Product and Engineering Wisdom Issue #18
Tips, advice and guides on communicating with different stakeholders
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 communicating with different stakeholders.
In product teams, communication is a vital skill to learn that is important in getting features and products built.
Stay safe and enjoy.
Adam
Updates: Apologies again, I’m still getting over my holiday and the newsletter was late :).
I might start playing when to release the Product Wisdom part of the newsletter. So, it might be more sporadic than it has been in the past. It will still be out every 2 weeks just not later in the week.
⚡Post of the Sprint
A Story of Product Manager Progression
by Osaseri Guobadia
Time: 19 mins ☕
In this webinar, the Product Director at Songkick goes through your career progression and all things she has learned along the way.
Adam’s Insight: A very much enjoyed this talk by Osaseri.
This is an honest talk on her career progression and some lessons that have been picked up along the way. I particularly like the mention of embracing baptism of fire, communication tips and discussion around strategy.
A lot of lessons and tips in communication (including how to craft a good story) are things that I've learned as a product manager that help to work with development teams. She provides some great actionable advice that I've noted and will take away.
I highly recommend listening to this if you're an in-house SEO or technical SEO Manager.
✨Product
Selling Problems (and Then Solutions) Instead of Philosophy
by Rich Mironov
Time: 10 mins 👀
A great guide by Rich Mironov on how to communicate problems and solutions to higher management.
Adam’s Insight: This is a great blog post on how to better communicate and raise issues with CEOs or higher management.
What I really enjoy is that the solution is simple: speak in plain English that other stakeholders can understand.
This lesson isn't just something product managers need to learn but also SEOs (I include myself in this). We often speak technical and assume we know the solution before anyone had a chance to understand the problem.
It's important to speak in plain English and in a language they understand to higher management, developers and other internal stakeholders who need to understand this problem.
The SEO MBA discusses these topics in greater detail but strong communication skills are vital to getting developers to implement your SEO tickets, initiatives and project.
I'd highly recommend reading post this at any SEO level.
Finding the Best Way to Communicate with Different Stakeholders
by Teresa Torres
Time: 18 mins ☕
Teresa Torres the author of Product Talk provides a case study on the importance of communication in a product discovery using Lisa Orr a Product Manager at Human API.
Adam’s Insight: The product discovery cycle is an important step in identifying customer pain points.
It involves a lot of customer interviews, sticky notes and mapping user journeys (highlighting pain points along the way).
At DeepCrawl we did this a lot for segmentation and other new features. It was an important step in helping us prioritise features and pages which would still help customers solve a problem.
Although you have to scroll past the introduction, this blog post highlights some really good points on how to set up communication channels with different stakeholders for a new project.
When mapping out a new feature, it was always important to talk to customer success, sales, marketing and other stakeholders to gather information on customers. It's also very important to keep them up to date on projects and this case study provides some really good tips on how to do this.
If you're an in-house SEO manager or technical SEO who's about to start a new initiative and want to improve communication channels with other teams, then this blog post can provide some great ideas on how a product team go about doing it.
⚙️Engineering
How to use cURL to test an origin server’s response
by Matt Torrisi
Time: 10 mins 👀
A sales engineer at Fastly describes a technique he taught his colleagues that helps way to test how an origin server responds.
Adam’s Insight: This is a great example of communication in action between developers and other stakeholders.
The result is that the developer created a simple technique to test the origin server response.
The article is only useful if you need to test the origin server response but its great to see a developer sharing their knowledge to help upskill other team members.