Product and Engineering Wisdom - Issue #14
Advice and tips on embracing the product mindset.
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 👋,
In this issue, the topic is embracing the product mindset.
This requires looking at problems, projects and even teams in a different way. The following articles provide tips, advice and guidance on how move to a product mindset:
Stay safe and enjoy.
Adam
The SEO Sprint Retrospective
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⚡Post of the Sprint
The Mindset That Kills Product Thinking
by Jeff Patton
Jeff Patton explains why following the agile manifesto makes you a good service provider but might not be a successful product creator.
Adam’s Insight: A lot of businesses focus on product delivery as a measure of success.
In this blog post, Jeff talks about why the outcome and impact mentality is critical for product success and the many pitfalls companies fall for when releasing software.
I have written about outcome vs output mentality in SEO, but Jeff does an amazing job explaining these concepts by using kitchen remodelling.
I'd recommend reading this for any junior or senior SEO who want to understand more about outcomes vs outputs.
✨Product
Why Product Pitches Fail
by Linda Z
Linda Z talks about the three biggest mistakes she sees when product teams pitch projects or new features in her newsletter.
Adam’s Insight: SEO and product aren't that different when they pitch projects. Both have to justify growth, roadmaps and new team members to get the job done.
Linda Z highlights four tips that I think SEO teams could learn from:
Use the rule of 3 when persuading stakeholders
Use stories to inspire and excite your team
Use numbers to prioritise tasks
Use analogies to sell helps teams get projects in 3 seconds
I would recommend reading this if you're an SEO who pitches a lot to teams.
Getting Engineers to Embrace the Product Trio
by Teresa Torres
Terresa discusses getting developers to be involved in the discovery phase of any project and provides tips on how to get them involved.
Adam’s Insight: For a product manager getting developers as early as possible is critical in getting a feature or product release.
Speaking to developers early on in the discovery phase of any project (especially SEO) is critical to understanding the feasibility of your proposed project.
Terresa's article also highlights a good point. We've spent a long time shutting down developers ideas and making them complete "tasks".
It shouldn't then be a surprise they are reluctant to engage with the discovery process of projects. SEOs face exactly the same challenges and should engage with development teams as soon as possible when trying to get recommendations implemented.
I'd recommend any SEO read this if they rely on development teams to get projects completed.
⚙️Engineering
Revamping Confluence Cloud Search
by Swati Katta
Swati, a Product Manager at Atlassian, provides a detailed blog post on the migration of the internal search service to a new platform.
Adam’s Insight: This is a very detailed post on releasing a new feature for Atlassian.
There is a lot to digest (some of it quite technical) but it is a great example of the complexities that product and engineering teams face when shipping new features.
I would recommend taking close attention to the lessons learned and details on why they are migrating.
Although this is specific to Atlassian a lot of the lessons learned Swati lists are also quite common at other organisations.
I'd recommend grabbing a coffee and going through this if you are a Technical SEO who works a lot with development teams.
Analyzing Customer Issues to Improve User Experience
by Nimesh Agarwal, Aravind Ranganathan, and Pallavi Nagesharao
The support team at Uber have published an article on the data and analytics technology used by their team to identify business trends within the organisation.
Adam’s Insight: This is a long technical blog post but I think it is very useful for anyone wanting to understand the complexity of identifying trends within a large organisation like Uber.
Quickly identifying business trends is critical to helping improve the product and the customer experience on the app. This blog post highlights the many challenges and growing examples of Uber building an analytics engine that can process information to help teams to quickly react to a growing problem.
As SEOs, we always track what Google is doing but there is a growing need to track other customer and business metrics which could indicate an issue. For example, monitoring the number of unsatisfied customers with FAQ content or the growing number of negative reviews for a product (or the business).
I'd recommend reading this if you're an SEO who wants to invest in monitoring other business metrics which identify issues with customer experience.
The SEO Sprint Retrospective
Please feel free to leave feedback so I can improve this newsletter.