Jules Walter argues that product sense is a learned skill rather than an innate talent, defined as consistently crafting products that have the intended impact on users through empathy and creativity. He offers four…
Part two of a B2B startup series examines how founders validate an idea before committing. Drawing on interviews with about two dozen companies, it lays out four validation paths (manual, listening, prototype with…
“[](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s!zHZ!,fauto,qauto:good,flprogressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fec85cabc-5222-4a71-9e48-159f1981c07e1600x800.png) It’s 2012 and our team has just joined Airbnb. We’re tasked with building out a “social travel” experience for Airbnb travelers. The thinking is that travelers on Airbnb are siloed across the city, and if we…”
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…
Todd Jackson, a seed-stage investor at First Round Capital, interviewed founders of eight companies (Vanta, Flexport, Cocoon, Good Dog, Snackpass, Rec Room, LaunchDarkly, Pinwheel) about how they chose and validated…
Teresa Torres argues that many product teams believe they already practice discovery, but they run interviews, usability tests, and A/B tests too infrequently and mostly to validate decisions already made. She defines…
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…
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…
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 profiles Bianca Starling, a senior product manager at Voxy, who adopted continuous discovery habits by starting with a small, time-boxed MVP rather than overhauling the whole product organization. She…
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…
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 shares six guiding principles for effective product discovery, distilled by her co-instructor Jeff Merrell from a design course on prototyping solutions. The principles cover building empathy for a…
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…
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 argues that many product managers remain unaware of a fundamental shift toward modern product discovery, despite the Lean Startup and design thinking having been around for years. She observes that many…
Teresa Torres traces how product discovery has evolved over roughly two decades, from long requirements documents and shipping flops like Windows ME toward experiment-driven, customer-centered practice. She argues that…
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…
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 profiles Amy O'Callaghan (product manager) and Jenn Atkins (product designer) at Snagajob, who were coached in continuous discovery and now run a team that talks to customers weekly and validates work…
Teresa Torres recaps her talk and fireside chat at Y Oslo 2024 on continuous discovery. She argues discovery is a team activity involving engineers, designers and PMs, that teams should start with the smallest possible…
This Product in Practice piece follows the Simply Business product team as they adopted continuous discovery with coaching from Teresa Torres. Their first chosen opportunity, late customer payments, was a real pain…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams shifting from managing outputs to managing outcomes need three mindsets to succeed at continuous discovery. She describes a collaborative mindset where the core trio (product…
Teresa Torres argues that continuous product discovery is not limited to famous consumer tech companies; any product team, including those at traditional enterprises, can practice it. She uses a case study of Farm…