An interview with Teresa Torres. Teresa is a product discovery coach who works with a variety of organisations to help bed in good product discovery practices. Her coaching experience led her to write a book on the same topic, which she hopes will inspire product teams around the world to build fast feedback loops and defeat stakeholder bias.
We talk about a lot, including:
- Why she decided to write Continuous Discovery Habits, and the feedback she's received so far
- What the concept of continuous discovery means in practical terms, and why it's important to stay on top of shifting customer needs
- The target audience for the book, and whether it's for product leaders or the sceptical exec team
- How ideological battles are not going to win the war for product discovery, and the importance of showing and not telling
- How her history in human-centred design, and disappointment at working practices in the real world, ignited her passion for discovery
- How cognitive biases can lead to bad product decisions, but how this isn't just down to stakeholders but also affects product teams themselves
- The importance of stakeholder management, addressing their own gaps, and using story mapping to uncover those gaps and assumptions
- Why you should follow through with an impact analysis when you're inevitably overruled, and uncover their (or your) gaps in understanding
- How continuous discovery can work with any type of addressable market, and how few people is too few
- The ideal frequency of customer contact, and why the longer you leave it, the more risky your decisions
- The critical importance of getting engineers into discovery early and using their knowledge & experience to get to the right solution
And much more!
Buy Continuous Discovery Habits
"In this book, you'll learn a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery that will help you answer each of these questions, giving you the confidence to act while also preparing you to be wrong. You'll learn to balance action with doubt so that you can get started without being blindsided by what you don't get right. "
Visit the book website or check it out on Amazon or Goodreads.
Contact Teresa
You can find out more about Teresa's coaching & education efforts on producttalk.org.
If you want to catch up with Teresa, you can Twitter or on LinkedIn.
