Product discovery coach, author of Continuous Discovery Habits; writes Product Talk.
“Have you ever been in a brainstorming meeting where the group gets stuck on one idea? They just want to run with it at the exclusion of all else. If your goal is to generate a lot of ideas, this can be pretty frustrating. But what about the opposite? You'”
This is a weekly roundup of product-building reads rather than a single argument. It pulls together a few threads: deciding what to ignore so you can focus on the most critical work, the primacy of conversion strategy…
Torres uses a made-up exchange between a product manager and an engineer to show how a feature disagreement is often really an implementation concern. Both people select different data and draw different conclusions, a…
Teresa Torres argues that teams who set incremental goals get incremental results, and that big wins require exponential goals. She recommends focusing on a single metric chosen for its impact on the business…
Teresa Torres's weekend roundup highlights three posts she found useful for building great products. She opens with Brad Feld's observation that startups often lack a clear owner of the overall user experience, which…
Teresa Torres describes rolling out Kindling, a simple idea management app, across her company to make product input more transparent and data-driven. She wanted an easy tool that everyone would use to share and vote on…
This weekly roundup by Teresa Torres curates readings on building better products, grouped around experimentation, skill development, and influence. Her central point is that experiments only produce value when they are…
Teresa Torres argues that communication is a core product skill and adapts Paul Grice's conversational maxims into four guidelines for product managers: be truthful, be concise, be relevant, and be clear. She urges PMs…
Teresa Torres reflects on her first year of blogging at Product Talk, which she started in November 2011. She found that writing sharpened her own thinking, often surprising her with conclusions she hadn't expected, and…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams often fixate on competitors' funding, press coverage, and launches, when they should focus on what customers actually do. She suggests competitors only deserve attention once…
Teresa Torres follows up her controversial argument that teams should ignore some bugs by explaining why interruptions are so costly. Using a series of escalating analogies about co-writing a paper, she shows how…
Teresa Torres argues that elaborate bug-management systems, with endless triage meetings and debates over priority and severity, waste product teams' time. She sorts bugs into three buckets: those that must interrupt…
Teresa Torres argues that when a whole company is invited to generate product ideas, every idea deserves thoughtful feedback, since that feedback is what keeps people contributing. She walks through common idea types…
Teresa Torres argues that product managers struggle to show stakeholders how they decide what to build, so people assume ideas just appear. Her remedy is radical transparency: define the problem, name the current…
Product managers constantly receive requests from sales, executives, support, engineers, and customers, and trying to satisfy all of them can derail a well-defined product. The author argues that you can rarely both…
Teresa Torres argues that a product should be built around doing one thing exceptionally well. Such focus helps customers understand when and why to use it, gives the team a realistic chance of being the best at that…
Teresa Torres reflects on a live podcast discussion about writing user stories, where co-host Roger Cauvin argued that stories lacking the who and why leave engineers doing only the bare minimum. Torres clarifies that…
Teresa Torres marks the one-year anniversary of Steve Jobs's death by reflecting on her mixed feelings about him. She credits Jobs with an extraordinary record of beautiful, usable products and a rare dedication to…
This piece is a curated index of Teresa Torres's earlier series on user story writing, pointing readers to posts ordered from foundational to advanced. It frames user stories as the main way product and engineering…
Teresa Torres argues that acceptance criteria are often the missing piece of a user story, and that they determine when a story is ready for release. She contends that criteria should be written from the end-user's…
Teresa Torres argues that user story prioritization is a balancing act rather than a formula. She suggests first setting high-level priorities through themes, then ranking stories within each theme by expected impact…
Teresa Torres argues that predicting the expected impact of each user story before building it serves two purposes: it helps prioritize the backlog, and it surfaces the hidden assumptions behind what a team is building…
Teresa Torres argues that choosing product themes is not enough; teams also need a way to predict and measure how each user story moves the product goal. Using an event-site example with the goal of increasing the…
Teresa Torres argues that user-story backlogs tend to grow into disorganized collections that lose connection to the product's purpose. Her remedy is to define a small set of strategic goals as themes before writing…
Teresa Torres extends her earlier post on user stories by walking through the INVEST criteria (Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimatable, Small, Testable) with concrete examples. She argues that stories should be…
This piece is a curated index of the author's earlier posts on breaking into product management. Its premise is that people arrive at product roles from many backgrounds, so there is no single path, and the most common…
Teresa Torres, drawing on her experience screening and interviewing product managers, outlines the most common mistakes candidates make. She argues that product management is not about personal opinion alone, that…
Torres argues that cold-applying for product roles rarely works, because large companies filter resumes by keyword and smaller ones have busy reviewers who skim them in seconds. Her remedy is an inside referral, ideally…
Teresa Torres argues that a product manager job search should start with self-assessment rather than a list of who is hiring. Companies differ in what they need: technical products favor engineers, market-creating…
Teresa Torres argues that public portfolios are a poor fit for product professionals, since they encourage over-claiming credit for team work and expose proprietary or employer-owned material. Hiring managers still want…