Product discovery coach, author of Continuous Discovery Habits; writes Product Talk.
“This post is part of the So You Want To Be a Product Manager series. We've heard from Oded and Colin who had some product experience from the context of account management type roles. We've heard from Zaz who switched to product from engineering. Today, we are going”
This interview-style post profiles Zaz Harris, a software engineer who moved into a product management role at her own company after her supervisors noticed her interest in product work and needed to fill a gap. The…
Teresa Torres interviews Colin Murphy, a former account manager who moved toward product management and shares lessons from his job search. His core argument is that career switchers must actively sell their applicable…
Teresa Torres interviews Oded Korczyn, who moved into his first formal product management role at AfterCollege despite never having held one. Oded draws on his anthropology background and startup experience, where he…
Teresa Torres argues that aspiring product managers can break the 'chicken and egg' problem of needing experience to get a PM job by starting their own side project right away. She notes there is no shortage of unsolved…
Teresa Torres argues that hiring for product management should hinge on demonstrated ability rather than credentials. As a hiring manager and consultant, she says she cares about none of the usual gatekeepers, such as…
Teresa Torres examines the public debate sparked by Jonah Lehrer's claim that brainstorming does not work, which followed Scott Berkun's rebuttal. She traces brainstorming to Alex Osborn, an advertising executive whose…
Teresa Torres shares the four opening questions she uses when screening candidates for product management roles, drawn from her consulting work recruiting PMs and designers. The questions probe a candidate's mental…
Teresa Torres describes how a weekend of family play turned her from a mobile-game holdout into a heavy user of Words with Friends, Draw Something, and Scramble. She uses a 2012 Journal of Product Innovation Management…
Teresa Torres argues that reading about a craft, whether storytelling or product management, does not make you good at it. Just as the Pixar story rules circulated widely without producing new Pixar-caliber…
Teresa Torres argues that the rapid user decline of BranchOut, a Facebook-based social recruiting app, was predictable because its core assumption failed. Her team had built a similar product and, through interviews…
Teresa Torres reviews Richard Feynman's memoir-style essays and draws lessons for product work. She argues that confidence in discussing ideas, rather than deferring to status, helps product managers defend their…
Teresa Torres argues that user stories communicate product requirements more effectively than traditional Product Requirement Documents. Long PRDs tend to be read once and then abandoned, while a set of user stories…
Teresa Torres argues that the handoff from product managers to engineers is harder than it looks, because the two groups hold different knowledge and often view the same problem from different angles. Drawing on…
This opening post in a planned series argues that a company can only launch a successful product if it builds something customers actually want, which requires deep knowledge of the customer's need, context, and…
Teresa Torres describes a period of struggle as a startup CEO, realizing that her work was interesting to her but not meaningful. Interest fades when products get hard or go wrong, while meaning sustains effort. She…
Teresa Torres, after returning to coding for a product launch following five years away, argues that product managers and designers do not strictly need to code today, but that everyone should learn the basics. She…
Teresa Torres argues that product managers constantly communicate complex ideas to engineers, designers, sales, and customers, and that visual thinking is one of the most effective ways to do it quickly and accurately…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams should talk to customers every day, even though famous quotes from Henry Ford and Steve Jobs seem to dismiss customer research. The key distinction is that customers can't…
Teresa Torres recounts a founder who received contradictory feedback from buyers about whether sellers should pay for a pre-sale information platform. Digging into the context of each conversation revealed that the…
Teresa Torres argues that product managers often frame their product vision as a specific solution, or mix a solution into a problem statement, which limits their options when the solution fails. Using a Caltrain mobile…
Teresa Torres argues that great product management means thinking from the whole business's perspective: a product must not only please customers but also earn money from them, which is the hardest part. She recommends…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams routinely build on untested assumptions, treating hopes as facts, and that this risks building something nobody wants. Using an imagined Caltrain commuter app, she shows how to…
Teresa Torres argues that many startups treat product management as little more than turning feedback into a feature list, and that the discipline remains underdeveloped. She notes that teams know valuable research…