Issue #28 - Product & Engineering Wisdom
Tips, advice and insight product strategy, product-led growth case studies and creating a web performance culture.
A free fortnightly email that highlights the relevant tips, advice, and case studies from the world of product and engineering for the SEO community.
Beta Course and Newsletter Update
I’ve completed the beta cohort for the upcoming course (it was over the last 4 weeks).
I learned a lot from speaking to SEOs from in-house, agencies and consultants from across the globe. I’ve also already gotten feedback from those on the course:
“Thank YOU so much, Adam! I can't begin to thank you enough for your help. I feel 100% more confident going into meetings with Product and Engineering in a more positive way.”
So, I have good news and bad news:
Good News - I have a very clear picture of what information SEOs need to understand how to work better with development/product teams.
Bad News - I’m going to have to slightly pivot away from my original idea for the “Agile Fundamentals for SEOs” course. All this means is that it might be a bit longer until the course comes out (but I am aiming for this year!).
I’m also going to be taking August off from doing any client work and writing any newsletters. However, don’t worry I have a lot more ideas for The SEO Sprint coming from September onwards.
Stay safe and enjoy your summer,
Adam
⚡Post of the Sprint
📟 How to create a winning product strategy
Reading Time: 55 mins
Summary: In this Lenny’s newsletter podcast, Melissa Perri a Product Management teacher (at Harvard Business School and Product Institute), consultant, and coach talks in-depth about product strategy within SaaS and Fortune 100 companies.
The Bottom Line
I HIGHLY recommend listening to Melissa talking about product strategy.
In this podcast she covers:
Signs a team doesn’t have a strategy
How to speak to get the strategy/vision out of leaders heads
How to identify a struggling strategy
How to build a winning strategy
Although this podcast is aimed at product teams, A LOT of the advice can be easily translated to SEO/growth teams.
I highly recommend for any SEO/growth specialists in a SaaS, product organisation or working with product/development teams.
✨Product
📟 Best product-led growth with 21 examples
Reading Time: 25 mins
Summary: In this article from Gina Allman @ ProductLed shows the features that Product-Led companies have in common through 21 examples.
The Bottom Line
This is a great post which digs into companies like WebPageTest.org, Zapier and Trello to highlight how they are using Product-Led tactics to grow their business.
User experience and product-led content can be useful for certain product organisations to grow their audience (and convert).
I’d recommend this post if you’re an SEO/growth specialist who wants to learn more about how to apply Product-Led growth strategies (with examples).
⚙️Engineering
💻 Farfetch sees higher conversion rates for better Core Web Vitals
Reading Time: 10 mins
Summary: A web.dev post from the Farfetch engineering team on how they improved Core Web Vitals at the ecommerce fashion company.
The Bottom Line
In this post from the Farfetch engineering team they talk through their process for improving Core Web Vitals at scale:
Forming a team - The Farfetch team couldn’t improve site speed across the website in the traditional siloed team structure so they formed a specialist squad (see Triad team structures).
Defining, measuring and monitoring - The team used monitoring tools to capture both lab and RUM data AND set performance budgets for the entire website.
Business language - The team worked with the analytics teams to show that some CWV metrics impacted on the business KPIs (conversion rate increased 2.8% for each second reduction on TTI).
Cultural change - The team built dashboard and business case tools (including a internal business calculator) to help embed site speed into the culture of teams. See a video on building a performance culture here.
Improving CWV metrics - The team identified that it the biggest wins for CWV improvements were on the product and category pages.
I highly recommend reading this if you’re a technical SEO working in a large scale organisation and wondering how others have solved improving Core Web Vitals.
Note: It is difficult and requires buy-in from engineering team. Also, notice how the post focuses on business KPIs and not improvement of “SEO rankings”.
💻 How we fixed an unreproducible React bug
Reading Time: 9 min
Summary: Maisie Johnson at Trello goes through a complex React bug that was causing issues for users.
The Bottom Line
In this post Maisie describes how the development team needed to dive in a detect “clues” to identify the bug in the Trello React app.
This is a good example of the complexity of fixing bugs from the perspective of a development team. Sometimes it is difficult to understand and narrow down the exact “bug” customers are seeing.
If you’re a technical SEO or SEO specialist who wants to get a better understanding of the process a dev team goes through fix a bug ticket - this is a good example.
💻 How the BBC is rolling out HSTS for better security and performance
Reading Time: 5 mins
Summary: Jeremy Wagner a technical writer at Google Chrome talks about the BBC’s migration to HSTS.
The Bottom Line
A small but good case study on how the BBC have moved to HTTP Strict-Transport-Security (HSTS). Notice the problem the BBC is trying to solve is improving security across the website.
If you’re a technically minded SEO this is great post on how a large organisation like the BBC deployed HSTS across their web properties.
That's it! Please share this newsletter if you find it interesting 👇.