Levels of Complexity

Posted on by Brendan

Progressing in your career to higher level roles often means the levels of complexity that you are dealing with increase. I’ve found the best product and marketing leaders are the most effective because they’re handling their levels of complexity in ways that produce value to their organization. You will know someone handles levels of complexity well from working directly with them and seeing it yourself or hearing from others how good that person is at breaking down a complex problem or opportunity in a compelling way and influencing people to solve it. 

Individual Contributors Remit:

  • Weekly Tasks 
  • Manager Communication
  • 1-3 Stakeholders 

Leader’s Remit:  

  • Direct Team & Cross-Functional Team 
  • Stakeholders and Peers 
  • Multi Year Strategy & Quarterly Execution 

The contrast in these two remits shows the added complexity a leader takes on. Each bullet requires leading & managing more people. The strategy is critical to nail down and get support on, then the execution needs to be done by others and you need to find effective ways to check in and add feedback. You will also need to pick the places where you get your hands dirty which has to be chosen wisely. 

When my remit started to get broader, I was pretty bad at managing layers of complexity. I was able to lean on my expertise in my domain which helped but I had to learn a lot of important lessons and still am regarding management, relationships, and strategy. Here’s a few:

  • You can’t do all the execution anymore. Practice delegating and specifically asking for things. It’s okay to be really prescriptive and let people give you feedback to pull back. 
  • Ask really thoughtful questions to get better answers.  
  • Set up a mechanism for weekly project updates that are used in weekly discussions to highlight progress and blockers. Makes convos more fluid. 
  • Set up 1:1s with key people and have 1:1 docs to riff on ideas during the call…it is good to put the notes in a place both people can read them. 
  • Have a robust weekly/daily planning process for yourself. Allow room for flexibility but stick to getting the high leverage stuff done each week. 
  • Prioritize high leverage tasks in a week such as strategy document, project document or test spec. 
  • Don’t be all business all the time. At the end of the day, it’s about the relationships and skills you’re developing that is important.
  • Make time to innovate and think.

I remember early in my career working on a client project that was going off the rails a bit in terms of many deliverables on deck and there was a bit of chaos brewing. The client lead came into the room where myself and a team member were trying to talk out what’s going on. The leader diffused the problem and simplified the actions with command. That’s a micro moment but great example of a leader handling levels of complexity well (multiple team members, multiple deliverables, and the clients success and happiness). 

What have you found to be helpful in managing levels of complexity in effective ways that add value?

Web3’s Impact on Web2

Posted on by Brendan

I’m reading Read Write Own by Chris Dixon which is about blockchain technology and a good refresher on the history of the internet. 

It is getting me thinking about the impact Web3 could have on the industry I work in(search), the skills I’ve built, and the companies I help.  

Similar to what GenAI did in 2023, if it gains steam and becomes reality it’s going to create a bunch of threats and opportunities for the Web2 companies I’ve helped over the last decade. In tandem with the threats and opportunities will also be distractions. 

The more I read the book, the more interesting and powerful Web3 sounds since the power will be in the user’s hands. At the same time, I am curious to see the businesses that emerge in a potentially more popular Web3 world, what Web2 companies do if this trend happens, and if and how it impacts internet search. 

If you don’t want to splurge on the book just yet, this is a podcast episode where Chris covers it some. Another good high level post on Web3 here.

Strategic Framing in SEO

Posted on by Brendan

I find SEO both fun to do and powerful for a business. In order to have the freedom to do it inside organizations, SEO leaders need to understand how to strategically communicate to executives and how to mobilize a team to action on the strategy. Executives are important because they’re deciding on what to fund and put resources to. The team is insanely important because they’ll execute the action agenda that drives the results. I’ve seen leaders be really good at one and not the other in either direction which isn’t the end of the world but I find diminishes the fun and power of SEO. I am on a journey myself to get effective at both.

The thing on my mind lately is the strategic aspect. People can ask for more strategy when you drill into an action. The key thing I’ve learned is they aren’t trying to 100% stay clear of actions as they’ll ask about actions right after saying they want more strategy. They want the actions too but they need to be oriented to the actions with a framing of the strategy and the opportunities.

When you go into updates about your roadmap, lead with opportunity buckets and guiding policies of your strategy. Have a visual that will bring people along quickly. Show that every time. I’m sure questions about the actions will come after that.

You don’t need to be in a leadership position to practice this. Try it with your manager.

I’ll be over here working at this myself too.

Your Ideas or Someone Else’s

Posted on by Brendan

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.

Product Discovery Framework Applied to SEO

Posted on by Brendan

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…..