Product discovery coach, author of Continuous Discovery Habits; writes Product Talk.
“Jim, like many product mangers, spends most of his day with his engineering team. He clarifies requirements, triages bugs, and seeks out hidden dependencies. Sally, on the other hand, spends most of her time with customers. She's understanding their context, uncovering pain points, and identifying opportunities to delight. What’”
Teresa Torres argues that job titles and disciplinary boundaries matter for advancing each craft, since naming skills lets people debate, invest in, and share them. However, she warns that the same labels become harmful…
Teresa Torres argues that many product managers are so consumed by delivery work (grooming backlogs, triaging bugs, handling schedule slips) that they lack time for discovery, the work of figuring out what to build. Ad…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams building enterprise software can and should experiment, even though A/B testing is often impractical for them. She points out that experiments are simply procedures for testing a…
Teresa Torres argues that the Lean Startup loop of Build, Measure, Learn starts in the wrong place, and that teams should instead Learn, Build, Measure. Building first means writing code for features that often fail…
Teresa Torres shares her favorite books from the roughly 60 she read in 2014, spanning music, decision making, mathematics, persuasion, negotiation, time perception, integrative thinking, customer development, and…
Teresa Torres argues that confidence in a product idea reflects how coherent a story feels in our heads, not whether the idea is true. She points to Research in Motion and AOL as examples of confident strategies that…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams should treat every idea as a testable hypothesis, which requires explaining why a change matters and how much impact it should produce. Ideas from design, sales, and product…
Teresa Torres argues that a lack of web traffic should not stop product teams from learning, even if A/B testing is their only experimentation tool. Using a worked example of testing testimonials on a blog's about page…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams should test ideas with experiments before building them, and that this starts with a well-formed hypothesis. Vague statements like 'a redesign will improve usability' cannot be…
Teresa Torres uses a playful Halloween scenario, planning hot apple cider for neighbors, to illustrate the four levels of product analysis: design, feasibility, feature, and value. Each roadblock the cider plan hits…
Teresa Torres argues that many teams run A/B tests without first knowing what they are trying to learn, which produces wasted effort and unclear results. Before testing, a team should define a specific hypothesis and…
Teresa Torres argues that as product teams adopt experimentation, their tests are only as good as their hypotheses and experiment design, so poor setup wastes money, time, and sprints. She lists fourteen common pitfalls…
Teresa Torres argues that successful products, even giants like Facebook and Google, began by serving a narrow group rather than everyone. Founders who try to sell to everyone end up building for no one, because the…
Teresa Torres recounts meeting a fitness-trainer founder at a startup pitch event whose customer definition was vague and whose validation relied on survey answers about hypothetical future purchases. She argues that…
Torres argues that thinking of a product as a collection of features is a trap that quietly undermines product quality. A feature-first mindset pulls teams into competitor-chasing, produces me-too offerings, and invites…
Teresa Torres argues that product builders rarely stop to consider the ethics of the data they collect, even though user tracking has grown far beyond the cookies that alarmed people in the late 1990s. She notes that…
Teresa Torres argues that the outrage over Facebook's social contagion experiment is inconsistent with how news outlets and internet companies already operate. She notes that editors and headline writers routinely…
Teresa Torres defends Facebook's 2014 emotional contagion study, published in PNAS, arguing that experimenting on users is standard practice for internet products and that the backlash is overblown. She contends the…
Teresa Torres argues that product leaders need only a basic grasp of statistics to avoid being misled by A/B tests. She explains statistical significance using a conversion example and warns that many web testing tools…
Teresa Torres recounts how her team at AfterCollege nearly celebrated a false win: a report claimed their new Explore feature beat the old Search, but the funnel had been misread as page-to-page when it was actually a…
Teresa Torres argues that curiosity is a core skill for product managers, especially when facing pressure to build one-off feature requests. Rather than arguing or pleading, PMs should investigate the underlying need…
Teresa Torres argues that product managers and hiring managers often chase breadth, trying to be good at everything and ending up mediocre. She proposes a three-tiered approach: build foundational attributes that make…
Teresa Torres recounts a poorly timed home-page redesign that disrupted a live sales demo, and uses it to examine the tension between continuous deployment and the disruption frequent product change causes. She argues…
Teresa Torres argues that annual feature-based product roadmaps create false certainty, since release dates routinely slip and features get reshuffled. Product leaders still owe their teams a map, but it should show…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams should start by defining what success looks like, since a clear goal is the ultimate measure that makes alignment and decisions easier. She warns against drowning in dozens of…
Teresa Torres argues that an MVP should be defined by what you need to learn, not by the smallest or easiest feature set to ship. Using a hypothetical SMS-based event tool for soccer teams, she shows how the riskiest…
Teresa Torres argues that the MVP is widely misunderstood and that getting it right is critical for product teams. Instead of letting build time drive priorities, she suggests distilling a big, ideal idea into the…
Teresa Torres argues that the most important product decision is what to build next, and that common scoring spreadsheets built on customer demand, build time, and stakeholder needs lead to mediocre products. She…
Torres argues that teams should stop testing ideas at random and instead be strategic about what they experiment on. Rather than prioritizing a list of ideas by gut feel, teams should estimate expected outcomes…