Teresa Torres
Enabling Continuous Product Discovery
In this episode of Brave UX, Teresa Torres provides a clear and compelling argument for continuous product discovery, shares practical advice for making it happen, and touches on the importance of collaborative critical thinking.
Highlights include:
- What is continuous product discovery and why is it important?
- How do you create great user interview questions?
- Why do product teams find it difficult to solve customer problems?
- How do you know if a prospective team member is a critical thinker?
- Why is it important for product teams to do their own research?
Who is Teresa Torres?
Teresa is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, product discovery coach, and the principal of Product Talk.
She has worked with hundreds of product teams, at companies of all sizes, including Spotify, CapitalOne and Snagajob. Teresa has also trained over 7,000 people in how to conduct world-class product discovery.
Teresa holds a BA in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University, and a Master of Science in Learning & Organisational Change from Northwestern University.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis Managing Founder of The Space InBetween and it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings and expert advice of world class design, UX and product management professionals. My guest today is Teresa Torres. Teresa is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and product discovery coach as the principle of Product Talk. She has worked with hundreds of teams at companies of all sizes, from early stage startups to global enterprises across many industries. To give you some examples, her recent clients include Spotify, capital One and sag a job through her training organization, Product Talk Academy. Teresa has also taught over 7,000 product people world class discovery skills, including how to gain valuable insights from customer interviews, how to run effective experiments and how to drive outcomes that create value for both customers and the business.
- Teresa's teachings focus on helping product teams to structure a sustainable approach to continuous discovery so they can infuse their daily product decisions with customer input. Before starting product talk, Teresa was the VP of product at after college and internet startup that helps college students to find their first job. She was also the president and CEO of Affinity Circles, a social network for alumni associations that was acquired by Mingle in 2011. Teresa holds a BA in symbolic systems from Stanford University and a master of science and learning and organizational change from Northwestern University. A critical thinker who's not afraid to roll up his sleeves. Teresa is a powerful voice in the global product community and it's that voice that I'm looking forward to hearing from now. Teresa, Welcome to the show.
- Teresa Torres:
- Ah, thank you. That was such a lovely introduction.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well look, you did all the hard work there. I just told the great story that has been your professional career and it has been quite a career and I'm looking forward to sharing some of those stories or hear you share some of those stories in today's conversation. But first, before we get started, I just wanted to ask you something. I understand that you often get asked whether you are Portuguese and I'm not gonna do that on this podcast, I promise you, but cause I've heard your answer to it. But I am curious to know as an American, how you feel about people asking you about their perceptions of your ethnicity.
- Teresa Torres:
- Yeah, this is an interesting question. So I am definitely an American. It takes about 30 seconds of hearing me talk for that to be very clear I say my name is Teresa Torres but half of my family are native Spanish speakers and they would say that my name is Teresa Torres. I can't do that very well, which is why I don't it's funny, I grew up even though, so my dad's family is from Mexico he himself is from California. So I grew up in a very traditional American household. I love that I have a diverse family. I literally, a lot of my dad's family are Spanish speakers first and speak very limited English but it's not culturally, it's just not what I grew up with. They were more distant family that we didn't see very often. And I definitely identify as an American. I think in the last few years of my career it's become a lot more apparent that how I identify myself is not necessarily how other people identify me. And I think that's more where it shows up is just, it comes with a lot of loaded expectations. Whereas I think I'm more of the it's very common in the US to have people from mixed ethnic backgrounds and to just feel like a mutt. And that's kind of how I feel. [laugh],
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You mentioned that it came with expectations from others on you that you'd sort only recently realized. What are those expectations and how do you feel about that realization that you've come to?
- Teresa Torres:
- Some of them are really simple. I get messages on LinkedIn all the time in Portuguese and I have to go to Google Translate. Others are people come up and ask me questions in Spanish at conferences and I took Spanish in school so I can kind of politely say that I prefer English [affirmative]. I definitely don't speak Spanish well enough to have a product management conversation in Spanish. So some of it is just that simple. Others of it is related to this bigger conversation around diversity and technology and social equity and social justice issues. And it's hard to know my role in that and how I relate to that cuz I didn't grow up culturally Latina [affirmative]. But it is a part of my iden identity and it is a part of my family history. So it, it's complex for me. I mostly identify as American and I think for most Americans we also have these ethnic identities that are either really tightly coupled with how we grew up in our culture or are really loosely coupled.
- And I think especially for outside of the United States not everybody fully understands that. So I think people interact with me assuming something and then I always feel a little bit awkward when I'm like, well I don't really speak Spanish or Portuguese, but it's fine. What's nice is it's a really fun way to connect with people and right now product discovery in Brazil is blowing up. And so I hear from people in Brazil all the time and I know that it provides a little bit of that connection of a lot of people like that. I have a Portuguese sounding name and if that's a great way to get in the door, I'm gonna take it
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh]. I love it. It's very pragmatic. It's very pragmatic. I also know that you've recently, you've given a talk on diversity and design and I did watch some of that talk and I understand that as you said, you're kind of trying to figure your of place in that particular topic out. What have you either realized about yourself and what that role might be or what would you like people to know about you that perhaps they don't know about you when they're making those assumptions that you might be Portuguese or speak Spanish or whatever that may be?
- Teresa Torres:
- Yeah, this is an interesting question. So I think probably for my first 10 years in the tech industry, I had blinders on. I was so oblivious to the diversity challenges in tech and I just sort of assumed a lot of people do that. It was a meritocracy and if I just put my head down and worked hard, everything would be fine. And then I got senior enough that I started to be involved in the conversations around who was promoted and who was hired and who wasn't. And I started to notice it's a real thing and both for women and for people of minority ethnicities. And that was really hard for me to realize I'm a real big idealist and I really just wanted the world to be different from what it was. And I started to think about what role do I play in this?
- How do I be a champion internally for underrepresented folks? It's not easy. I don't know, I don't have all the right answers, but it's something that, especially for the last 10 years I've thought a lot about. And then 2020 being the year that it was, so obviously the whole world went through a global pandemic here in the US We also in parallel went through some pretty extreme sort of social justice inequity, sort, just movements and issues and things that brought up in the news. And I would argue it's been going on longer than that. We saw the Me Too movement a few years before that and it's really hard to ignore what's happening in our communities. And I don't, as a American woman who also is of a Latina ethnicity, I don't know really complex for me to think through how does being a woman or being Latina but really growing up in a very American household contribute to that.
- Here's what I do know. I know a lot about continuous discovery, which is all about how do we connect with our customers. I know a lot about how we can make those practices, how we can get closer to our customers. And then there's a really nice hook for how do we be more inclusive in how we do that. And I also know that I'm really blessed that I have a platform and I have a stage. And so I was worried about getting into this realm because I know a lot of people who have taken a lot of internet abuse for speaking up about some of these issues. And I knew it was a little bit of a risk, but I think we're ready for it. And I think that I have a responsibility to use the voice that I do have to help be a part of creating a better world. So it's messy. I don't have all the answers by any means, but I'm still working my way through it trying to figure it out.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And what are some of those practical things that you are trying to encourage or that you are doing with your platform? Those things that you would like people to know so that we can have a more diverse inclusive product community?
- Teresa Torres:
- So first of all I think was just braising it as a topic. I mean just speaking about it I think creates space for it. And I know other people are speaking about it [affirmative]. I'm not trying to say that I'm the lone person who's gonna come in and give voice to it, but I think the more voices the better. The other thing I did is that I'm just starting to explore this and usually I talk about things that I've developed a lot of depth and knowledge about. And so it also felt like a risk to just work out loud and to talk about it as I learned about it. And I did that deliberately. It made me a little uncomfortable and I wanted to contribute and ask questions and learn in community around it cuz I know there's plenty of people working in this space that are far ahead of me
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [affirmative].
- Teresa Torres:
- So yeah, I don't know, it's just excited. So I just finished writing a book and if I saw what happened in the world last year and decided to do that talk at the beginning of this year, it raised all these questions of wow, there's more I wanted, I could have included in my book. And so the timing was a little bit tough cuz I was like, wow, my book could have been a lot stronger on this topic. And so one of my goals for the next say 12 to 18 months, I'm terrible at timeline, so it could be the next four years we'll see [laugh] is I really wanna write a companion, whether it's a workbook or a pamphlet or another book, who knows, that just sort expands on this. And as I learn, start to look at how do we layer this new dimension of just justice and equity into the work that we're doing as product teams,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You're such a compelling and clear communicator. I have no doubt that when you dive into this and you do start to form your view on that, the world will be a better place for it when it comes time to express it. So that's great to hear that you are figuring it out and that we can watch this space and see what happens.
- Teresa Torres:
- Oh well thank you. I hope that people don't just watch that they participate cuz I feel like this is a big enough arena that it's gonna take a long time and a lot of people to be a part of figuring out how to solve it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, 100%. And speaking of you being a great and compelling communicator, as I mentioned before we started recording, I've watched literally all of your talks and you obviously come at your talks from a position of deep expertise that you've developed over time. But what I'm interested in understanding is where does this really compelling communication repertoire that you've built up, where does this come from? Is this always been something that's been a strength of yours?
- Teresa Torres:
- Ooh, that's a good question. I don't know. I can remember the very first talk I gave was just at a meetup in San Francisco and it probably wasn't that great to be honest but I do remember that I loved it. It was such a fun way to connect with people and I'm actually really introverted. I'm one of those weird people that's super outgoing and energetic but is also very introverted and that surprises people. But it was a fun way to go to a big event and have a role to play that was not nearly as exhausting as the small talk networking. And that was really surprising to me. I thought I, I don't even know really what drew me to even speak at that first meetup. I was long enough ago, I can't quite remember but I mm-hmm [affirmative] absolutely loved it and it made it really easy to then connect with people after speaking and people came up and asked me questions, which took a lot of the burden off of me to figure out how do I have a conversation with this stranger.
- So they were actually a lot of benefits for me personally as an introverted kind of person that wanted to connect with other people and then, I don't know, am a very curious, sort lifelong learner. And I don't everything that I do, I just start to look at, okay, how do I iterate and how do I improve? And I used to watch videos of my early talks and cringe because I had terrible nervous energy and I said a million times and I still watch all the videos of my talks and just try to improve. But yeah, I think some of it, most of my talks I'm talking about something I know really well. And so I think that a lot of the articulation is just clarity a thought cuz it's spent 20 plus years thinking about the same thing which I love. That's not a bad thing. I absolutely love it. And then I think also is just sort that iterative, I'm always looking to how can I get better
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [affirmative]. And what would you say to someone who's listening today that might be a bit nervous about doing a talk has something to share but is on the fence? What would you say to them?
- Teresa Torres:
- I think the key is to find the right medium. So I know a lot of people that blog cuz they like to write and a lot of people host podcasts cuz they like to interview people and other people do videos. I think if you come into it as I should do this or this is gonna be good for me professionally, it's hard. It's a lot of work. You're constantly putting yourself out there, you're opening yourself up to the internet for feedback, which is brutal. So I
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Think it can be
- Teresa Torres:
- [laugh]. I think the key is to really just find a medium that is fun for you to create and then just keep going. I mean I remember hearing from bloggers that they would say, if you went back and read my first blog post, it was terrible. And now I'm that blogger saying that my first blog posts were atrocious and I experimented a lot in my first couple years with length and format and what I like to write about. And it probably took three years of writing before I really found my voice and the topic I wanted to write about. And so I think a lot of it is do something you love doing and then just keep going.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Great advice. And you spoke about creating things and that people create through different mediums. You also mentioned that you have written a book and I understand that book comes out in a couple of days, it's called Continuous Discovery habits and it's obviously something that as you mentioned, you've been distilling your thinking on for a couple of decades now, some people listening might not be really clued up on continuous discovery. So I know this might be going back to basics for you, but just for the benefit of our listeners, what is continuous discovery?
- Teresa Torres:
- Yeah, this is a great question. So I always like to start at the very beginning. Every product team, regardless of the context that they work in, regardless of the types of products that they work on, they have two parts to their job. They have to make decisions about what to build and then they have to go and build it, right? And we have different sets of activities with each of those two things. So with discovery is all the things we're doing to decide what to build, whereas it's often talked about in parallel to de delivery, which is all the things we're doing to build and deliver a production quality product. And so every product team is doing discovery or every product team discovery has been done somewhere in the organization. Sometimes it's done by the leaders and they just tell the team what to build.
- Sometimes it's done by the team themselves. I think what we've seen over the last 20 years, if not longer is we're seeing the industry move from a really waterfall project based method of delivery to a more continuous delivery. We've seen boxed software move to internet software move to twice a year releases to all the way down to some companies release multiple times a day. And I think we're seeing the same shift happen on the discovery side. So we used to do a whole bunch of research with a bunch of different users, put it in a research report usually by a strategy strategy team at the company, hand it off to other people at the company who said, okay, let's build these features that got handed off to the product teams and they worked for six months and then shipped something. The challenge with this is that we learn at the very end that what we built didn't work.
- And with the rise of the internet and just faster cycles and more competitive markets, we're building the wrong stuff a lot and we've come a long way, but I'm still overwhelmed every day by how bad technology works. We're just not good at software yet. I mean, I go out to dinner and I can't park because I can't get the parking app to load on my phone. That's not an improvement over putting coins in a meter, it's just not. And so continuous discovery is really just how do we make sure that more of our decisions are infused with customer feedback. So in a project world we would do this strategic research and we would get customer input on the big strategic decisions. Whereas in a continuous discovery model we are still doing that, but we're also trying to get feedback on the more mundane, everyday decisions that can make or break our products just as much.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And you've spoken about the importance for the product team, the core product team, the product manager, the designer and the engineer, the tick lead to be doing their own research. What is important about those people doing research themselves?
- Teresa Torres:
- There's a couple components to this. So first of all, in our old project world, a product manager would work with business stakeholders and define requirements, hand 'em off to a designer. The designer would do the design, hand it off to the engineer, the engineer at write code. This is a really wasteful model because what would happen inevitably is that the designer would get the requirements and find problems and they'd have to go back to the product manager. They'd have to rewrite requirements. The designer would then finish the designs, they'd go to the engineers, they would find problems. Now we're rewriting requirements redesigning design. And it's why inevitably every software project that's ever happened on planet Earth is over budget, under scoped. We're not very good at this [affirmative]. And so I think what we're seeing is that if you actually just take smaller teams of people that represent the three critical roles at a minimum and bring 'em together and say, okay, actually just work this out amongst yourselves from the very beginning we get better products.
- So we wanna make sure that all three of those disciplines are represented so that we know that it's feasible, we know that it's usable, we know that it's desirable and we end up with a viable product. And so if those three roles are gonna be making decisions about what to build, they need to be spending time with customers and they need to be doing their own research and they need to make sure that those decisions are actually gonna work for their customers. And this is a, what's so hard about talking about and teaching continuous discovery is that so many of us in the industry are still rooted so strongly in a project world. It's hard to imagine what a continuous world even looks like. And that's still, that's what keeps me creating content is I'm just trying to show people what does this look like? Is it real? People tell me all the time the idea of a product trio, those three roles working together seems so idealistic and or they go the other way. They say it feels so inefficient and when you see it work, it's magical. We just, what
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Do you say to those people when they challenge you on that and they go, oh this sounds great in theory, but my organization it could never work that way. What do you say?
- Teresa Torres:
- So I think there's two different aspects to this. Some people respond and they don't believe it exists. And I say, okay, well there are thousands of teams working this way right now and this is where that William Gibson quote of the future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed, [laugh] really relevant. This is not a made up thing. We're not talking about unicorns, we're talking about a real thing that is happening today that is getting results. So I think that's the first part of it. I think the second question of this is so far from how my organization works today is a really valid question because the vast majority of people in the industry are still working on under that 1980s or earlier big box like software on a shelf software development model. And even if they're doing Scrum or they use OKRs or they have all the buzzwords of that sound like they're modern philosophically, they're leaders are leading from an old project based model and their work is being dictated from an old project based model.
- And so it can be hard [affirmative]. One of the things that I do in the book is I try to give people really actionable steps of like, okay, you've now been introduced to this. What's gonna feel like an ideal way of working? How do you get there? And I really encourage people to not focus on the bigger organization. Most individual contributors are not gonna change their organizational culture. That's why their company pays the big four consulting firms billions of dollars to try to bring about organizational change and they still fail. So I think the smarter strategy is to just really focus on your own work on your individual day to day work. And anybody working in any of these three roles can work to build stronger relationships with their peers. Even if they change teams all the time, even if there's no stability from project to project, they still can think about how do I move towards more cross-functional decision making?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [affirmative]. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Focus on what you can control and not sort get lost of the noise of the things that you can't. Now I understand in your definition of continuous discovery, you mentioned the need for a weekly cadence as in doing some form of customer discovery weekly. Why is weekly contact with customers so important? That seems like a lot of work for people to do. Why not monthly?
- Teresa Torres:
- Yeah, here's great about this. So I started saying this I think five years ago and I remember being at a event at a conference at Target in Minneapolis here in the States and three, I was on a panel and three people on the panel gave me grief cuz they thought this cadence was not sustainable [laugh]. And I remember thinking you work at Target, so Target in the United States is a big department everything store and you could not find an American who has not been to a target. It's just not possible. Every American has been to a target. And so I remember getting this question and saying you could walk outside and just pull aside a stranger and they're a customer. Talking to a customer every week is not that hard for, but at that time this was just not an was not a norm. Teams were not talking to customers on a regular basis.
- Now I see it all the time. I see other consultants talk about weekly touchpoints with customers. It's becoming a new norm and that makes me very happy because we're making product decisions every single day. Again, we're not making big strategic decisions every day. We make those maybe weekly or monthly or quarterly, but we're making decisions. How should the data model work? What should we label this button? Where do we expose this feature in the interface? How should this workflow work? And this is why we have so many. The example I give is I have dozens of apps on my phone that don't really work. [laugh] like they got the big strategic decision of what should it do, right? Enough that I downloaded it [affirmative], but then it didn't work. So it just lives on my phone and I haven't opened it probably ever. And that's really common.
- We're still really bad at building software that actually works for real human beings. And so the whole idea behind the weekly cadence is a couple of things. The more time you spend with your customers, the more often you realize how often you are wrong. A product team is wrong all the time. Most of the time we're just blind to that cause we're not talking to our customers, we're never getting that feedback that hey, we were wrong. So that's the first thing. The more often you talk to customers more you remember to question your assumptions to run experiments, to test your ideas. So I think about interviewing as this keystone habit. It's the habit that if you start there, it's gonna unlock other habits. [affirmative]. So in the health world exercises the keystone habit, people that tend to exercise more then tend to eat better, sleep more, be more productive at work.
- So I really think interviewing is the keystone habit for discovery. When teams interview more, they do all the other things more often. [affirmative] there's also this really practical part of a weekly cadence, which is it's a lot harder to go from zero to one than from one to two in anything. And so if we can just start building this muscle, if we're gonna talk to a customer every week, we start to build momentum. It just becomes a habit [affirmative]. Whereas if you talk to a customer every other week, that's a little bit of a harder habit to build. And a lot of the teams that I work with, they just pick a time every week, Tuesdays at 11 when we do our customer interviews and it just becomes any other meeting on their calendar. It just happens.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I really like that. It's kind of somewhat the same problem I suppose that the food boxes we're trying to solve and the question, what's for dinner? If you already know that it's coming every week you get delivered a box and that's just what happens. You don't have that cognitive load of going through the process of trying to plan it and how do we bring it together. It just forms a habit. And I think that's a really powerful and insightful point and justification for why you need to do this on a weekly cadence.
- Teresa Torres:
- It's funny as a practitioner, so when I was working in companies as a full-time employee, I always talk to customers and even in looking back what were really tough environments for talking to customers but I learned it as an undergrad that that's just how you design things. You talk to customers. And I naively thought that's how business worked. And so I stubbornly did it that way, [laugh]. And then I learned over time, especially as a coach that this is, most people don't think this way. It actually is genuinely hard. And several years ago I had read the book Nudge by Sunstein and Thaler who are both behavior economists and they talk about a choice architecture. How do you design design a system so that people make the better choice? And so I started to think about what's the choice architecture for interviewing regularly? How do you make it easier to do an interview every week than to not do an interview every week? And that led to, I've done a ton of work around how can teams automate their recruiting process and just have an interview show up on their calendar every week. And that is really the secret to unlocking continuous interviewing is that if you have to hustle to recruit someone every week, you're just not gonna do it. So the key is how do you wake up on Monday morning and have an interview on your schedule without you having to do anything? I like it then there's no reason not to talk to a customer every week
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh]. Yeah, it makes it pretty difficult. Like you said, it's just like any other meeting I've been wondering about discovery more broadly. This it seems to be that delivery is really well understood. There's been a lot of structure around it, people understand what good looks like there, but it seems to have been so much more difficult for discovery to achieve that level. And it's not something that's difficult to convince product people that are reading the sort of books that you write and other people like you write, we get it, we understand why it's important and we want to be doing that. But what are some of the things that outside of what we can do as individual contributors, what are some of the conditions or the beliefs or the sort of cultural practices within organizations that need to be there to enable that kind of practice to really happen and take hold?
- Teresa Torres:
- Yeah, so I think there's a big difference between delivery and discovery in terms of why change has been hard. So with delivery to really adopt good delivery practices and move from a project delivery delivery mindset to a continuous delivery mindset, you need really strong engineering leadership. And that's not that common, which is why I would say there's still lots of companies that are plenty far behind on the delivery side. But we do know what good looks like. We know about automatic builds, we know about unit testing, we know about releasing more frequently. There's a lot of tenants that are well known that a good engineering leader can easily bring to an organization. And the reason why they can easily bring it to an organization is the only people affected by that change are the engineers, maybe QA folks. If you're changing up your DevOps strategy, it could affect your QA team.
- But generally the only people affected by that change in the organization is the engineering team. Now when we look at the discovery side, who has to be impacted by the change? Your executives who are used to dictating what's being built, your sales team that's used to being asked for their feature requests, your marketing team, which may or may not be used to dictating the benefits and the value proposition of the product. So when we see what's needed on the discovery side to truly shift from a project mindset to a more continuous discovery mindset, we need the whole organization to change. And that's much harder. And I would argue all of business is going in this direction, we're gonna see all of business go in this direction, maybe not in our lifetimes, cuz business change happens glacially slowly [laugh]. But I do think our current product practices are the future of business.
- I just, there's so much ambiguity and uncertainty in the world changes rapidly that I don't really see any other way. If you're an individual contributor and you're trying to enact change in your organization, just being aware of that, everybody in your organization has to change because it's gonna happen way slower than you want it to. And so this is a little bit of, it's a marathon and it's a lifetime marathon and maybe multiple generations of lifetimes marathon. And to keep that in perspective, which is actually why I encourage teams to focus on what can they do today, what's in their power of control to influence today themselves. But I think they can still influence others in the organization. They can invite people to go to the big conferences cuz all they talk about at big conferences now is product discovery. And they can share books and they can share talks and they can slowly start to influence the culture that way. And one of the best ways to do it is to highlight, Hey, look at, here's a competitor who is starting to do this, or here's our CEO's favorite company who's starting to do this.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, yeah. And you talked about the glacial of pace of change within organizations or business culture in general. And that reminded me of a great talk that you gave in 2019 at the Mind, the product in San Francisco called Justify Your Product Decisions [affirmative]. And why I'm bringing this up is you very eloquently in that talk told a personal story of how you thought as you progressed through the education system, which is another system that moves at glacial pace. And you talk there about the approach to problem solving and the mindsets and practices that our education systems places into us as students as we go through that process. How has the experience of education, which was largely designed in the 20th century, impacted our attitudes and behaviors by the time that we get out into the workforce when it comes to discovery?
- Teresa Torres:
- This is a great question. So I know first of all, there's a lot of variation around the world in the quality of education and what education is designed to teach. So I can speak about education in the US [affirmative] I'm not gonna pretend to have any clue about how it works anywhere else. [laugh]. So I know in the US our education model is pretty old. I I would say it's even older than I think probably 18 hundreds is when we first started having of one room classrooms of mixed ages. And what was the goal of that? The goal honestly was to create good citizens. It was much more about how do you be a member of society than it was about what do we need to teach you and why? And really being a good member of society was about conforming. And I think it started to evolve a little bit in the last hundred years of we now have formal curricula and we start to talk about math and science and reading and writing.
- Although here in the US even that's controversial in a mess. You would think that teaching math and science is a given and you would think teaching our history would be a given. But a lot of those are really controversial topics. And our education system is based on this model of you learn some facts and then we're gonna test you on those facts. And so there's sort of this underlying epistemic belief of facts are real, facts are real. I'm not questioning that, but that all of human knowledge can be distilled down into individual facts. And that that's important to learn rather than this idea of critical. Really what you should be learning in school is how to be a critical thinker. And here in the US right at the turn of the 19 hundreds we had American educational philosopher, John Dewey, who was really fascinated by democracy and what it would take for a democracy not only to survive but to thrive.
- And he argued, in order for democracy to thrive, we needed to develop strong critical thinkers. And especially now when we see what's been happening in the world, and especially in the US over the last four years, politically, we have a giant lack of strong critical thinking. We have on both sides of the political spectrum. We have people who read a news article and they don't know how to evaluate is this true or not? They just read it, they don't question it. And if they agree with it, they share it on social media and if they disagree with it, they just dismiss it as false. And that's a huge problem. So I think most of us in that talk that I shared, definitely in elementary school here in the US, you just learn facts. Maybe by middle school you get to learn how to have an opinion. And by high school you're definitely writing perspective papers if you went to a good school. But for me, it wasn't until college that I really got exposed to these hard unsolvable problems that you debate and that you try to understand both sides or the many sides. And I was really lucky. I went to a really good university I did an interdisciplinary program where I got introduced to not just computer science and design, but also philosophy and linguistics and cognitive psychology.
- And it really helped give me a well rounded interdisciplinary view of how do you attack a problem from multiple disciplines. And I think we need to be teaching more of that
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [affirmative]. Yeah, I had to actually look up what symbolic systems was when I was looking at your bio. And I mean it does seem like it's one of those programs that's designed to really challenge you and to look at problems from multiple angles. So it's one of those things that you suggested that is, and I believe it is true, that it is lacking at the moment. And I wonder in terms of critical thinking, and I wonder what thoughts you have about people that are in a position, they want to change the product culture at their organization, they understand that it's important for the people that they bring into that organization to have critical thinking skills. But what are some of the ways that you can assess whether you are looking at a prospective team member, whether or not they do have that growth mindset and whether they are willing to challenge their beliefs and hold those loosely so that we can actually create better products?
- Teresa Torres:
- This is a really good question. I think it's easy, and this is also why organizational change is so hard. I think it's easy for people to say all the right things. And then in that critical moment where you need to make a decision in under pressure, we fall back to what we've always done. And so one of the things that I teach teams is to externalize your thinking. So there's lots of ways to do this, right? Customer journey maps are a way of externalizing your thinking. Opportunity solution trees, which is my visual for how do you map out the best path to an outcome, is a way of externalizing your thinking. Story maps user story mapping that Jeff Patton popularized is a way of visualizing your thinking. I think when we take the time to externalize our thinking so that we can all examine it, especially when people are working on teams together, we start to really see the gaps in our thinking. And I think until we do, that language is so vague, it all sounds like we're in agreement. It all sounds like it's really well thought out. And then only later down the road do we find the problems. We find the gaps. And so I just think visualizing things is a super p a superpower. And it sounds so simple, but if I was interviewing somebody and I was trying to assess how strong are your critical thinking skills, I would want them to visualize something. Whatever that something is,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Show me. Yeah, show me, right? Don't just tell me.
- Teresa Torres:
- Yeah. Cause I think there's a depth there that has to, you can't draw a half baked idea.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. Yep. And you've spoken about this in that talk that I referenced as well. This is about showing your thinking [affirmative] also, you talked about how this is beneficial in terms of aligning stakeholders outside of that product trio or the product organization so that they can understand what it is that you're doing and that they can also participate in the shaping of whatever the solution or the problem is that you're trying to explore. It also reminds me of a quote that I've written down. I believe from that talk where you said, when you're trying to collaborate as a product team, step one is to integrate your perspectives. We like to think that the product manager is the voice of the business and that the designer is the voice of the customer. And that the engineer is the voice of what is possible with technology. And instead of trying to integrate those voices, we argue about which voice should take precedence. Tell me more about that and how that relates to what we've just been talking about.
- Teresa Torres:
- Yeah, here's the reality. Cross-functional collaboration is really hard. We're not good at it. Most of us have never had to truly cross-functionally collaborate. It's why I get questions all the time. Well, who gets to decide? No, if you're designating someone, a decision maker, you're not collaborating. It's also why organizations struggle with alignment because we don't even know how to cross-functionally collaborate at the executive level. Our executives don't agree. And so we see that disagreement propagate through the entire organization. [affirmative] I was really fortunate during my master's program, I got to sort nerd out on problem solving and how it relates to design [affirmative]. And I got introduced to this researcher, oh man, David Jonas, I blank on his name for a minute. David Jonas, he was the University of Missouri. And he just studied types of problem solving. If you've heard any of my talks, me talk about ill structured problems versus well structured problems that comes from his work.
- And it's just this idea. And he studied how do we be good at these messy ill structured problems. Some people call 'em wicked problems, that might be a more common name for him, but they're, they have, they're problems that have complexity. We have to define the problem before we can even solve it. And Jonas really recommends the best way to tackle an structured problem is to consider multiple perspectives. Because the more ways that you can think about how to frame the problem and how to integrate those perspectives, the richer you're understanding of the problem and the richer your're understanding of the problem, the better you're gonna be at solving it. And so I think when we talk about a product manager, a designer, and an engineer, and they can't agree and they all have their different solutions and they're struggling to align, they haven't integrated their perspectives.
- They're each relying on unique knowledge that they haven't surfaced and shared with each other. And I think the real work of collaboration is aligning around what we know, taking the time to one individually say, why do I believe this? What is it dependent upon? And this is the critical thinking piece. This is where John Dewey, I think wrote some amazing things. I hold this belief, what led to me holding this belief and being really clear about why do I believe this? And then taking the time to communicate that chain of inferences to our teammates and looking at what were their starting points, what were the inputs to their beliefs so that we get to the point where all three of us are starting from the same inputs and we all start from the same inputs. We may not draw the same conclusions, but we're much more likely and we're gonna have much smaller differences when we can start from that same shared understanding. But it does take a lot of work. And I think that's where business culture of 30 minute meetings back to back all day long, don't really support that kind of work. So some of the practical part of it is you gotta just clear your calendar, get rid of all the meetings that don't matter.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I mean it does sound like hard work and it's obviously something that doesn't get done enough given the way that most people are used to working. And if you're a fly on the wall in any meeting, in any organization, on any given day, you're bound to see collaboration not happening as it should and as it should for the benefit of the organization. You know, talked about the need to visualize your critical thinking and the role that plays in helping people align on what to do and how to do it. And I know something that you are particularly proud of that you invented called the Opportunity Solution Tree is a way in which teams can do this. What is the Opportunity Solution Tree? What does it do and how does it help teams to frame and communicate their discovery activities?
- Teresa Torres:
- So the sort of flavor of continuous discovery that I teach assumes that we're starting with an outcome. So we're empowering our product trio to drive a outcome, which is different from how a lot of teams work. A lot of teams are given, here's a roadmap, go deliver these outputs. So first we're starting with a outcome. The challenge with starting with an outcome, which is usually in the form of move this number go increase engagement, go reduce churn, is most teams haven't had experience with that. They don't know how to do that. It's a wide open ill structured problem. So we need a technique or a strategy for how we need to add structure to the problem [affirmative]. So one of the things I encourage teams to do is to go out and interview customers and start to uncover needs pain points and desires, which I collectively call opportunities that if you addressed them would drive that outcome.
- So what we're doing there is we're aligning the business need, which is drive that outcome with what are the customer needs that could drive that business need. And that's actually a really important step because for a lot of companies, the hyper focus and the business need and they forget to create customer value and they end up in these ethical quandaries, or the opposite happens, they create a ton of customer value, but they forget to create business value and they go outta business. And so it sounds so simple, of course we should solve the customer problems that will create business value. But just aligning those two things is a really powerful step. And so the opportunity solution trait just visualizes it, just visualizes it in a decision tree format. So it's just how do you take an inventory of all the opportunities that you're hearing, how might they help you drive your outcome? How do you structure it so that you're giving structure to this wide open problem? And then you can pick where to focus and add solutions and add experiments. And it's just a way of visualizing the whole discovery process so that as you wind through the twisting, turning paths of discovery, that is a mess moment to moment. You have this visual that you're maintaining and creating along the way so that you know where you are and where you've been as a team
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [affirmative]. And I get the sense that it also helps to illustrate to anyone else that you may wanna involve in your product discovery process and your decisions around what to pursue, that you've considered different alternatives and you have something that you can support the conversation around why you decided to go down a certain track.
- Teresa Torres:
- It does in terms of communicating where you are and where you've been, there's a couple of things that make it really nice. So because it's a tree structure, as you move your way down the tree, the opportunity space is getting more and more specific. So at the top level of opportunities, they're really broad opportunities. So if I work at a job board might, and I'm focused on the employer side, they might be things like I need to post a job listing, I need to evaluate candidates, I need to communicate with people in the interview process, really high level needs. But then as you work your way down the tree, they're getting more and more specific. And the value of this is it helps to unlock this truly agile iterative cadence, [affirmative]. And when you're communicating outside your team, you don't have to get into all those details. You can stay at the high level and then only dive into the details for where your current work lives. And so it has this nice balance of you can say, look, we took an inventory of the whole landscape. These are all the things we considered. You only need to know about the high level ones. And then when we get into the, we chose this one, here's why. Now let's dive into the details of where we're currently focused [affirmative]. So it also helps to just manage all the overwhelming knowledge we're acquiring as we do our discovery
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [affirmative]. And something else that you've previously said relating to the tree is that teams focus on too many opportunities at the same time and they build really shallow products. They build a little bit to address a lot of the problems, but they don't solve a single problem entirely. Why does that sort of behavior happen and how can teams do a better job of avoiding that?
- Teresa Torres:
- Yeah, I think cuz as an industry we have an obsession with outputs. [laugh]. We have cultures of feature factories, or as Melissa Perry calls it, the build trap is that we measure the success of a product team based on the number of lines of code that they write or based on the number of features they shipped instead of the value those features created. And that, what's sad about this is that if you think about your favorite products, they probably do fewer things better, right? Cause that's really what we want is we want our problem to be solved not to have 400 bells, like bells and whistles. The problem is there is a gap between how we make buying decisions and how we make using decisions. And oftentimes all those features sound really good when we're making a purchase decision but they become a problem and we're actually trying to use the product.
- And we haven't really figured out how to bridge that gap yet. But I still would argue today the best products do one or two things really well. And then with time they expand and we can even see some really great companies struggling to expand [affirmative]. Dropbox comes to mind. Dropbox was a high, super high growth company that did one thing fairly well, file sharing. Now that they became a big company, they're looking for more growth. They could keep iterating on fire file sharing, but especially venture backed companies, you gotta find adjacent markets looking for their second or third product, much harder. Maybe they've done so with paper. I know some people that use that product but nowhere at the level of the original product, it's hard. It's really hard to do. So I really like to see teams work on teeny tiny problems that they can thoroughly solve before they move on to the next teeny tiny problem. And then just trust the over time, if you solve enough teeny tiny problems, you'll end up with a really well designed, coherent, strong product.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, it's almost like there's this reluctance to close off opportunities. And maybe it's the framing of it, I'm not quite sure what it is, but it's a very human behavior to of leave your options open and not necessarily say no to doing certain things. And you do see that happening in products where they sort of Frankenstein, they're a beautiful thing, doing one thing really well, like Dropbox as you gave an example of, but they almost have this compulsion to want to grow, which forces them to pursue products that might not necessarily fit with that core purpose they were trying to achieve initially.
- Teresa Torres:
- Yeah, I think there's a lot of dimensions to this. So first of all, I think you nailed it. I think companies are obsessed with growth. If you're venture back public, there's reasons for that. And growth usually means growing your employees and now you need to give them something to do. Whereas maybe we need to get better at growth. Maybe growth doesn't mean growth in people. Maybe growth mean Dropbox could have probably grown their original product and kept growing as a company. Cuz I know plenty of people that have never heard of Dropbox. Now my guess is that Dropbox is doing both. So you get to this point in size of company where you need to be pushing on growth on multiple dimensions. And I don't know, this is a hard topic. I don't know what the right answer is. I even Google to me is a company that hasn't necessarily figured out their third product.
- Like Google has search phenomenal, Google has Gmail, kind of phenomenal [laugh] after that. I don't know, I'm sure they have billion dollar products after that and somebody's gonna tweet at me and tell me how dumb I am, cuz I don't know what they are [laugh]. But generally, if I look at the millions of products that Google puts out, a lot of them are total failures from a market perspective. And that's part of Google's philosophy is go let these teams run lots of experiments, some of them will work. It's very much the VC model and that might be the right approach to, that might be the right approach to innovation. But man, I really hope we can just get better at this cuz it feels so wasteful and it leads to products like Google Reader that a lot of us loved that just suddenly went away one day. Right? Yeah. So it's also, it's tough from a great example of a product that created customer value but not business value.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, it is. And it was a sad day when they disappeared for all of us particularly. I
- Teresa Torres:
- Still miss it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. Yeah. It's actually come up a couple of times recently in conversations that I've had. It's definitely something that we're pining for and effectively they killed rss, didn't they? When that product was removed.
- Teresa Torres:
- Although I stubbornly still use RSS and services like Medium that don't even offer RSS feeds. I'm like, you're breaking the open nature of the internet. It's driving nuts.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, big time. Let's shift gears. Are you up for some scenario based questions that might help people in the product organization, whether it's design engineering or product management to solve a problem that they might be struggling with at the moment?
- Teresa Torres:
- Sure.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Okay. Excellent. Scenario number one. You're the head of product at an established B2B company and you're looking at implementing continuous discovery, but you are concerned that your teams won't be able to find enough of the right customers to involve in their research. What do you do to alleviate that concern?
- Teresa Torres:
- Yeah, this is a great question. This is a little bit, we touched on this a little bit earlier with this idea of automating the recruiting process. So first of all, when I'm coaching teams, the first thing I tell them is, do anything you can this week to talk to a customer. I don't care if it's sustainable, you can be scrappy. Just go hustle and find a customer to talk to this week. So if you've never talked to a customer, do not worry about process. Just go find somebody to talk to because your first conversation is gonna provide immense value. From there, you wanna start to think about, okay, now I wanna do this every week. How do I start to make it more sustainable? It's gonna depend wildly on who your customers are. [affirmative]. So if you're we're talking about b2b, if you're Slack and you have thousands, tens, or hundreds of thousands of customers, you don't have to think about process very much.
- All of your product teams could probably reach out to whoever they want and there's gonna be very little overlap. That's great. That's an easy scenario. I worked with a company where they sold the US movie studios. There were six companies in their total addressable market. They had to coordinate about who they were reaching out to in one. And that's where we talk. We see the rise of product ops and design ops in companies. That's where having somebody solve this problem for all of your product teams can be really helpful. [affirmative], how are we gonna recruit customers in a way that allows every single one of our teams to talk to a customer every week? And there's a lot of ways to do this. I cover three of the most common ones in my book. You can recruit people while they're using your product. You can use your customer facing teams to help you recruit. So you can have your account managers or your support teams you can give them triggers. If you encounter a customer that has this problem, schedule an interview with us [affirmative] and they're really hard to reach customer scenarios, I encourage people to set up long-term relationships with customers through a customer advisory panel [affirmative], but to actually interview them one on one. So don't treat it like a focus group, just have a requirement of being on that advisory board, be that they participate in one-on-one interviews.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And what's important about not treating them as a focus group
- Teresa Torres:
- It's fairly easy to teach a product team how to interview well. It's much harder to teach them how to run a focus group. Well, [affirmative] I mean, I know people that get PhDs in market research that struggle to learn how to run a focus group. Well, [laugh] really hard to not with focus groups, we're bringing in all the group dynamics. So the first person to respond is gonna influence the direction of the entire rest of the group. And it takes a really skilled facilitator to collect reliable feedback in a focus group. It does take a skilled interviewer to collect reliable feedback in an interview, but the skill to the ability to develop that skill is a lot simpler. So it's easy to teach a product team how to interview well. It's a lot harder to teach them how to run a focus group. Well,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And I also suspect it's easier to get single people in a room to interview than it is to convene groups on a regular cadence. So you can build that muscle much quicker than you can with groups. Definitely. Yeah. Cool. You ready for another one?
- Teresa Torres:
- Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Okay, here we go. Scenario number two. You're a UX designer and a product team, and you are new to discovery, especially exploring the problem space. You get the theory, but you haven't spoken to many customers before. How do you design your interview questions so that they aren't too general to be useful?
- Teresa Torres:
- So they're gonna get into the art of interviewing. So the big thing that people do wrong with interviewing is they ask a whole bunch of research questions in the interview. So I'm gonna make a distinction between a research question and an interview question. A research question is what you're trying to learn. And most teams write like three page discussion guides and they're all full of research questions. So I'll give an example. Let's say that I work at Netflix and I'm trying to understand your Netflix viewing behavior. I might want to know things like what do you like to watch? How do you decide what to watch? Who do you watch with? What type of device do you watch on? Do you binge watch [affirmative]? I might have a whole list of questions. Here's the challenge. If I ask you what do you like to watch? Your answer is gonna be influenced by any number of cognitive biases.
- You're gonna tell me the most recent thing you watched, you're gonna tell me the thing that you wish you watched more often. You're gonna tell me the thing that you're significant other keeps harassing you about watching, right? It's not necessarily gonna reflect reality. And it's not cuz you're trying to be deceitful or you're trying to put your best foot forward. It's just a function of how human brains work. So the piece that people miss is we gotta translate those research questions into an interview question that helps us collect more reliable feedback. And the key to that is just to ask for a very specific instance. So if I just say, tell me about the last time you watched Netflix. I can listen. I can collect the story and listen for where were you, who were you with, what did you watch? How did you choose it?
- Did you watch more than one episode? And I can get answers to all of my research based questions, but because they happened in the context of a specific instance, they're gonna reflect your actual behavior. And that's something that a lot of teams just, we hear all the cliches open, ask open-ended questions. And so we ask something, tell me about your experience with Netflix. That's still a speculative question. It's not about a specific instance. So if we're trying to uncover behavior, we wanna ask about specific instances in the past. And then the work of the interviewer is to really pull out all those details. Cuz if I ask you Tell me about the last time you watched Netflix, you're gonna gimme a short answer. You're gonna say, oh, I watched this show the other day, [laugh] not a very good story. So I have to do the work to situate you back in that moment. Where were you? Who were you with? So now I can ask my research questions in the context of that specific story.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, that's really powerful and it's a huge point if you're trying to understand behavior. It sounds like what you're saying is that you need to put people back in a context that they can recall where they were behaving with the product rather than just a broad and ambiguous question where they could give you a really light and loose answer.
- Teresa Torres:
- Yeah, and this is what's really great about interviewing is because our criminal justice system depends on interviews, [laugh], we have lots of great research on what leads to reliable interviewing. And it's not a hundred percent analogous when we're talking about product interviewing, but there's a lot we can draw from and borrow from there.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So it sounds like you're advocating for some people in the legal profession to come on over into product,
- Teresa Torres:
- Maybe
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh], they've got some transfer skills.
- Teresa Torres:
- Journalists also are very good at interviewing people, right? Cuz it's getting at that story.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, a hundred percent. Are you ready for a final one?
- Teresa Torres:
- Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Okay, here we go. Scenario number three, seeing a competitive threat looming. Your company has given product teams like yours, the permission and the support to carry out continuous discovery. This is great, but your team is feeling unsure about where to start. How do you know which techniques to use and when?
- Teresa Torres:
- I'm gonna plug my book
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [laugh]. Yeah, go on, do.
- Teresa Torres:
- So my book is called Continuous Discovery Habits. By the time you're listening or watching to this, it will be available in bookstores around the world. It is meant to be a product trio's guide to it, to how to do continuous discovery. And it really, I know there's so much out there about here's why you should work this way. It gets a little bit into that, but it's really designed to be pragmatic hands on. How do you start with an outcome? What do you do first? What do you do next? What do you do next? And here's the thing, there is no one recipe. So the book is gonna give you a place to start and it's also gonna give you a lot of tools for how do you iterate and adapt it for the way that your team needs to work. And I already said this earlier, it starts with just start talking to your customers. From there you'll get into identifying assumptions, testing your assumptions, using prototypes. But I think most of the bang for your buck comes from talk to your customers every week and then keep iterating. Make next week look better than last week.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, I love it. Actually, I was gonna ask you, and I think you've just answered this, what you wanted to say to all the great product people out there who are wondering what the right answer is, but I think you've already very eloquently addressed that with that answer. So that's fantastic.
- Teresa Torres:
- This is something that I think is another gap between the way discovery is moving business and the way business wants to work. So I'm gonna bring up safe, which is the scaled something Agile framework. I don't know what the E stands for. There's nothing agile about safe. The premise of Safe is let's get all of our teams doing the same thing. The premise of Agile is let each team figure out the best way for them to work. And I think that's true on the discovery side. We have a million ways of doing things. My goal with the book is to give you a starting point, but I think it's really critical that every team, if they're truly gonna be a well-functioning cross-functional team, they need to iterate on their work methods just as much as they iterate on their product.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- [affirmative]? Yep. Write that one down everybody. [laugh]. So Teresa, just be mindful of time thinking about where product discovery is now. What is your greatest hope for product discovery and also the people that are practicing it over the coming years?
- Teresa Torres:
- Well, my personal goal is just to increase the number of trios that adopt a continuous cadence to their discovery practices. We have a long way to go. I think I probably could spend my lifetime on that and maybe scratch the service [laugh]. For those of us that are fortunate to work in trios, it's hard to realize that other people even introduced to some of these concepts, but I would say 90 plus percent of product people have never seen this work in practice. We have a long way to go so I get asked all the time, what do I think the next new innovative framework or tool is gonna be? I don't know that we need a next new innovative framework or tool. I think we gotta pull up our boots and do the hard work and start to enact change in our industry.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, that's a great point to draw the show down to a close. Teresa, thank you. This has been a wonderful and rich conversation. It's been great to have you on the show sharing your insights and knowledge. So thank you very much.
- Teresa Torres:
- Thanks for having me. It's been a lot of fun.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You're most welcome. And thank you for all you are doing to help make discovery a better and more understood and more regular aspect of modern product.
- Teresa Torres:
- Thank you,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Teresa, if people want to find out more about you, find out about Continuous Discovery Habits, your new book, what you're up to, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Teresa Torres:
- To check out my blog at producttalk.org you can learn about the book there. You can join the mailing list. We send out a monthly newsletter every month with whatever we've published recently. And also worthy reads from around the web. I'm also a voracious reader, so I like to share what I've been reading lately. And really my goal is just to give you actionable content that you can put into practice in the next day or two. So if you're interested in learning more about continuous discovery, I recommend checking it out.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, most definitely. Thanks Teresa. And if you are listening and you are key to check out Teresa's work, I can also recommend highly her talks that you can find on producttalk.org as well. They're very, very good and very insightful. Thanks for everyone that's tuned in. It's been great having you here as well. Everything that we've covered today will be in the show notes, including where you can find Teresa, Product Talk and all of the resources that we've mentioned. If you enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world class leaders in design, UX, and product, don't forget to leave us a review and subscribe to the channel. And until next time, keep being brave.