Torres: Stopping delivery to conduct discovery kills organizational appetite for research
Teresa Torres · Build better products with continuous product discovery | Teresa Torres · Oct 6, 2022 · at 26:10
Product discovery coach Teresa Torres addresses pushback from leadership claiming teams lack time for customer discovery.
0:00 / 0:32exact quote · 32.2s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“The best way to kill any appetite for discovery is to say, let's stop making bets until we discover. No, don't do that. Keep making bets in parallel, start doing some discovery so that eventually those bets get better. And I think the reason why people make this mistake is they think about it as phases. First I discover and then I deliver. No, you're always delivering and you're always discovering. And the more you build this discovery habit, the better those bets are going to get with time.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Teresa Torres
Torres: Calling product managers 'CEOs of the product' stems from toxic culture
“And I see analogies of the product manager is the decider and they're the CEO of the product. I think this is coming from toxic business culture personally.”
Torres: Effective teams run 6 to 12 assumption tests weekly
“That team that's struggling to test a single idea is still stuck in project-based research world. They're running experiments that take weeks to get results. Whereas when I talk about assumption testing, I'm working with a team that's running half a dozen to a…”
Torres: 98% of people write opportunities as solutions
“I can tell you that an opportunity is an unmet need, pain point, or desire, and that's great. But I can tell you that 98% of people that write opportunities write them as solutions. So we tend to just really struggle with this distinction between the problem s…”
Torres: Individual contributors should adapt personal habits rather than forcing org change
“If you're an individual contributor and you're not at a 10 person company, I would say don't try to force the organizational change. Organizational change is such a hard and messy problem. I feel like what I would do in that situation is I would just change th…”
Torres: 98% of tech has never experienced an effective product trio
“Probably 98% of the industry has never worked on a well-functioning product trio, and this idea sounds crazy.”
Torres: Asking users what they would do produces unreliable discovery data
“And I think that's a really big mistake that teams make. Is they, both in their prototype tests and in their interviews, they focus on what people would do, on what people think, on why they think they do something, and it's all really unreliable. It's a garba…”