Product discovery coach, author of Continuous Discovery Habits; writes Product Talk.
“Welcome to the next installment of Ask Teresa, the column where I address common questions about continuous discovery. If you’d like to see the other posts in this series, you can find them here. Creating frequent touch points with customers is one of the core tenets of continuous discovery.”
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…
When COVID-19 closed international borders in 2020, Seera Group's Digital Hotels team saw demand shift from hotels to domestic alternative accommodations like chalets and Istrahas. Using opportunity solution trees built…
Teresa Torres examines the difference between product managers and product owners, a question many companies ask her as a discovery coach. She traces how the product manager role evolved from traditional…
Teresa Torres interviews product coach Petra Wille about her path from computer science and concept work at SAP and XING to becoming a general manager and then a coach. Wille argues that product leaders, who often come…
Sonja Martin, a product manager at tails.com, describes how her cross-functional team repeatedly refined their desired outcome. They began with 90-day retention, a useful North Star but too lagging and noisy to guide…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams must map the opportunity space before solving problems, because customer interviews surface far more needs, pain points, and desires than any team can address. Treating…
Teresa Torres argues that discovery teams should be judged by whether their discovery work actually moves a desired product outcome, tracked as absolute progress quarter over quarter rather than percent of a goal. Since…