I went to the Boston Bruins practice last week. I’ve been away from hockey for the most part over the last 10 years. Since September, I have been playing once per week. The practice was awesome to watch. Watching elite players practice skills and drills at a high level is enriching.
Part of me getting back into hockey ties to having an itch for my kids to play hockey. I know I can’t really control it. I can help influence it. The way I think about it is they will at least know how to skate. Who knows how far they take it from there. If they get into other things, I’ll be right there with them.
At work, you are either (1) executing someone else’s idea (2) executing your own idea. I’ve seen people early in their career be good at one and bad at the other. I’ve seen either direction to be honest. Someone early in their career could be good at moving on their ideas and not good at moving on others or vice versa. Personally, I was more natural with others so I had to work on idea generation over the years.
In order to progress, you need to do both. Awareness around which one you excel at is important and practicing the one that is less natural should be a priority.
My kids will be executing on my idea of learning to skate. At some point, they will execute their own too.
Author: Brendan
Product Discovery Framework Applied to SEO
A video from 2016 made the rounds amongst the Wayfair SEO Product team this week and I found it very useful. Teresa Torres shares insights into her experience working with Product & Engineering teams as well as defines what product discovery is and how to measure success.
As the discipline of SEO gets intertwined more in product management, there is a lot we can learn from product discovery frameworks. Curious technical and analytical minded SEO practitioners can naturally excel at product discovery because we’ve been doing details of it for years. By that I mean actions such as competitive analysis, keyword research, data analysis, etc.
While we’re naturally good at the details, we flock to solutions for our collaborators. I have found from experience that flocking to solutions is not as effective. What is effective is defining outcomes and problems for teams to discuss, refine, and rally around first. Then diving into solutions & experiments.
See a very simple example below…this can certainly get more complex with other strategic SEO pillars such as internal linking or schema but starting simple is key.
- Business Objective: Grow our base of new customers
- SEO Objective: Begin ranking for new keywords tied to priority business topic with a minimum of 2K new pages.
- SEO Outcome: Drive new customers to site by increasing organic traffic to new pages with new keywords by H2 ’22.
- SEO Opportunities / Problem(s)
- Potential new customers are searching Google every day for what we sell. We identified 5K relevant keywords with search demand which we aren’t ranking for.
- No clear system for programmatically generating new pages.
- Manual creation would take far too long.
- Discuss more with your team…..
Stopping here to call out that this is Product Discovery. If you are in an SEO Product Manager role, I recommend trying to frame your idea or project in the context above first prior to going into what we get to below which is known as Product Delivery. This is so important due to the cross-functional nature of an SEO Product Manager. You need to give your team ownership and context of the business objective and problem, then invite them to use their expertise on solutions / experiments.
What I like about this approach too is I hope you can feel less alone on your SEO island where you feel like the only one driving ideas and presenting solutions.
- Solutions:
- Consider technology vendor who has an out of the box solution
- Build scalable system for programmatic page generation
- Leverage machine learning to pursue a mix of programmatic content creation and manual curation
- Discuss more with your team…..
- Experiments:
- Run 3 month pilot with vendor solution and measure impact.
- Use GPT-3 machine learning model to produce content for 25-50 pages and gauge if it comes back descriptive and quality enough for customers.
- Discuss more with your team…..
Balancing Questions vs. Answers for Managers
Now more than ever, I believe managers should practice balancing asking reports the right questions at the right time with providing them answers.
In professional settings, one core need people often have is being understood. Humans want to be seen, be heard, and be acknowledged for their ideas and creativity.
The nature of a manger-report relationship is often one where the manager has knowledge perhaps because (1) they did the role before or because (2) they are more senior and are viewed as ‘having the answers.’
As a result of this dynamic, mangers might miss the chance to develop awareness about how understood their employees truly feel and might be too quick to provide answers/opinions on how to approach projects rather than asking questions.
When managers start from a curious, question seeking position, employees will naturally feel more understood, allowing them to walk away from discussions feeling motivated, excited, and engaged to do their job.
Managers should develop instincts on what questions to ask when and when to give employees answers.
It sounds obvious and easy, but it is very hard and instinctual.
In the situational leadership framework, I added a guideline on how often managers should provide answers vs. ask questions.
Essentially with highly qualified reports (both confident and competence), mangers should be asking questions more often than providing answers. Because the report is so strong, they will likely be loud about when they need an answer. Pay attention to that.
When the manager is in coaching / supporting mode, the balance is likely more even – though I’d still argue it should balance towards questions. If managers get their questions right then reports’ confidence or competence should grow through answering them.
In directing mode, managers are giving more answers than questions. Consider preparing asks and structure them in writing before or after 1:1 discussions to increase the chances the information is digested and understood.
Creator Economy & Traditional Education
The creator economy is much more vast than online professional learning – but from what I’ve researched so far – I believe it has a chance to disrupt traditional education over the long term.
Before I dive in here is an article from TechCrunch about Edtech and the creator economy. They list out the startups below in the space. I have also listened to a few of Gum road’s podcast episodes:
Startups:
Podcasts:
- Ana Lorena Fabrega on Making Your Own Path
- Daniel Vassallo on Small Bets and Planning for Unpredictability
- Dickie Bush on Writing and Running an Internet Business
Sahil Lavingia – the founder and CEO of Gumroad – offers a course called The Minimalist Entrepreneur ($1500), which got me thinking a lot about how the creator economy might disrupt traditional education.
When I say traditional education, I mean graduate and undergraduate degrees, but I see most creator economy courses disrupting at the graduate level to start.
Some quick benefits for the end consumer looking for education:
Unbundled Offerings: course offerings are unbundled for the learner to choose what they want. They’re not paying for 2 years, 6 semesters, and 18 courses – some of which will be valuable / culminating and some of which will not. Instead, students can zero in on the topics of interest and find learning opportunities. There still will be scenarios where bundling is valuable, especially to those still deciding where to take their professional career (hence why maybe graduate programs are more disrupted than undergraduate assuming most graduate students have a more defined area of interest).
Social Proof / Credibility: Who is teaching a course I want to take? What is their lecture style? How do they structure the course? These were important questions for me during grad and undergrad since I aimed for making as many courses as possible worth my while. Knowing the teacher, what they do for work can totally eliminate these unknowns and better help students choose the course they take.
The brand power of top tier MBA programs is one aspect that creators can’t compete with – at least not right now. A Harvard MBA carries weight with employers.
A colleague of mine always says MBA students represent a ‘great applicant pool.’ Maybe employers could partner with creators to hire people who take their courses?
Emeritus is a very interesting Edtech company partnering with universities and enterprise businesses to bring high quality education / courses to individuals.
This will be an interesting trend to follow. I am still very thankful for my undergraduate and graduate degrees. I haven’t experienced an online course taught by a creator yet but perhaps some time soon.
Clifton Strengths Finder
I took the Clifton Strengths Finder assessment in Q4 ’21 for the first time and found it both interesting and helpful.
If you haven’t heard of this test and how to interpret it, let me share a few quick facts about it.
- You answer a series of questions which takes about 15 minutes.
- There are a total of 34 strengths.
- The 34 strengths map to 4 different domains (1) Strategic Thinking (2) Relationship Building (3) Executing (4) Influence
- The results of the test provide you with your strengths in order of most to least and the point is to focus mostly on the top 5 but also the top 10.
You can see the domains which you spike most it. Another way to look at the strengths are they are the areas that give you the most energy. Where you score lower is where you likely get less energy.
I believe and subscribe to the idea that a huge part of career success / happiness / fulfillment is accomplished by knowing yourself well. In particular what your strengths are and where your energy comes from. Which is why I got a lot of value from this.
My results spiked mostly in the Strategic Thinking and Executing domains. All of my top 5 strengths were from either of these two. I also had strengths in my top 10 under the Relationship Building domain. Influence did not appear until 15 and 16 which I attribute to growing up as the youngest of 2 😉
- Learner –> Strategic Thinking
- Achiever –> Executing
- Strategic –> Strategic Thinking
- Belief –>Executing
- Responsibility –>Executing
- Positivity –> Relationship Building
- Context –> Strategic Thinking
- Arranger –>Executing
- Developer –> Relationship Building
- Individualization –> Relationship Building
I paid ~$50 to get a more detailed report of my results which ranks the strengths in order and gives insight into how to approach top / middle / and bottom strengths.
A few others on my team took the assessment at the same time so it became a great way to learn about others, how they are similar to and complement your strengths, and how to best work together.
A few colleagues had taken the assessment multiple times over a 10+ year stretch which seemed interesting to see how strengths change overtime.