#Issue 27 - Product & Engineering Wisdom
#Issue 27 - Product & Engineering Wisdom
Tips, advice and insight on Product culture @ Shopify, navigating large cross-team initiatives and why creating a product vision matters for developers.
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 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
📟 Brandon Chu on Building Product at Shopify
Reading Time: 50 mins
Summary: Lenny Rachitsky interviews Brandon Chu VP of Product @ Shopify.
The Bottom Line
I highlighy recommend listening to this podcast.
Brandon’s medium posts are well known in the product industry for being great sources of writing and helping junior product managers to learn advanced concepts (for example Product Management Mental Models for Everyone).
If you’re new to a SEO Product Management role I would definatly listen to this podcast as Brandon talks a lot about the culture of Shopify, changes to the product due to COVID and how product management is run at Shopify.
I’d also recommend listening to more Lenny’s Newsletter Podcasts (a lot of awsome product guests).
✨Product
📟Why Engineers Are Hungry for a Product Vision
Reading Time: 5 mins
Summary: John McDonald an Ex-Googler talks about the importance of creating a product vision for development teams and why it is critical to work with development teams.
The Bottom Line
Envisioning is an important part of helping your development team better understand the requirements of a SEO project.
John provides a good introduction on why a good product vision/envisioning exercise is important for getting engineers onboard a project.
He provides 4 methods for communitcating an effective vision:
Documentation - Provide concise and clear documentation which helps to communicate your vision.
Visualisation - Use visualization techniques to help development teams better understand your idea and the outcome you want to achieve.
Tickets/epics titles - Make sure to use appropriate titles in user stories and epics to help developers connect the vision with reality.
Discuss with the team - Disuccing and getting feedback on your vision early and often is an important part of making sure it feasible.
I’ve discussed how in-house SEO teams use clear documentation to communicate SEO projects to development teams.
I’d recommend reviewing the piece if you want to learn more about how to communciate an idea to development or product teams.
⚙️Engineering
💻 How to navigate large cross-team initiatives
Reading Time: 8 mins
Summary: Lily Wittle and Cathy Ji from the LinkedIn engineering team discuss how to manage a large cross-team technical project.
The Bottom Line
This is a great post if you’re interested in a real life case study of how a large technical project tp depreciate legacy tech is managed in a large enterprise organisation.
Both Lily and Cathy provide great tips on how to drive a cross-functional project across 100 indivudal engineers.
I’d recommend reading this if you’re a SEO who needs to work across departments to get SEO recommendations implemented.
💻 Debugging Ad Delivery At Pinterest
Reading Time: 5 mins
Summary: Nishant Roy the Engineering Manager at the Ads Serving Platform team discusses how they created a platform to help debug ad problems.
The Bottom Line
This is a great example of how an engineering team building interfaces to help improve the development experience, reduce waste and help the team improve the system.
All of this can help to make debugging issues more efficent and make Pinterest advertisers happier.
Nishant takes you through how they built an entire system and used documentation to help other engineers debug problems quickly.
In his blog post he says the result of this system was:
“In 2021, our customer ops team received a total of 7270 tickets, out of which only 78 needed to be escalated to the engineering team for further investigation. This means that 99% of all tickets were resolved without any support from the engineering team.”
This is a great read for any SEO if you want to better understand the impact of building systems to automate handling problems, rather than patching over problems one problem at a time.
That's it! Please share this newsletter if you find it interesting 👇.