Product Talk · Teresa TorresJun 7, 2023
Jun 7, 2023 · 8 min
“Adopting continuous discovery can feel like a big, audacious goal. If you’ve never spoken with a customer, how will you be able to set up interviews every single week? If you don’t currently work in a product trio at all, how will you be able to work and”
Product Talk · Teresa TorresMay 17, 2023
May 17, 2023
Teresa Torres observes that many individual contributors who love continuous discovery struggle to get their teammates, stakeholders, and leaders on board, because few people have time to read a book or blog post. To…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresMay 10, 2023
May 10, 2023 · 32 min
Teresa Torres interviews Ellen Juhlin, a product leader at Orion Labs, about how she introduced continuous discovery habits to a team that had been driven by founder-led outputs, sales-driven feature requests, and…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresMay 3, 2023
May 3, 2023 · 6 min
Teresa Torres responds to a recommendation in Monetizing Innovation that teams simply ask customers about their willingness to pay, which she firmly rejects. She argues that hypothetical answers are unreliable because…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresApr 19, 2023
Apr 19, 2023 · 16 min
Teresa Torres and members of the Continuous Discovery Habits community share the personal knowledge management (PKM) tools and habits they use to capture, organize, and reuse what they learn about products, customers…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresApr 12, 2023
Apr 12, 2023 · 23 min
Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion analyze free-text answers from a 2022 benchmark survey where many product teams answered 'other' when asked whether their product aims to grow revenue or reduce costs. Using real examples…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresApr 5, 2023
Apr 5, 2023 · 7 min
Brainstorming in groups often underperforms because of social loafing, conformity, production blocking, and downward norm setting, yet teams still benefit from the diverse perspectives each member brings. This essay…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresMar 15, 2023
Mar 15, 2023 · 19 min
Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion discuss how leaders can hold empowered product teams accountable to outcomes without sliding back into feature-factory control. They describe empowerment as a spectrum: teams get discretion…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresMar 8, 2023
Mar 8, 2023 · 3 min
Teresa Torres addresses a common confusion: how OKRs relate to outcomes. She explains that an OKR pairs an inspiring objective with measurable key results, while an outcome is the change that results from actions…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresMar 1, 2023
Mar 1, 2023 · 23 min
Teresa Torres reports on the second part of her inaugural CDH Benchmark Survey, which asked product teams about their discovery habits. She argues that many people doubt that continuous discovery exists in practice…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresFeb 15, 2023
Feb 15, 2023 · 10 min
Teresa Torres ran the inaugural CDH Benchmark survey, collecting responses from 1,999 product people across 78 countries to measure how many teams have adopted continuous discovery habits and whether those habits…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresFeb 8, 2023
Feb 8, 2023 · 14 min
Teresa Torres argues there is no single perfect tool for recruiting customer interview participants in continuous discovery; the best tool is the one a team will actually use. The article walks through three steps…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresFeb 1, 2023
Feb 1, 2023 · 3 min
Teresa Torres argues that opportunity mapping, the first step of building an opportunity solution tree, breaks down when teams generate opportunities from memory, which produces vague, unactionable ideas. Actionable…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresJan 18, 2023
Jan 18, 2023 · 9 min
Teresa Torres profiles product manager Helena Jeret-Mäe at Singularity Creations, who moved from building speculative features on request to a continuous discovery practice. Early on, she built an unused field a…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresJan 4, 2023
Jan 4, 2023 · 8 min
Teresa Torres reviews 2022, when her business shifted to being course-first and reached far more people than one-on-one coaching ever could. She describes the grind of the pandemic years, including launching several…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresDec 21, 2022
Dec 21, 2022 · 9 min
Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion, both product discovery coaches, walk through the eight most common mistakes teams make when defining product outcomes. They argue that outcomes often get mislabeled as outputs…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresDec 7, 2022
Dec 7, 2022 · 16 min
Teresa Torres argues that customer interviews are among the most valuable and sustainable ways for product teams to learn about customers, creating a compounding competitive advantage. She separates true customer…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresNov 16, 2022
Nov 16, 2022 · 10 min
Teresa Torres announces that Product Talk has added Ellen Juhlin, a product coach and Senior Director of Product Management at Orion Labs, to its instructor pool. The post frames the expansion as part of Product Talk's…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresOct 19, 2022
Oct 19, 2022 · 12 min
Grailed's Discovery team spent eight months building a curated feed that barely moved the business. After adopting continuous discovery habits and an opportunity solution tree, they reframed the problem in customer…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresOct 5, 2022
Oct 5, 2022 · 8 min
Teresa Torres argues that continuous discovery generates a lot of artifacts, and teams often waste effort by creating separate documents for doing, communicating, and archiving work. She recommends using one set of…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresSep 7, 2022
Sep 7, 2022 · 10 min
Teresa Torres profiles how Sören Weber and the Search & Flow team at trivago adopted continuous discovery habits on a mature hotel metasearch product. Despite existing user-focus rituals, the team tended to jump to…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresJul 20, 2022
Jul 20, 2022 · 4 min
Teresa Torres argues that B2B and B2C discovery are less different than people assume, since most consumer products also serve multiple stakeholders such as advertisers or content providers. The key issue in enterprise…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresJul 6, 2022
Jul 6, 2022 · 6 min
Teresa Torres addresses the catch-22 of landing a first product role when employers want experience. Her core argument is that aspiring PMs can manufacture credible experience through self-directed side projects, even…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresJun 15, 2022
Jun 15, 2022 · 4 min
Teresa Torres argues that product teams should monitor customer signals from support tickets, sales conversations, surveys, and behavioral analytics, but should not treat these fragments as a substitute for customer…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresJun 1, 2022
Jun 1, 2022 · 7 min
Teresa Torres's continuous-discovery practice depends on interviewing customers every week, but finding participants is the hardest part and often blocks the habit. This Product in Practice piece profiles Dan Clem at…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresMay 18, 2022
May 18, 2022 · 5 min
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…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresMay 4, 2022
May 4, 2022 · 7 min
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…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresApr 20, 2022
Apr 20, 2022 · 8 min
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…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresApr 6, 2022
Apr 6, 2022 · 5 min
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…
Product Talk · Teresa TorresMar 16, 2022
Mar 16, 2022 · 7 min
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…