Product discovery coach, author of Continuous Discovery Habits; writes Product Talk.
“Hi there, Product Talk readers! We can’t wait to share our latest Product in Practice with you. For this story, we spoke with a product team leading the Digital Hotels vertical at Seera Group, a travel and tourism company based in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). The team”
Teresa Torres examines the difference between product managers and product owners, a question many companies ask her as a discovery coach. She traces how the product manager role evolved from traditional…
Teresa Torres interviews product coach Petra Wille about her path from computer science and concept work at SAP and XING to becoming a general manager and then a coach. Wille argues that product leaders, who often come…
Sonja Martin, a product manager at tails.com, describes how her cross-functional team repeatedly refined their desired outcome. They began with 90-day retention, a useful North Star but too lagging and noisy to guide…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams must map the opportunity space before solving problems, because customer interviews surface far more needs, pain points, and desires than any team can address. Treating…
Teresa Torres argues that discovery teams should be judged by whether their discovery work actually moves a desired product outcome, tracked as absolute progress quarter over quarter rather than percent of a goal. Since…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams are often held responsible for business outcomes such as revenue, margin, or churn, which they cannot directly control. Business outcomes are lagging indicators that only reveal…
This Product in Practice piece follows the Simply Business product team as they adopted continuous discovery with coaching from Teresa Torres. Their first chosen opportunity, late customer payments, was a real pain…
Teresa Torres argues that the belief that product teams must be co-located is outdated, since many successful companies already run fully remote and global teams, and modern digital tools now provide most of the…
Teresa Torres argues that product trios (PM, designer, engineer) should conduct their own customer discovery interviews rather than outsource them to centralized research, marketing, or BI teams. Centralized research is…
This Product in Practice feature profiles Lisa Orr, a former data scientist turned product manager at Airship, who leads discovery for the orchestration product area with coaching from Teresa Torres. It shows how a…
Teresa Torres announces her 2020 priorities in a public annual letter, continuing a tradition started the previous year to focus her work and filter irrelevant requests. Her core focus is refining her Continuous…
This Product in Practice piece profiles Chris Hockley, a lean agile coach at SuperAwesome, who introduced the opportunity solution tree to several product teams through a staggered rollout. He found that teams grasped…
Teresa Torres publishes a running list of product, UX, and product-management conferences planned for 2020, organized by month with dates, names, and locations. The list is explicitly non-exhaustive and invites readers…
Teresa Torres argues that most managers claim to manage by outcomes but in practice still manage by outputs, dictating features, projects, and fixed roadmaps. The root cause she identifies is a trust problem: managers…
Teresa Torres profiles Rachel Allen, a product leader who builds new business lines inside large companies such as Allstate's Arity and HERE Maps. Rachel argues that corporate size is an advantage: existing assets…
Teresa Torres argues that product managers often fixate on having the 'right answer,' presenting finished backlogs and roadmaps that stakeholders then override with their own opinions. Her remedy is to show the…
Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion share practical ways to use opportunity solution trees beyond the original tool. Hope adapts the tree with color-coding so stakeholders can quickly see which opportunities and solutions are…
Teresa Torres argues that continuous product discovery is not limited to famous consumer tech companies; any product team, including those at traditional enterprises, can practice it. She uses a case study of Farm…
Teresa Torres, a discovery coach, shares a case study of a SEEK product team that moved from ad hoc, as-needed discovery to a structured, continuous discovery practice. Before coaching, the team interviewed customers…
Teresa Torres, who teaches design-based courses at Northwestern, argues that continuous discovery principles extend beyond product work to broader organizational challenges like engagement, team effectiveness, and…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams waste effort ranking backlogs of solutions with made-up scoring formulas. Instead, teams should gather customer opportunities (needs, pain points, desires) from interview stories…
Teresa Torres explains how she decides what to accept and decline as a product coach, teacher, writer and speaker, starting from a clear set of personal priorities: teaching, curriculum design, reading, writing and…
Teresa Torres argues that engineers should be active participants in product discovery rather than only writing code, since they contribute distinct knowledge and skills. She explains that different team members…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams shifting from managing outputs to managing outcomes need three mindsets to succeed at continuous discovery. She describes a collaborative mindset where the core trio (product…
Teresa Torres describes coaching the CarMax Digital Merchandising team, a mature product team that already practiced discovery but lacked deliberate organization. Through interviews with the PM, designer, and tech lead…
Teresa Torres shares six guiding principles for effective product discovery, distilled by her co-instructor Jeff Merrell from a design course on prototyping solutions. The principles cover building empathy for a…
Teresa Torres argues that product managers often feel frustrated when senior stakeholders override discovery-based recommendations with their own preferred solutions. Because organizations are hierarchies rather than…
Teresa Torres argues that asking how much time to spend in discovery is the wrong question, because discovery and delivery should happen continuously rather than in sequence. The right amount of discovery is whatever is…
Teresa Torres profiles Amy O'Callaghan (product manager) and Jenn Atkins (product designer) at Snagajob, who were coached in continuous discovery and now run a team that talks to customers weekly and validates work…