By Teresa Torres · producttalk.org · @ttorres on X · LinkedIn
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 contends that competitors are no better at understanding your customers, that customer requests reveal needs rather than solutions, and that time-to-build and stakeholder consensus should not drive prioritization. Instead, she advises prioritizing on a single dimension: expected impact on the team's goal, which has already absorbed customer and business input. The piece matters because it reframes prioritization as a discipline of focused outcome-driven choice rather than consensus or convenience.
01Key takeaways
- Don't prioritize with weighted scoring spreadsheets built on demand, effort, and stakeholder asks.
- Treat customer feature requests as signals of underlying needs, not as specifications to build.
- Assume competitors don't understand your customers any better than you do.
- Let time-to-build inform how you deliver the most important work, not what that work is.
- Keep stakeholders aligned on the goal and their impact inputs rather than ranking features by committee.
- Prioritize on expected impact toward your goal, using test results from your top ideas.
02Key sections
- Rethinking the usual scoring spreadsheet
- Torres rejects the popular weighted matrix of demand, build time, and stakeholder needs as the way to decide what to build. She sees it as a process that encourages building by checklist.
- Customer requests and competitors
- Copying competitors and treating customer feature requests as requirements produces yesterday's product. The job is to uncover the underlying need and design tomorrow's solution.
- Why build time and stakeholders shouldn't drive the choice
- Ranking by ease of build yields easy, undifferentiated features, and running prioritization by committee yields products that suck. Stakeholders should shape the goal and provide impact input, not dictate the next build.
- Prioritizing on expected impact
- Goals already encode customer and business needs, so prioritization should use one dimension: expected impact on the goal, informed by tests of the top ideas.
03From the post
“What should you build next? This is one of the most important decisions you’ll make as a product manager. If you work in an Agile environment, you’ll make it sprint after sprint. Much of your success will depend on these decisions. Don’t Do What Most People Do”
Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.