Lessons from Scribd | Abby Gleason

This week I interviewed Abby Gleason, an SEO Product Manager at Scribd. Abby leads the organic search strategy for Scribd, a reading subscription service with millions of ebooks, audiobooks and more.

Abby has a wealth of experience working with content, business and technical teams working in agencies. As an SEO moving into a product role, Abby has learned to adapt and embrace many engineering practices to get things done.

In this podcast, we talked about:

• Getting into SEO
• Getting into product
• Combining user and Google experience to drive results
• Why Googlebot is a user
• The full process of getting things done with developers
• Working with designers and developers
• Designers are a superpower
• Meeting facilitation and product managers
• Product manager = communication
• Process of writing briefs for developers
• Importance of collaboration anchor points
• Conversation > Documentation
• Communicating Problems > SEO Solutions
• Devs asking for solutions vs Devs asking for problems
• Why SEO specialists matter in development teams
• Why SEO PMs need to prioritise ruthlessly
• Why listening matters
• Prioritising and SEO Product Roadmaps
• Creating SEO Product Strategy
• Four Types of SEO Strategy
• Communicating to the management team
• Forecasting process
• How to say no in an internal team
• Release planning process + ruthless prioritization
• Retrospective

In this podcast, we talked about:

Listen now on Apple, and Spotify.

Recommended top three skills:

Abby would recommend communication broken down into three parts:

1. Clear written communication - Avoid a wall of text in Slack, email or documents, and use on-page SEO and readability best practices.
2. Show your personality - You must show your personality at work in your communication as it helps people remember you.
3. Internal networking - You need to meet with people, have one-on-ones and listen to get a better understanding of the business problems.