#31 Product & Engineering Wisdom
Advice on top 1% SEOs, transparent roadmaps and building categories with ML.
A weekly newsletter that provides practical advice for SEOs on how to work with product and development teams.
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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 become a top 1% PM
Listen Time: 1 hour
Summary: In this podcast, Lenny Rachitsky talks to Ian McAllister the Senior Director of Product at Uber about his famous top 1% PM newsletter about what separates the top 1% of PMs from the 10%.
The Bottom Line
If you want to progress in your career as an SEO, then I would highly recommend listening to this podcast.
Ian provides direction on how to broaden your skills.
Although it focuses and talks about Product Managers, any SEO should listen and take note.
Ian McAllister has worked at organisations like Amazon, Uber and Airbnb — learning essential skills to get projects executed.
The core skill blocks throughout your career that any PM (and SEO) should keep improving are:
Communication - Learn to reflect on verbal and written communication to different stakeholders and what they want out of the interaction.
Prioritization - Learn to obsess over prioritizing the different dimensions at a macro (strategy and roadmap) and micro level (tasks and tickets).
Execution - Learn to drive execution and own projects.
If you want to listen and learn how to become a better SEO or SEO PM this should be on your podcast listen list.
✨Product
📟 How an Airtable product ops strategist makes roadmap updates at scale
Reading Time: 10 mins
Summary: In this post, Zach Felsenstein the Product Strategy & Operations Specialist at Airtable discusses how they use the tool to communicate roadmaps.
The Bottom Line
Although this is a “look at using our own tool” type of post, it does offer insight into a strategic communication tool many PM teams use.
Living and transparent roadmaps.
I know many SEOs use sheets or slide decks to communicate roadmaps to stakeholders but what is fascinating is that PMs use Trello, Notion or Asana to keep stakeholders up-to-date.
This is a great post if you want to learn more about transparent outcome driven roadmaps in action.
📡 Tension: why product development requires balancing conflicting goals
Reading Time: 10 mins
Summary: Jeff Paton writes a blog post to describe the language he uses to describe product development.
The Bottom Line
One key mental model that many SEOs and businesses need to understand is the difference between output and outcomes.
This is a great blog post if you want to learn the difference between these two concepts and the problems with building software, websites or adding features to a CMS.
I’d recommend reading this if you want to learn more about the product development process and the outcomes vs output tension that is always present.
⚙️Engineering
💻 Building Airbnb Categories with ML
Reading Time: 10 mins
Summary: A lot of ML engineers at Airbnb put together this excellent blog post on how they use machine learning as part of a process to create website categories.
The Bottom Line
I always enjoy reading how engineers found a solution to solve a complex problem.
The team at Airbnb wanting to “inspire” users to try new destinations, rather than the other way around.
They used machine learning and a manual process to create new categories based on unique places to stay.
If you want to learn more about how ML engineers solve this problem behind the scenes this is an excellent post to read.
💻 Five Data-Loading Patterns To Improve Web Performance
Reading Time: 10 mins
Summary: A blog post by Agustinus Theodorus on data-loading patterns and how they can impact web performance.
The Bottom Line
A short and snappy blog post on the top 5 data-loading patterns that you need to know:
Server-Side Rendering and Jamstack
Active Memory Caching
Data Event Sourcing
Prefetching and Lazy Loading
Resumability
What I enjoyed about this blog post is that the author uses both data and low-fidelity designs (using Excalidraw) to illustrate his point.
If you’re a technical SEO or SEO interested in technical tips and tricks then I recommend putting this on your reading list.
That's it! Please share this newsletter if you find it interesting 👇.