Discovery & customer research

Later this month I'll be hosting two mini-workshops on the skills that I think will differentiate the best product teams from the rest. AI Evals: The New Discovery Habit 🗓️ September 23, 2026, 9am-10:30am PDT In this session, you'll get introduced to what AI evals are, you'll receive a blueprint…

Customers describe the problem right in front of them—not their wildest dreams. That's the trap Chris (Aha!) sees teams fall into during discovery. "It's very difficult for them to imagine that you might deliver their wildest dreams." The real skill in product discovery is extrapolation: taking…

Product management is laced with one stubborn bias: we overvalue our own ideas about what to build next. Steve (Vistaly) says minds rarely change until teams hear customers describe the problem in their own words. That's why Vistaly puts interview evidence directly on the opportunity solution…

Teresa Torres wants to believe every product team does careful synthesis after each customer interview. The reality? It's hard, so teams give up and grab the two or three things they remember most. "We're not competing with making good synthesis faster. We're competing with making shallow synthesis…

"It can feel like you are the lone champion pushing for change in your organization." That's why we are reading Continuous Discovery Habits together throughout 2026. 📚 The book turns five this year and many of you have bought and read it. But reading isn't the same as doing. So we are reading…

Trend I'm following: Teams using AI "simulations" to quickly test product ideas and flow tweaks. Products like @simile_ai, @primitivelabsai, @syntheticusers, and others. If you've tried something like this, how'd it go?

"I'm going to tell you my story because I think it's an amazing story of continuous improvement, of how teeny-tiny steps compound over time." Over the past year, my work has transformed completely—and it all started with a broken ankle and a willingness to get curious about AI. In this article, I…

"It can feel like you are the lone champion pushing for change in your organization." That's why we are reading Continuous Discovery Habits together throughout 2026. 📚 The book turns five this year and many of you have bought and read it. But reading isn't the same as doing. So we are reading…

AI evals have been the "it" skill for product teams for over a year. I've even called evals a new discovery habit. But I still meet product teams who only have a vague idea of what evals are. And it's not their fault. Most of the writing on this topic is intended for engineers or just isn't…

What happens when you hand your opportunity solution tree to an AI? Vistaly rebuilt its entire product to find out—and the agents were the easy part. In this episode of Just Now Possible, Teresa Torres talks with Matt O'Connell (Co-Founder and CEO), CP Dehli (Co-Founder), and Steve Klein…

🎙️Trash Can Tracking What if the ideas you throw away tell you more about the health of your product process than the ones you ship? In this episode of All Things Product, Petra Wille introduces trash can tracking — a deceptively simple technique for making discovery work visible. By adding trash…

Inspired by Git diff, Teresa Torres started simple: compare the input tree to the output tree and generate a change set. Then she learned the same pair of trees can produce multiple change sets—and only one tells the real story. A semantic merge means something very different from a delete plus…

🎙️Quality of Evidence You've got behavioral analytics, support tickets, sales call notes, and a feedback inbox that never empties. With all that data coming in, do product teams actually still need to go out and talk to users? In this episode, Petra Wille and Teresa Torres dig into why not all…

What does it take to build an AI app builder specifically for product managers—not engineers—inside an already crowded market? In this episode of Just Now Possible, Teresa Torres talks with Brian De Haaff (CEO and Co-Founder), Chris Waters (CTO and Co-Founder), and Sarah Moisan-Thomas (Senior…

We asked Claude what changed with Linear’s competitors. The first answer used an old source as if it were recent. It also stated a guess as fact. Then we gave the same model our competitive skills. It showed its limits up front. It explained how it ranked the changes and kept

This week on the podcast, @vlaurenlee from @Shopify shared how her team is using AI to solve AI problems, instead of waiting years for interaction data. "You're basically imparting all of your product intuition into an LLM to then shape yet another LLM." /2