Product and Engineering Wisdom - Issue #9
Tips and advice on taking risks to quantify the impact of changes
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 👋,
It’s been two weeks which means another issue of product and engineering wisdom.
In this issue, the theme is taking risks to quantify the impact of changes.
The following articles can help you understand why taking risks can help you quantify the impact of business changes (good or bad):
Stay safe and enjoy.
Adam
⚡Post of the Sprint
The Art of Removing Features and Products
by Neil Rahilly, Casey Winters, Fareed Mosavat, Keya Patel, Reforge
This article is written by Neil Rahilly, Casey Winters, Fareed Mosavat and Keya Patel. All senior product leaders have written about why it’s important to learn the art of unshipping a feature or product.
Adam’s Insight: Thoroughly enjoyed this guide. It isn’t relevant to all SEOs but it’s useful for those who work in-house or want to learn more about product management.
Unshipping a feature or product is an important part of software development.
What is crucial to understand is that many features are constantly being monitored and tested against key results. The monitoring of the product/feature helps to quantify if it needs to be retired (which is a lot harder than it sounds).
This is a great beginners guide for anyone in the SEO industry wanting to better understand why and how product features are removed.
✨Product
We Don’t Run AB-Tests Anymore
by Dennis Meisner, Product Growth, Facebook
A blog post by Dennis Meisner at Facebook who discusses the idea of experimentation. In this article he discusses that experimentation is about measuring business risk and quantifying the impact of changes on your business.
Adam’s Insight: Experimenting and running tests is at the hear of all successful product teams.
In fact I would say that testing is becoming a critical part of SEO, PPC and many other digital channels.
This is a great article for any SEO/digital professional who wants to better understand why they should be doing testing and experimenting.
Lessons from IKEA
by Jon Moore, Silicon Valley Product Group
A blog post by Jon Moore a partner at the Silicon Valley Product Group who discusses the product lessons that can be learned from IKEA.
Adam’s Insight: This is a very short but impactful article from the SVPG which analyses the Testament of a Furniture Dealer written by Ingvar Kamprad who founded IKEA.
I highly recommend reading if you are interested in understanding how to develop a culture of experimentation and adopting a lean agile mindset.
⚙️Engineering
How image search works at Dropbox
by Thomas Berg, Dropbox
Thomas Berg discusses how the Drop image search works using machine learning.
Adam’s Insight: Image and video search isn’t just used in search engines, other software needs search to help users find their content.
This is a great example of the engineering team highlighting how they solved a problem of trying to find content which isn’t traditionally easy to find unless it is labelled properly.
A must read for any technical SEO who is interested in learning more about how image search works in the wild.
Orange: New PWA converts 52% better on mobile
by Adam Skręt, Rafał Filipek and Marcin Sierakowski, Orange
Adam Skręt, Rafał Filipek and Marcin Sierakowski discuss the benefits of launching a new Progressive Web App (PWA) that impact the bottom line.
Adam’s Insight: This is a great example of a team getting buy-in from the leadership team to improve the page load speed of the website.
I would definitely recommend reading this if your organisation is thinking about migrating to a PWA.
Retrospective
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