Industry News

This isn’t a new revelation, but it’s helpful to see research to back up how important good managers are:

Managers play a crucial role in shaping an employee’s experience. For example, research shows that nearly 70% of the variability in employee engagement can be predicted by their managers’ behavior, decisions, and personality traits. In other words, whether people are happy, energized, or miserable at work depends mostly on their boss—and whether or not they’re an incompetent manager....

I like this idea from James Stanier on how to make sure that product strategy doesn’t die the moment it’s created:

One way to do this is to create a regular heartbeat for your strategy. The duration of this heartbeat is up to you, but aligning with one of the larger cycles of the year is a good bet: for example, perhaps you could do it quarterly or biannually. The heartbeat is a communication that looks back at the strategy, recaps the key points, and then shows how it has been...

I love everything Mandy Brown writes, but Coming home hit extra hard. I have been becoming increasingly disillusioned with social media to a point where I wish I could just leave it all behind, but I had this idea in my head that because of the work I do, that’s not an option. Mandy managed to articulate my feelings about it so well:

To step into the stream of any social network, to become immersed in the news, reactions, rage and hopes, the marketing and psyops, the funny jokes and...

This is a really interesting overview and perspective by one of the co-founders of GitHub:

So, to sum up, we won because we started at the right time and we had taste. We were there when a new paradigm was being born and we approached the problem of helping people embrace that new paradigm with a developer experience centric approach that nobody else had the capacity for or interest in.

The whole post is worth reading for the history and all ways things just went right for GitHub.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...

Today is the day Google would be celebrating its birthday or anniversary - September 27th. As Google posted last year, On September 27, 1998, Google Inc. was officially born.

Google Search rankings gains were lost for many, followed more more volatility this week. Google updated its web search spam policies, with a focus on site reputation abuse. Google's cache operator is now fully dead...

Krystal Taing, a Google local product expert in the Google Business Profiles forum and Vice President at Uberall, said she is seeing a rise in re-verifications from Google Business Profiles even after just making small changes or additions to your Google Business Profile.

Google is testing adding a new section named "About this place" to the local panel in the Google Business Profile listings within Google Search and Google Maps. This section shows you text and image reviews of this place in a stacked card format.

Microsoft is testing adding more details to the short video carousel it shows in Bing Search. Now it is showing video length, descriptions, a swipe to see more and other changes.