“Welcome to the next installment of Ask Teresa, the column where I address common questions about continuous discovery. If you’d like to see the other posts in this series, you can find them here. Creating frequent touch points with customers is one of the core tenets of continuous discovery.”
An interview-style episode with Marily Nika, an AI product leader, on how product managers can use AI in their work and build AI-powered products. She covers practical ChatGPT prompts, when to build versus buy models…
A paid newsletter post summarizing Lenny Rachitsky's podcast conversation with SEO expert Ethan Smith. It explains the three main types of SEO, contrasts contextual and navigational internal links, and argues that…
Marty Cagan argues that strong project management is a hidden driver of successful product organizations, using eBay's Lynn Reedy as the example. He contends that project management is distinct from product management…
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 opportunity mapping, the first step of building an opportunity solution tree, breaks down when teams generate opportunities from memory, which produces vague, unactionable ideas. Actionable…
Marty Cagan argues that product teams doing discovery often move far too slowly, risking wasted time and money on unvalidated ideas. He distinguishes time-boxing (fixed work period followed by reflection) from…
This episode of a product podcast features Incident.io's founding engineer Lawrence Jones and AI product lead Ed Dean discussing how their team is building an AI SRE that helps diagnose and respond to production…
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 teams under pressure to keep up with continuous customer interviews are turning to generative AI for synthesis, and that this often backfires. The core problem is that AI cannot supply context…
Marty Cagan argues that removing usability problems and bugs only gets a product to the absence of pain, which is not the same as delighting users. Great products cause pleasure, sometimes from raw value, but often from…
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…
Lenny Rachitsky offers a five-point checklist for deciding when to sunset a product or feature, drawing on his Airbnb experience. The core argument is that a feature failing at least three of the criteria (low usage…
Lenny Rachitsky argues that true viral growth is rare and short-lived, and that most products spike when a large one-to-many broadcaster shares them. Drawing on Derek Thompson's Hit Makers and examples like Spotify…
If you use AI for competitor research, steal this rule. Every claim gets a date. Last week Claude answered a simple question about Linear’s competitors using an old source as if it were recent. It also stated a guess as fact. The skill forced the answer to show the dates,
Teresa Torres argues there is no single perfect tool for recruiting customer interview participants in continuous discovery; the best tool is the one a team will actually use. The article walks through three steps…
Hiten Shah traces the idea of 'slop' from 19th-century pig feed and swill milk through naval slop chests, industrial refineries, institutional cafeteria food and today's algorithmic content feeds. His core argument is…
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…
Marily Nika, a former AI PM at Google and Meta, presents a weekly ritual for building AI product sense: probing a model with messy, ambiguous, and difficult inputs to map failure modes before users do. She argues PMs…
Lenny Rachitsky opens with a note on the war in Ukraine and ways to help, then answers a reader question about waitlist conversion. Drawing on founder input, he shares rough conversion benchmarks for free sign-ups, paid…
Teresa Torres explains how she now records customer research interviews (audio only, with disclosure) while taking handwritten notes that capture structure rather than verbatim quotes. She argues that recording frees…
Cagan describes a "Big Bang" release as a project built for months and then launched all at once, a common outcome of Waterfall but also possible under Scrum. He argues it almost never goes well: dates slip or features…
This episode of Just Now Possible, hosted by Teresa Torres, is an in-depth look at how Doist built Ramble, a voice-to-task feature in Todoist that turns spoken brain dumps into structured tasks in real time. Ramble was…
Teresa Torres argues that atypical customer stories, the ones that stand out from the rest of an interview set, are valuable rather than something to discard during continuous discovery. Teams often focus only on shared…