Product Talk
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Product Talk is written by Teresa Torres. Teresa is a product discovery coach who helps teams adopt user-centered, hypothesis-driven product development practices. She works with companies of all sizes on integrating user research, experimentation, and the right analytics into the product development process resulting in better product decisions.
Product Talk
1w ago
I’m hosting several free events over the next two weeks. I’d love for you to join one of them.
March 25th: The What & Why of Continuous Discovery
In this webinar, I’ll introduce participants to the continuous discovery framework I introduced in my book Continuous Discovery Habits. We’ll cover:
The difference between discovery and delivery
My definition of continuous discovery
Why continuous discovery matters
What a good continuous discovery team does week over week
How you can develop your own discovery habits
This webinar is great for folks in product, design, or engineering who are ne ..read more
Product Talk
2w ago
When an organization shifts from delivery or feature teams to product teams, the first step is often a change to team structure.
Delivery and feature teams are often structured by function—front-end teams, back-end teams, mobile teams, etc. These teams can rarely deliver value on their own. Instead, they hand off work from team to team—the back-end engineers design the data model and system architecture, the front-end engineers build the interface elements, the mobile engineers work toward feature parity, etc.
The challenge with this way of working is that it is both slow and constraining. It ..read more
Product Talk
3w ago
When you’re building a product, you can easily get overwhelmed by ideas. There are the ideas your product trio comes up with based on your discovery work, the ideas that come from your customers in the form of specific requests, and the ideas that come from stakeholders within your company like your customer-facing teams or CEO, to name a few.
While some of these ideas are unsolicited and may not relate to your current outcome or the opportunities you’re pursuing, that doesn’t mean you want to ignore or discard them completely. Just because an idea isn’t something you’re going to pursue today ..read more
Product Talk
1M ago
Continuous discovery is not a linear journey—as much as we might want it to be. Like a lot of learning, it often feels messy and chaotic.
Continuous discovery is not a linear journey—as much as we might want it to be. Like a lot of learning, it often feels messy and chaotic. –
But if you stick with it, you may eventually find you can look back and see how much you’ve progressed.
That’s certainly the case for Kelsey Terry, who’s sharing her story in today’s Product in Practice. In her former role as Director of Product at Going (formerly known as Scott’s Cheap Flights), Kelsey was tasked with ..read more
Product Talk
1M ago
When you start interviewing customers every week, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by how much you are learning.
When we use our customer interviews to collect specific stories about past behavior, every conversation can uncover dozens of unmet customer needs, pain points, and desires (AKA opportunities).
I recommend teams use three different artifacts to keep track of what they are learning from their customer interviews:
The interview snapshot: This artifact summarizes what you learned from a single customer interview. Teams should create an interview snapshot for each interview that they condu ..read more
Product Talk
1M ago
There are all kinds of ways to introduce continuous discovery habits. If you’ve been at your company for a while, you might get inspired after reading a book or attending a conference. If you’re joining a new company, you might want to try a new tactic out with your new team. And if you’re really excited about an idea, you might look for opportunities to share it outside your company with the broader product community.
Today’s Product in Practice features a continuous discovery champion who did all three.
Tali Melchior, Director of Product Management at Texthelp, was first inspired to experime ..read more
Product Talk
1M ago
The larger and more complex your company is, the more challenging it can be to introduce continuous discovery. It’s not just about training people to conduct interviews, use opportunity solution trees, or test assumptions—though those are all important activities—it’s also about convincing them of the value of these activities and getting the people they work with on board as well.
Sandrine Veillet’s Product in Practice story perfectly exemplifies this. While Sandrine was convinced of the impact continuous discovery could have at her organization, her task wasn’t as simple as just introducing ..read more
Product Talk
2M ago
You’ll often hear Teresa say that there’s no single right way to do continuous discovery. Something she might not say as often (that’s just as true) is that there’s no single wrong way to do discovery, either.
Because discovery involves changing the way you work on an individual, team, and even company level, it’s all too easy to make mistakes and missteps.
Let’s be clear: The fact that it’s easy to make mistakes is not an excuse for avoiding discovery. It’s just helpful to know what to expect so you don’t have to be too hard on yourself when something goes wrong. And maybe you can save yours ..read more
Product Talk
2M ago
The foundation of continuous discovery is weekly touchpoints with customers. These touchpoints will allow you to collect stories that help you identify opportunities and build out your opportunity solution tree.
It sounds simple, but what happens if your product is so new that you don’t have any customers yet? Or what if you’re just getting started with an idea and your product doesn’t even exist yet?
What do you do about discovery if your product is so new that you don’t have any customers yet? Or what if you’re just getting started with an idea and your product doesn’t even exist yet? –
T ..read more
Product Talk
2M ago
Founders have all sorts of reasons for starting companies. Sometimes it’s because they’ve personally experienced a pain point and want to address it. Sometimes they’re dissatisfied with what’s available on the market and think they can do better. And sometimes it’s because they have an idea that they think could be a smashing success and they want to pursue it.
As Teresa has written before, this last scenario is the most common. But it’s also problematic. Here’s Teresa’s take:
When we start with an idea, the scope of our discovery work becomes, “Is my idea good or not?” This framing is ..read more