Product discovery coach, author of Continuous Discovery Habits; writes Product Talk.
“Customer interviews are one of the most impactful activities a product team can do. But only if we use the right methods. An early customer interviewing mistake is to spend your interview time exploring your solution ideas. You might present a prototype and ask, “What do you think?” Or even,”
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…
This Product in Practice piece profiles how Hemnet, Sweden's largest property portal, adopted continuous discovery through a grassroots start. A User Research Director and a Chief Product Officer describe how one…
In a fireside chat at the Product at Heart Leadership Forum, Teresa Torres and Petra Wille discuss how product leaders can help teams adopt continuous discovery. Torres frames discovery as the work of deciding what to…
Product Talk's community manager, Welena Villasoto, shows how a non-PM can run a weekly continuous interviewing practice. She practiced story-based interviewing with Teresa Torres first, moving from talking too much to…
Teresa Torres argues that continuous discovery is achievable in almost any organization, even when people say 'that would never work here.' She frames resistance into three scenarios: the feature factory, the messy…
Teresa Torres explores how the opportunity solution tree, a continuous discovery tool, can be applied beyond digital products to personal and organizational challenges. Through three examples, she shows how the tree…
This Product Talk announcement introduces Ellen Brandenberger, a product coach and Director of Product at Stack Overflow, as a new instructor for the Product Talk Academy. It frames the expansion as part of the…