“Getting a group together to generate ideas—an activity often referred to as “brainstorming”—doesn’t always go smoothly. In the past, Teresa has written about the major reasons why traditional brainstorming doesn’t work: social loafing (people tend not to work as hard in a group setting), conformity (people”
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…
Lenny Rachitsky opens a seven-part B2B startup playbook by examining how successful B2B companies found their original ideas. Drawing on dozens of founder interviews, he argues that a strong B2B idea combines an…
Teresa Torres argues that product managers are essentially designers who solve ill-structured problems, which have no single right answer and several competing solutions. Drawing on educational psychologist David…
Marty Cagan reviews Ken Kocienda's memoir Creative Selection, told from the perspective of an engineer who spent about 15 years at Apple and served as tech lead for key efforts, most notably the original iPhone…
Teresa Torres argues that teams under pressure to keep up with continuous customer interviews are turning to generative AI for synthesis, and that this often backfires. The core problem is that AI cannot supply context…
Teresa Torres, a discovery coach, explains that her high-touch coaching is only available to companies willing to invest heavily, so she is designing a lighter-weight course for individual practitioners. She argues that…
Teresa Torres argues that customer interviews often fail because people describe their ideal behavior rather than what they actually do, and their brains readily invent coherent but false explanations. She draws on…
Marty Cagan describes a common remote-work problem in product discovery: teams drift back into passing static artifacts between product manager, designer, and engineers instead of collaborating closely. His proposed fix…
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…
Teresa Torres profiles Yury Oleynik, VP of Product Management at HiveMQ, and how his team automated recruiting for continuous customer interviews. Early manual outreach campaigns to thousands of free-plan users yielded…
Marty Cagan argues that product teams learn most when they put early, rough ideas in front of real users, and that they should do so faster than feels comfortable. He notes that polishing ideas in private mostly deepens…
Teresa Torres answers a reader's question about how often product teams should ship customer value, concluding that weekly or biweekly delivery is an ideal benchmark rather than an immediate requirement. She explains…
Teresa Torres recounts meeting a fitness-trainer founder at a startup pitch event whose customer definition was vague and whose validation relied on survey answers about hypothetical future purchases. She argues that…
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 argues that product teams often fall for confirmation bias: people notice evidence that supports their ideas and overlook disconfirming signals, even when given the same data. Her example shows how…
Teresa Torres, a product coach and course creator, announces she is recruiting product managers and product leaders for customer interviews. She argues that after two years of teaching and coaching, she needs to…
Marty Cagan reflects on the many competing definitions of the product role and argues that how a product person defines their job reveals a lot about their experience. He highlights an analysis by technology analyst…
Teresa Torres argues that rapid prototyping is far broader than wireframes and usability testing. She offers a working definition of a prototype as something that simulates an experience, is built to answer a specific…
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…
Cagan argues that strong products are the foundation of a sustainable business, and that weak products force sales and marketing into costly workarounds and frustrate customers. The remedy he proposes is a Charter…
Marty Cagan argues that a new wave of generative AI prototyping tools has been a good development for product discovery, but it has created confusion among product managers who fail to distinguish a prototype from a…
Marty Cagan revisits the Silicon Valley slogan "we eat our own dog food," which he once repeated at Netscape, and now calls it meaningless. Using your own product is just another form of QA, not something to brag about…
Teresa Torres uses a playful Halloween scenario, planning hot apple cider for neighbors, to illustrate the four levels of product analysis: design, feasibility, feature, and value. Each roadblock the cider plan hits…