Product discovery coach, author of Continuous Discovery Habits; writes Product Talk.
“This post is part of a series about making better product decisions. One of the most common questions I get at my company, is why don't we have a mobile app. We are in the age of mobile, how can we possibly survive without a mobile app? There are”
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…
Teresa Torres argues that teams struggle when they mix up the phases of idea work: generating options and choosing among them need different rhythms and different conversational modes. Drawing on Tim Brown's…
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…