Lagging vs leading, Devs hate meetings, Future-proofing
Lagging vs leading, Devs hate meetings, Future-proofing
Edition #13 - Monday 3-2-1
Don’t forget the SEO Case Study Database is launching this Wednesday at 2 pm UK time. I’ll send out a newsletter with further details on where you can buy the database.
Hello 👋,
Welcome to the 3-2-1 Monday newsletter.
Every Monday morning, start your week with the following:
💡 3 short ideas about working with devs and product teams.
📰 Two articles to explore to help be more effective with product and dev teams.
❓ One question for you to think about this week while working.
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💡 3 Short Ideas
Short ideas on how to improve working with devs and product teams.
1) Lagging vs Leading Indicators
SEO traffic is a lagging indicator.
Clients and stakeholders always ask me when they will see results from SEO. I always give the usual 6-12 months response, but I also like to educate them that SEO traffic is a lagging indicator.
What is a lagging indicator?
“A lagging indicator is a metric that takes a long time to impact or measure.” - Geckoboard
This means that the work done in the first 6 months (inputs) will impact the performance in the next 6 months. Everyone wants the results, but nobody does the work.
What is also important to understand is that SEO is a continuous investment. As time passes, SEO traffic will increase or decrease based on the investment.
When working with the product and engineering teams, you must ruthlessly prioritise and focus on the inputs/initiatives/opportunities that drive your SEO performance. There is no point in trying to implement every little task because these teams don’t have time or resources.
It is these inputs that make up your leading metrics. A leading metric is:
“Leading indicators give early indications of performance.” - Geckoboard
Only by focusing on getting inputs to execute (publishing content, fixing bugs, shipping SEO features) can we be sure that our SEO traffic will see an improvement in the next 6 months.
Tom Critchlow over at the SEOMBA wrote a great piece all about identifying SEO input metrics that will drive SEO performance which I’d recommend checking out 👇.
2) Developers hate low-engagement meetings
A survey of over 1,000 developers in the US found that the biggest productivity drain is not technical but waiting on other people and unnecessary meetings.
When working with development teams, you need to be aware that they are constantly either:
⌚ Fighting for their time
🔃 Waiting for other teams to provide further details
To address these pain points, I always make sure that I follow three simple steps to make sure I am maximising their time (and mine):
🧠 Understand - Get a better understanding of team processes and meeting schedules.
🤖 Optimise - When booking a meeting, make sure it has a goal, is time-bound, and you have the requirements ready.
⬇️ Reduce - Don't overload the dev team with meetings and force them to context switch; focus on one problem at a time in each meeting.
3) Future-proofing
A pattern I’ve noticed while working with developers at enterprise companies: Future-proofing.
What is future-proofing?
Well, future-proofing is simply building rules into a system (website or software) to handle a problem at scale.
For example, let's say you uploaded 100 images to a website’s CMS that were each 2 mb in size. To improve the page speed performance you’d need to resize and compress each image manually then upload them back into the CMS.
If you ask developers to do this you’ll be laughed off the Zoom call.
Instead what you’d want to do is:
Add functionality to the website to automatically compress images.
Add functionality to stop users from adding images of a certain size.
This is future-proofing. Creating rules in the system to automate the handling of different problems at scale, streamlining the workflow and stopping issues from occurring.
📰 2 Articles to Explore
Articles to explore to help be more effective with product and dev teams.
How to Plan Software Under Uncertainty
by
“You can’t just plan out a project ahead of time and just follow an instruction manual. That’s just not how the world works”
2017 Software Developer Productivity Survey
a survey of 1,000 developers in the US and UK by GitPrime
“The biggest drains on productivity are not technical. We can’t even fault the colossal time suck of Reddit, Hacker News, or Twitter.
Turns out, the biggest drains on productivity are waiting on other people and low-engagement meetings.”
❓ 1 Question For You
A question for you to think about this week while working.
Is there anyway you can future-proof your SEO recommendations?
How did I do this week?
If you enjoyed reading this article, then consider the following:
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