Product discovery coach, author of Continuous Discovery Habits; writes Product Talk.
“Meet Sally and Pam. Sally is a product manager, Pam a user experience designer, and they are working on a new mobile app. They’ve conducted customer interviews, defined their MVP, and are now working through the initial designs. Even though their MVP will only include a fraction of their”
Teresa Torres argues that rapid prototyping is far broader than wireframes and usability testing. She offers a working definition of a prototype as something that simulates an experience, is built to answer a specific…
This post reports feedback from the first cohort of Teresa Torres's Continuous Interviewing course, which ran for 50 product managers, designers, and UX researchers. It recaps the course's rationale, drawing on…
Teresa Torres, a discovery coach, explains that her high-touch coaching is only available to companies willing to invest heavily, so she is designing a lighter-weight course for individual practitioners. She argues that…
Teresa Torres recounts a 2008 product story in which her team at an alumni community startup fixed on an engineer's Google Maps idea while the real problem was unwanted spam. She argues teams fall in love with their…
Teresa Torres argues that the popular "We believe... will result in... we will have confidence when..." hypothesis format is quick but insufficient for sound experiment design. She explains that teams should test the…
Teresa Torres argues that many product teams believe they already practice discovery, but they run interviews, usability tests, and A/B tests too infrequently and mostly to validate decisions already made. She defines…
Teresa Torres recaps her favorite moments from the Mind the Product SF 2017 conference, which she considers the best product event she attends. She highlights her own workshop on continuous product discovery habits…
Teresa Torres argues that managing product teams by outcomes rather than outputs is necessary for real autonomy, but it is hard because leaders struggle to trust teams and teams struggle to communicate progress on…
Teresa Torres introduces the Ladder of Evidence, a framework for judging how reliable customer feedback is. Asking people what they would do in the future, as focus groups and surveys often do, yields weak signal…
Teresa Torres traces how product discovery has evolved over roughly two decades, from long requirements documents and shipping flops like Windows ME toward experiment-driven, customer-centered practice. She argues that…
Teresa Torres argues that a simple visual structure, the opportunity solution tree, is changing how product teams do discovery. She explains that teams struggled to connect customer research with solution testing, and…
Teresa Torres argues that customer interviews often fail because people describe their ideal behavior rather than what they actually do, and their brains readily invent coherent but false explanations. She draws on…
Teresa Torres argues that many product managers remain unaware of a fundamental shift toward modern product discovery, despite the Lean Startup and design thinking having been around for years. She observes that many…
Torres argues that product delivery has matured through Agile, continuous integration, and story mapping, while product discovery, the work of deciding what to build, has lagged behind. She contrasts the traditional…
Teresa Torres explains how she now records customer research interviews (audio only, with disclosure) while taking handwritten notes that capture structure rather than verbatim quotes. She argues that recording frees…
Teresa Torres explains how she selects participants for a product management research study that drew 90 responses in 48 hours. She argues that interviewing is qualitative and descriptive, so the statistical idea of a…
Teresa Torres, a product coach and course creator, announces she is recruiting product managers and product leaders for customer interviews. She argues that after two years of teaching and coaching, she needs to…
Teresa Torres interviews Hope Gurion, Chief Product Officer at CareerBuilder, about how she built product management, UX, and analytics functions at a company that previously lacked them. Gurion describes shifting her…
Teresa Torres argues that drawing maps and visual models sharpens thinking, and that the Business Model Canvas spread because it makes a business model visible on one page. She draws on cognitive psychology, notably…
Teresa Torres argues that teams use A/B tests poorly, mainly to confirm favored ideas or to blindly try variations, which teaches them little. Drawing on John Dewey's account of reflective thinking, she describes a…
Teresa Torres argues that product managers are essentially designers who solve ill-structured problems, which have no single right answer and several competing solutions. Drawing on educational psychologist David…
Teresa Torres shares her top picks from the 74 books she read in 2015, grouped into product-management-adjacent titles, books on meaning and happiness, academic reads that shaped her thinking, and favorite fiction. The…
Teresa Torres describes how she turns annual priorities into workable plans: first into measurable product goals and process goals, then into concrete processes that deconstruct each goal, and finally into habits that…
Teresa Torres describes how she dedicates much of December to reflecting on the past year and planning the next. She runs an annual retrospective asking what went well and what did not, and keeps both lists in view to…
Teresa Torres recounts a early-career design review in which a client dismissed her work as horrible and asked to reuse an existing homepage. Her manager defused the clash by asking her to walk through her reasoning…
Teresa Torres argues that a common mistake among teams new to Lean Startup methods is substituting experimentation for judgment, testing options like folders versus tags without first reasoning about which is most…
Teresa Torres recounts a difficult period in 2011 when she was CEO of a struggling startup, dealing with severe anxiety and feeling unable to ask for help. After the company was sold and she stepped away, a master's…
Teresa Torres argues that product managers often wish their leadership, engineers, designers, and sales teams would behave differently, when the more productive move is to change their own behavior first. For each…
Teresa Torres argues that a company's staffing choices reveal its real values. Most companies say they prioritize customer love and data-driven decisions, yet employ far fewer product managers, designers, researchers…