discuss the question around “what makes a great product manager?”.
They reflect on the past 2 years on interviewing other product managers and their own experience.
Lily highlights a number of factors that make a great product specalist including:
Clarity and purpose - Bringing clarify and purpose to the chaos of working in an organisation.
Common language - Learning how to speak the language of different stakeholders (CEOs, developers, designers, etc.) to get buy-in for projects.
Patience and persistence - It takes time for things to get implemented and ideas are constantly challenged but you need to have the patient with people but still be persistent in dealing with problems.
I highly recommend listening to this podcast for any in-house SEOs as what makes a great product manager have similar parrells to being a great SEO.
✨Product
📟 How we treat content as a product - Cloudflare
Reading Time: 5 mins
Summary: Kim Jeske on Cloudflare’s Product Content Experience (PCX) team discusses how his team treats content like a product.
The Bottom Line
In this blog post Kim talks about about how the content team modified and used Agile practices on content projects. They go through the same processes as a product team would to identify and prioritise content.
This helped his team keep up with the product and developmen teams which resulted in documentation being ready when the feature was launched.
Aligning and adapting agile practices helped the cotent team ship fast and often - while maintaing quality.
I highly recommend this if you’re an SEO Content specialist who has at work alongside product and development teams.
📟How to build machine learning-based products
Reading Time: 10 min
Summary: Olga Kuritsyna the Head of Product at Flocktory writes how to create ML product/features for other product managers and data scientists.
The Bottom Line
I’ve discussed writing Outcome-Drive SEO Roadmaps and this essay by Olga takes anyone looking after an ML product through a similar process.
It provides great concise but specific details around how to build a feature using machine-learning.
I recommend reading this if you’re interested in how Product Managers pitch an idea for a heavy data led idea to solve a problem.
⚙️Engineering
💻 How we’re using projects to build projects
Reading Time: 10 mins
Summary: Jed Verity at Github discusses how they use Github projects to manage development team backlogs.
The Bottom Line
Although this is a clear marketing blog post to get people to use Github issues, I like that they are using examples to show how Github teams deliver projects.
The blog post goes through the guiding principles and how the team work together to drive the roadmap forward.
The guiding principles are:
The pitch - Any team member can pitch an idea in an upcomg cycle (6-8 weeks) but it must follow a specific PDR format.
Keep it small - Any idea needs to be no more than 6 week cycles to build an idea to stop developers working on ideas for too long.
Ship to learn - The quick development cycles allow developers to learn and get feedback from customers quickly to improve features.
I recommend reading this if you’re SEO who works closly with developement or product teams and want to get insight into how they work moving forward.
💻 How we improved DNS record build speed by more than 4,000x - Cloudflare
Reading Time: 5 mins
Summary: Alex Fattouche at Cloudflare writes about how Cloudflare made their Zone builder for DNS propagation even faster.
The Bottom Line
This is a technical blog post that can help SEOs better understand how dev teams refactor and improve new features.
I recommend reading this if you’re a technical SEO or SEO Product Owner who needs to improve parts of a webiste - it might help you understand the mindset of how developers go about refactoring and measuring improvements.
That's it! Please share this newsletter if you find it interesting 👇.