How To Develop Your Active Listening Skills

Teresa Torres argues that people often hear what they expect rather than what was actually said, which leads teams to disagree about the same user interview and to build the wrong product. Because great products depend on uncovering unmet needs and jobs to be done, product managers must listen actively to users, sales reps, engineers, and others. Active listening, she explains, involves empathy, attention to the emotional meaning behind words, reading nonverbal cues, and reflecting back what was heard to confirm understanding. She closes with practical habits, such as paraphrasing, asking clarifying questions, and suspending judgment, that build the skill over time.

01Key takeaways

• Recognize that you often hear what you expect, not what was said, and check your own filters.
• Listen for underlying needs and jobs, not just the feature requests people make.
• Pay attention to emotion and tone as well as the words someone uses.
• Reflect back what you heard in your own words and confirm it with the speaker.
• Ask clarifying questions instead of filling gaps with assumptions.
• Suspend judgment and let others finish before forming your counterpoint.

02Key sections

Why we misinterpret what we hear

Using the ladder of inference, the author shows that people select different data and attach their own meanings, so shared observations often produce different conclusions. Listeners end up hearing what they think was said.

Listening to users to avoid the wrong product

Good products solve real needs, and discovering those needs requires listening for pain points and jobs rather than asking users what to build. Active listening builds trust, which leads users to share more useful insights.

Listening beyond users

The same skill applies to sales reps and engineers, whose requests are surface-level statements that need probing for underlying needs, context, and emotional pressure.

The four steps of active listening

The four steps are practicing empathy and questioning one's own filters, noting the emotional meaning, observing nonverbal cues, and reflecting back what was heard to confirm it.

How to get better at active listening

Improvement comes from deliberate practice, paraphrasing in your own words, asking clarifying questions instead of assuming, and holding back counterarguments until you have heard the speaker out.

03From the post

“Have you ever found yourself disagreeing with someone about what was said? Perhaps you and one of your coworkers watched a user interview and you walked away with two different interpretations. Why does this happen? We’ve already been introduced to the ladder of inference when we discussed finding common”

04Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.