Product discovery coach, author of Continuous Discovery Habits; writes Product Talk.
“Not having enough time is one of the main reasons people say they can’t interview customers every week. And this is not just an empty excuse—most product people’s calendars are packed. So the idea of trying to carve out time to recruit and schedule interviews might feel”
Teresa Torres addresses a common obstacle to continuous discovery: sales and marketing teams that resist product managers talking to customers. She explains that this resistance usually stems from fear of the unknown…
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…
Teresa Torres argues that continuous discovery habits apply to early-stage startups, not just mature products, even before a product or customers exist. She illustrates the ideal path with fictional founders who set a…
Teresa Torres argues that teams should separate their research questions (what they want to learn) from their interview questions (what they actually ask), because people answer direct questions unreliably due to…
Teresa Torres argues that effective product teams should pair two discovery activities every week: continuous customer interviewing to find opportunities, and assumption testing to evaluate solutions. Visualizing this…
Teresa Torres argues that frequent, consistent customer interviews are a keystone habit of continuous discovery, since they make other discovery habits easier to adopt. She addresses who to interview: early on, anyone…
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…
This Product in Practice story describes how Ellen Juhlin, a senior product director at Orion Labs, brought engineers into continuous discovery. Engineers often see product work as order-taking, but their technical…
Teresa Torres reviews how her coaching business has changed and lays out her plans for 2022. She explains that her main goal is to get more product trios adopting continuous discovery, but that this impact is hard to…
Teresa Torres argues that job seekers should evaluate a prospective employer's continuous discovery habits before accepting a role, since most companies are still early in adopting them. Drawing on interviews with…
This Product Talk edition profiles how the Collaboration Group at 99designs, a two-sided design marketplace owned by Vistaprint, is building a continuous discovery practice. Senior PM Matt Richmond and his team treated…
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…
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…
Teresa Torres responds to Hope Gurion's proposal to add customer segments to opportunity solution trees, arguing that the tool should stay simple and focused on a single product outcome. She disagrees with two of Hope's…
Teresa Torres introduces Hope Gurion's approach to representing customer segments on an opportunity solution tree, noting that structuring the opportunity space is hard when customers are diverse, especially in B2B…
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…
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…
Teresa Torres describes how she used her own continuous discovery methods to shape and test the book that became Continuous Discovery Habits. Rather than writing the whole book upfront and hoping it landed, she turned…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams should bring justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) principles into continuous discovery, since products often encode existing social biases (e.g., pulse oximeters…
This final session of a three-part webinar series argues there is no single correct way to run product discovery, and that teams should instead be judged by underlying principles that fit their context. It covers two…
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…
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…
Teresa Torres uses her annual January post to lay out Product Talk's plans for 2021, applying the same opportunity-solution methods she teaches product trios to her own business. She frames her desired outcome as…