Product Trio

The ultimate guide to OKRs

Stakeholder Management for Product Teams: Show Your Work, Don't Sell Your Conclusions

Teresa Torres argues that product teams are sliding back into feature-factory habits as AI tools make shipping faster, and that stakeholders often arrive with solutions rather than problems. Her core advice is to stop…

Ch. 4: Visualizing What You Already Know

This book club post kicks off a monthly reading guide for Teresa Torres's Continuous Discovery Habits on its fifth anniversary. It focuses on Chapter 4, which argues that individuals should draw their own experience…

Boundaries Between Product & Engineering - All Things Product Podcast with Teresa Torres & Petra Wille

Teresa Torres and Petra Wille examine the blurred line between product and engineering, where product managers drift into owning bugs, tech debt and architecture. They argue this starts as helpfulness but leads to PM…

The Product Operating Model Explained: From Pilot Teams to Full Transformation

Teresa Torres explains the product operating model, a set of first principles popularized by Marty Cagan, which focuses on achieving customer and business outcomes rather than shipping outputs. She contrasts it with the…

The Impact of Working in a Product Trio

Teresa Torres argues that defining the ideal customer profile should not belong to one function but be shared across product, design, engineering, sales, marketing, customer success, and finance. Cross-functional…

Making Continuous Discovery Work for You: The SPICEY Approach

Teresa Torres argues that teams should adopt continuous discovery through small, sustainable habits rather than attempting a full transformation at once, which often leads to frustration. She adapts Nisha Vora's SPICEY…

Y Oslo 2024: When It Comes to Discovery, Something is Better Than Nothing

Teresa Torres recaps her talk and fireside chat at Y Oslo 2024 on continuous discovery. She argues discovery is a team activity involving engineers, designers and PMs, that teams should start with the smallest possible…

Ask Teresa: Does the Engineer in the Product Trio Need to be the Tech Lead?

Teresa Torres argues that the engineer in a product trio should be the one with the most authority over technical feasibility, but that the word "lead" causes confusion because it conflates seniority, management, and…

12 Hurdles to Effective Product Trio Collaboration

Teresa Torres draws on the 2022 CDH Benchmarks survey of roughly 2,000 people to examine why product trios (PM, designer, engineer) often fail to collaborate effectively. Although most respondents worked in trios, about…

Product in Practice: How Botify Broke Down Silos and Moved to Product Trios

Teresa Torres profiles how Botify, a B2B SaaS company, gradually moved from siloed roles to product trios (PM, designer, tech lead) starting in 2019. The shift was driven by its Chief Product Officer and several team…

Product in Practice: Why Ramsey Solutions Rotates Engineers in Their Product Trios

This Product in Practice story from Ramsey Solutions explains how the company got engineers to take part in product trios, despite their reluctance. Engineers feared falling behind technically and saw the tech lead role…

Don't Use Generative AI to Replace Discovery with Real Humans

Teresa Torres argues against generative AI tools that try to replace real discovery work, such as synthetic customer interviews, auto-generated opportunity solution trees, or AI-drafted artifacts. She explains that…

Product Trios: What They Are, Why They Matter, and How to Get Started

Teresa Torres argues that product trios, small cross-functional teams of product, design, and engineering, should jointly own both discovery (deciding what to build) and delivery. She contrasts this with waterfall…

Ask the Community: How Do You Shift From Functional Teams to Value-Driven Teams?

Teresa Torres and community members explore how organizations moving from functional or platform teams (back-end, web, mobile) to cross-functional, value-driven product teams can make the transition. Functional…

Product in Practice: Introducing Opportunity Solution Trees at Texthelp

Teresa Torres profiles Tali Melchior, Director of Product Management at Texthelp, who introduced opportunity solution trees (OSTs) first at a previous company after a book club, then at Texthelp, and later through…

Product in Practice: Bringing the Discovery Habits to WebMD

Sandrine Veillet, VP of Global Product at WebMD, describes how she introduced continuous discovery into a large, previously waterfall-style product organization. She began by building a product vision and simple…

Product in Practice: Stepping Into Your First Product Leadership Role—What to Expect

New product leaders often struggle with the shift from doing discovery and delivery themselves to leading teams and stakeholders. Two leaders from the Continuous Discovery Habits community share how they handled this…

Product in Practice: All It Took Was One Product Trio to Inspire Change—The Hemnet Story

This Product in Practice piece profiles how Hemnet, Sweden's largest property portal, adopted continuous discovery through a grassroots start. A User Research Director and a Chief Product Officer describe how one…

How Can Product Leaders Support Continuous Discovery?

In a fireside chat at the Product at Heart Leadership Forum, Teresa Torres and Petra Wille discuss how product leaders can help teams adopt continuous discovery. Torres frames discovery as the work of deciding what to…

Everyone Can Do Continuous Discovery—Even You! Here’s How

Teresa Torres argues that continuous discovery is achievable in almost any organization, even when people say 'that would never work here.' She frames resistance into three scenarios: the feature factory, the messy…

Product in Practice: One Product Manager’s Quest to Adopt Continuous Discovery at Her Company

Teresa Torres profiles Bianca Starling, a senior product manager at Voxy, who adopted continuous discovery habits by starting with a small, time-boxed MVP rather than overhauling the whole product organization. She…

Insights from the CDH Benchmark Survey: Measuring Product and Team Performance

Teresa Torres ran the inaugural CDH Benchmark survey, collecting responses from 1,999 product people across 78 countries to measure how many teams have adopted continuous discovery habits and whether those habits…

Customer Interviews: How to Recruit, What to Ask, and How to Synthesize What You Learn

Teresa Torres argues that customer interviews are among the most valuable and sustainable ways for product teams to learn about customers, creating a compounding competitive advantage. She separates true customer…

Tools of the Trade: A Look at Pendo’s Discovery Tech Stack

This Tools of the Trade installment profiles Steve Cheshire, a PM at Pendo, to show how one team runs continuous discovery with a practical tech stack. The core argument is that there is no single correct toolset; the…

Ask Teresa: Who’s Responsible for What in the Product Trio?

Teresa Torres argues that every member of the product trio (product manager, designer, engineer) is jointly responsible and accountable for all five risk areas: desirable, viable, feasible, usable, and ethical…

Discovery Hand-Offs Kill Momentum: Here’s What to Do Instead

Teresa Torres argues that handing discovery findings from a product trio to the rest of the delivery team recreates the old waterfall 'game of telephone', losing context and distorting customer needs. Discovery should…

Tools of the Trade: A Look at Optimal Workshop’s Discovery Tech Stack

Teresa Torres introduces a new series, Tools of the Trade, profiling continuous discovery practitioners and the tools they use. This first edition features Rebecca Klee, a UX Researcher at Optimal Workshop, who walks…

Product in Practice: Finding the Best Way to Communicate with Different Stakeholders

Teresa Torres profiles Lisa Orr, a product manager who carried her continuous discovery habits from Airship to a new Senior PM role at Human API. The central argument is that good discovery is wasted unless stakeholders…

Product Discovery Basics: Everything You Need to Know

Teresa Torres argues that product discovery, the work of deciding what to build, should be a continuous activity rather than a project-based phase at the start of a initiative. She contrasts it with delivery, the work…

Core Concept: Getting Engineers to Embrace the Product Trio

Teresa Torres argues that engineers should be part of product discovery from the start, and offers three tactics for overcoming their resistance. Many engineers resist customer contact, but they still hold strong…

Core Concept: The Role of User Research in a Continuous Discovery World

Teresa Torres argues that user researchers have a vital place in continuous discovery, even though most product trios don't include one by default because companies rarely have enough researchers. She outlines three…

Core Concept: What Roles are Represented in a Product Trio?

Teresa Torres addresses the most common reader question about her book Continuous Discovery Habits: why user researchers, marketers, data analysts and other roles were not named in the product trio. She explains that…

The CSPO Pathology

Marty Cagan argues that the product management field suffers from a widespread problem: many people become product managers after only a Certified Scrum Product Owner course, which teaches delivery-process rituals…

Core Concept: Collaborative Decision-Making in a Product Trio

Teresa Torres argues that product trios (a product manager, designer, and engineer) struggle to agree when they start from individual preferences and jump straight to solutions. Instead, they should first build a shared…

Continuous Discovery Habits (the Book) is Finally Here!

Teresa Torres announces the launch of her book Continuous Discovery Habits, presenting it as a guide for product trios to run a structured, sustainable discovery practice. She frames it as the distillation of eight…

Core Concept: The Product Trio

Teresa Torres introduces the product trio: a product manager, designer, and engineer who share responsibility for product decisions rather than handing work off in sequence. She argues the traditional handoff model…

Why There’s No Single “Right” Way to Do Discovery: Part 2

Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion continue their series arguing there is no single right way to run product discovery, while holding teams to shared principles. This session covers two principles of continuous discovery…

Why There’s No Single “Right” Way to Do Discovery: Part 1

Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion, both discovery coaches, argue that there is no single correct way to do product discovery, because every company, team, and customer base differs. Instead of prescribing one method, they…

Product Managers and Product Owners: What’s the Difference?

Teresa Torres examines the difference between product managers and product owners, a question many companies ask her as a discovery coach. She traces how the product manager role evolved from traditional…

Why Engineers Should Participate in Discovery

Teresa Torres argues that engineers should be active participants in product discovery rather than only writing code, since they contribute distinct knowledge and skills. She explains that different team members…

Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more