Product discovery coach, author of Continuous Discovery Habits; writes Product Talk.
“When we interview customers, our goal is to learn as much as we can about their context. This will help us understand their specific needs, pain points, and desires (otherwise known as opportunities) which will inform our product decisions. But what happens when you hear a story that stands out”
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…
Convo's product team set out to test assumptions about a feature letting Deaf users bring an interpreter into a Zoom meeting, but running those tests over Zoom introduced confusing meta-tasks and technical problems…
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…
Teresa Torres shares four examples from coach Ellen Juhlin of using in-app surveys to sustain customer touchpoints as part of continuous discovery. Across different products, Ellen tried a Mixpanel pop-up, an onboarding…
Stephanie Leue, then Chief Product Officer at Doodle, describes moving a team that had been run as a top-down feature factory toward continuous discovery. Despite good data access, customer feedback channels, and a new…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams often misuse customer interviews by spending time evaluating solution ideas, which yields unreliable feedback because people overestimate their future behavior. Interviews are…
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 teams are often flooded with ideas from customers, stakeholders, and their own discovery work, and need a way to capture them without derailing their workflow. In this Tools of the Trade interview, Teresa Torres…
Teresa Torres profiles Kelsey Terry, former Director of Product at Going, who led a pilot product trio tasked with testing the ideas in Continuous Discovery Habits and spreading them across the company. The story shows…
Teresa Torres argues that continuous customer interviews generate far more learning than teams can hold in their heads, and proposes the interview snapshot as a one-page artifact that captures a single conversation…
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…
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…
Teresa Torres asked members of the Continuous Discovery Habits community to share early mistakes they made when adopting continuous discovery. Three practitioners describe their missteps: a PM who ran discovery without…
Teresa Torres surveys how early-stage teams recruit interviewees when they have no customers or even no product yet, a common blocker to continuous discovery. She draws on members of her Continuous Discovery Habits…
This Product in Practice case study follows Kranthi Kiran, founder of ThoughtFlow, a collaboration tool combining visual mind mapping with data modeling. It opens by framing the risk founders face when they start from…
Teresa Torres opens 2024 by departing from her usual annual plan, explaining that a sabbatical-style 2023 was derailed by her husband's surgery and a difficult platform migration, leaving her facing burnout. Rather than…
This case study follows Mike Donovan, SVP of Product at Sauce Labs, who credits a Product Discovery Fundamentals course with reshaping how his team works. Moving away from a feature factory where sales passed requests…
Lily Smith, Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, describes how she set out to add deliberate practice to product learning after realizing that reading and talks were not enough to change how she and her peers work…
Teresa Torres and community members address a common problem: a stakeholder, such as a CEO, brings a solution idea that is unconnected to the team's current outcome and discovery work. The article argues against simply…
Teresa Torres profiles Thomas Groendal, a senior PM at Bluestone Analytics, whose intelligence-analysis products (DarkBlue and DarkPursuit) operate on the dark web with few users, privacy restrictions, and very long…
Teresa Torres introduces opportunity solution trees as a visual tool that lets product trios map the paths from a desired outcome to customer opportunities, candidate solutions, and assumption tests. The article argues…
Teresa Torres argues that opportunity solution trees, a simple visual map linking a desired business outcome to customer opportunities, solutions, and assumption tests, help product trios make better product decisions…
Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion walk through the seven most common reasons product teams say they have no time for discovery, and offer practical fixes for each. The core argument is that discovery should run in tandem…
Teresa Torres describes her Continuous Discovery Habits (CDH) community, built on the idea that people learn best in community rather than from reading alone. She explains why she shifted from being the expert to…
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…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams should regularly test the underlying assumptions behind their ideas rather than whole solutions, so they can compare options quickly and drop weak ones early. She explains that an…
Teresa Torres argues that good continuous discovery depends on first surfacing the hidden assumptions behind each idea, since teams can't test beliefs they haven't named. She proposes five assumption categories…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams should not commit to specific features by specific dates, because product work is inherently unpredictable and date-based roadmaps tend to create chaos, broken trust, and wasted…
Teresa Torres surveys how product teams build and maintain opportunity solution trees, the visual map linking a desired outcome to opportunities and candidate solutions. She interviewed six practitioners about the tools…