Product discovery coach, author of Continuous Discovery Habits; writes Product Talk.
“This post is part of a series about making better product decisions. At the World Domination Summit 2013, Jia Jiang gave an amazing talk about his experience following his dreams. When he was young, he saw Bill Gates speak, and he dreamed of starting a company someday. But like many”
Teresa Torres argues that product people routinely make poor estimates because they produce single-point predictions for uncertain outcomes like build time or conversion rates. Drawing on research summarized in the…
Teresa Torres argues that as a product grows and the leader can no longer be everywhere, the vision must be turned into guardrails that let others decide autonomously yet consistently. Drawing on the Heath brothers'…
Teresa Torres argues that resistance to product changes often has little to do with whether the new design solves a real need. Instead, people push back because they have grown familiar with the status quo and because…
Teresa Torres describes a common product dilemma: a few at-risk customers request a feature that doesn't fit the product's strategy and may have more perceived than actual value. She argues that the hardest part is not…
Teresa Torres argues that most product ideas are born from fleeting thoughts, but only some should become businesses. She offers a set of questions to test an idea's viability before investing heavily. Her approach…
Teresa Torres examines the common push to build a mobile app and tests the assumption that it will drive growth. Stakeholders often justify the idea with broad beliefs about mobile usage, yet the data on typical app…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams often fall for confirmation bias: people notice evidence that supports their ideas and overlook disconfirming signals, even when given the same data. Her example shows how…
Teresa Torres describes a design problem with a job posting form's location options, where combining multiple location types and telecommute rules created excessive complexity. Instead of designing from scratch, her…
Teresa Torres argues that product managers make dozens of decisions daily and tend to feel confident about them, yet decision research shows people often make poor choices while believing they are sound. Our minds are…
Teresa Torres uses the story of a skier who tried to build a snowboard that worked like skis, despite lukewarm feedback, to show how product teams fall into one-idea-at-a-time thinking. Drawing on the Heath brothers'…
The author describes a lunchtime request from a sales director to build a feature that could keep a few at-risk customers, and argues that the framing of 'should we build it or not' is too narrow. Drawing on Chip and…
Teresa Torres argues that product builders consistently overestimate how right they are, drawing on behavioral research and the Heath brothers' book Decisive, which describes four decision-making traps: narrow framing…
Teresa Torres walks through how she sets quarterly product goals for her team, focusing on the most valuable thing the business needs next. She shows three quarters of goals that changed as her understanding grew: first…
Teresa Torres argues that good design comes from deliberately generating many ideas rather than waiting for a single flash of insight. She notes that the effortless-seeming "a-ha" moment rests on a lot of prior work…
Teresa Torres describes mentoring a design intern with no prior design background, who is learning interaction design over a summer. Her approach blends reading (Don Norman's and Alan Cooper's books), iterative…
Teresa Torres reviews Lean Analytics by Alistair Croll and Ben Yoskovitz and argues it is an essential, accessible guide to product and startup analytics. She notes it covers the basics of good metrics and segments…
Torres argues that all-time totals, like lifetime registered users, are rarely useful because they only go up and hide whether a product is improving or declining. The right measure depends on choosing a time increment…
Torres argues that before choosing metrics, teams must define what success looks like for their specific product, because it differs widely across businesses. She illustrates this with three examples: a price comparison…
Teresa Torres recounts advising a junior designer who wanted to grow in user experience design. She argues that hands-on learning matters more than reading or talking, and that the designer's best growth opportunity is…
Teresa Torres argues that empathy, the ability to feel what another person feels rather than merely sympathize, is essential for building products that solve real problems or create delight. Sympathy tends to make us…
Teresa Torres proposes a draft list of seven foundational traits that underlie strong product management, arguing that developing these core abilities would fuel progress across the many specific skills PMs need. She…
Teresa Torres argues that even improvements to a product will trigger resistance, because users must adjust to any change. She contrasts Facebook's rocky rollout of the News Feed and Beacon with its smoother launch of…
Teresa Torres argues that most product requirements are poor because teams finish writing them too early and start building before the solution has been iterated on. She recommends treating requirements like writing…
Teresa Torres argues that a single A/B test rarely settles a question; instead, teams should string related hypotheses together around one underlying insight. Using an email subject-line example about urgency, she shows…
Teresa Torres argues that A/B testing should follow the scientific method rather than being used for trivial tweaks like button colors or wording. She recommends starting from a real insight about why recipients ignore…
This post sets out what product teams should realistically expect from email metrics: open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and unsubscribes. It explains that open rates are an imperfect approximation…
Teresa Torres argues that a well-designed email template is not enough; product teams must also manage deliverability, the process of getting messages past ISP and client spam filters into real inboxes. She outlines how…
Teresa Torres argues that product emails only help if they are designed to convert, and recommends building a reusable email template rather than designing each message from scratch. A template lets teams user-test and…
Teresa Torres argues that email remains a powerful channel for products despite claims it is dead. She counters common myths: that young users avoid email, that spam has ruined it, and that users will be annoyed by…