By Teresa Torres · producttalk.org · @ttorres on X · LinkedIn
Teresa Torres argues that product managers struggle to show stakeholders how they decide what to build, so people assume ideas just appear. Her remedy is radical transparency: define the problem, name the current challenges, invite ideas aimed at those challenges, and publish the criteria used to judge them. She stresses consistent, detailed feedback on every idea and getting some contributions into development to keep people engaged. The approach matters because it lets a company harness broad creativity without losing product focus or pleasing everyone.
01Key takeaways
- Be transparent about how you decide what to build so others understand your product reasoning.
- Define one clear problem before soliciting any product ideas from others.
- Ask contributors to solve named challenges rather than to propose features freely.
- Publish your evaluation criteria in advance and apply them the same way to every idea.
- Give detailed feedback on each idea, even rejected ones, to sustain participation.
- Ship some contributed ideas; if none are practical, revisit the problem framing instead of blaming contributors.
02Key sections
- Make the decision process visible
- Stakeholders see only the finished ideas, not the filtering behind them. Exposing your reasoning helps them understand why the product moves as it does.
- Anchor on a clear problem and its challenges
- Start from a specific problem rather than a solution, then list what makes it hard and where the product falls short.
- Invite ideas aimed at challenges
- Ask for solutions to named challenges instead of open-ended feature suggestions, which keeps contributions focused on the problem.
- Publish evaluation criteria and apply them consistently
- Explain up front how ideas will be judged, using metrics along the path to the ultimate outcome, and never change the rules midstream.
- Reward participation and ship some ideas
- Give detailed feedback on every submission and actually build some, since visible shipped ideas motivate the whole team.
03From the post
“One of the hardest parts of product management is making visible how you evaluate ideas and make decisions about what to build. Everyone has ideas. Rarely are you sitting around dreaming up what to build next. More likely, your wading through feature request after feature request trying to identify what'”
Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.