#29 Product & Engineering Wisdom
#29 Product & Engineering Wisdom
Tips, advice and insight product-led growth and influencing other teams.
A monthly email that highlights the relevant tips, advice, and case studies from the world of product and engineering for the SEO community.
👋 New Subscribers
Hello new subscribers,
For anyone new to this newsletter this is a roundup of posts from the product and engineering community.
I’ve found a lot of tips and wisdom that can be useful for SEO specialists working with other teams.
You can read more about the different newsletter types on the About page.
📰 The SEO Sprint News
👋 Hi current subscribers,
You may have noticed that I’ve started to publish weekly. I’m currently testing to see what happens if I frequently publish practical advice and tips which can help SEOs work better with development and product teams.
This experiment started from Sep-Dec 2022. I want to see if my ideas are useful and helpful to other SEOs in similar situations.
If you want to help out please leave feedback 🔊 and share on social media 🐦.
A big shout out to the Agile for SEO Beta course testers who gave me a lot to think about!
Speaking of the course ⛳, I’ve started to build out the curriculum for a more practical course that can help SEOs work better with development and product teams.
Stay safe and enjoy,
Adam
⚡Post of the Sprint
📟 Why Product-Led Growth is the Future
Watching Time: 59 mins
Summary: In this Lenny’s Podcast, Lenny speaks to Elena Verna the Head of Growth at Amplitude about growth and product strategy (previous @Survey Monkey and Miro).
The Bottom Line
This podcast blew my tiny mind 🤯!
Elena talks about the “in the trenches” growth strategies and tactics for B2B companies within organisations like SurveyMonkey and Miro.
What I enjoyed most about this podcast is that Elena talks about focusing on “retention” and not neccessarily focusing just on aquiring more users. If your users are not using and engaging with the product then it becomes very difficult to use product-led aquisition strategies.
If you want to improve your “Product Sense” and get a better understanding of how SEO works with other aquisition levers to grow a business, this is must listen to podcast.
This is defintatly a must listen to any SEO who works in a B2B organisation. If you don’t work in a B2B company — listen to it anyway!
✨Product
📟 Problems With The Lean Startup Methodology
Reading Time: 10 mins
Summary: In this article, Sachin Rekhi the Founder & CEO of Notejoy outlines the four problems with The Lean Startup Methodology.
The Bottom Line
Lean Thinking can be problematic for a business if taken to the extreme.
Sachine outlines four ways that Lean Startup can cause major problems for a business that uses the methodology:
Agnostic experimentation over compelling strategy
Failing too fast over failing forward
Incremental products over game changing products
Overemphasizes on product over deliberate growth
All of these problems are easy traps to fall into for anyone within product, growth or SEO who thinks they are doing agile by using Lean Startup practices.
I’d recommend reading this if you’re an SEO working in a SaaS or startup.
📟 How to get better at Influence
Reading Time: 15 mins
Summary: In this newsletter, Lenny Rachitsky discusses how product managers can get better at influence.
The Bottom Line
Working with development and product teams it is important to be able to influence other teams to get things done.
In this free newsletter Lenny provides a framework to help individuals within a team to help get better at influencing other stakeholders.
I’d recommend this to any SEO working in-house who needs to get things done but needs to build trust across multiple different teams.
⚙️Engineering
💻 Debugging Teams: Groundhog Day
Reading Time: 6 mins
Summary: In this medium post Camille Fournier talks about “Groundhog Day”, the experience of doing lots of work but never moving forward.
The Bottom Line
Doing low-impact and low-effort work day after day can lead to your company feeling like there is no progress.
In this article Camille discusses the common symptons of “Groundhog day”:
A lack of long-term strategy
A strategy that changes constantly
A lack of strategic execution
A lack of metrics and accountability
Failure to deal with the underlying circumstances
One of the key problems with “doing agile” is that your team can execute incrementally but see no impact on business results.
This is why it is important to really think about the problem and the outcomes you are trying to achieve when implementing features.
I’d recommend any technical SEO or in-house who works within a team that works with a development team that releases on regular basis.
💻 Software Visualization — Challenge, Accepted
Reading Time: 10 mins
Summary: In this technical blog post Renato Kalman (Sr. Engineer) and Johan Wallin (Staff Engineer) at Spotify discuss using software to visualise the complex system architecture.
The Bottom Line
This is a great example of a company putting into practice shared understanding and developing a common langauge.
To quote the article:
“At Spotify, we believe that a solid shared understanding and terminology around software and resources empower communication and collaboration, which is essential to success for a company at our scale.”
In this article, the engineerings at Spotify discuss how they have built “The Spotify System Model” using diagrams to help different teams understand how their system works.
This is an excellent read for any technical SEO or in-house SEO who wants to understand how complex architecture can be understood by a large team.
📋 Newsletter Feedback
How did I do this week?
If you enjoyed reading this article then consider the following:
📰 Share — Please share the newsletter with your network or colleagues if you think they might find it useful!
✉️ Subscribe to The SEO Sprint newsletter — if you haven’t already then please consider subscribing to the newsletter.