Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more
User's personalized AI podcast notes AI-generated based on their snips
AI-generated based on their snips
1. Teams often struggle to shift from building product features to exploring the problem space. The Opportunity Solution Tree provides structure for this shift by helping teams understand the distinction between the problem space and the solution space.
2. The process of deciding what to watch involves considering factors like the platform, evaluating the content, ensuring a good viewing experience, and potential post-viewing interactions. Within this process, various user needs and pain points arise, ranging from tactical issues like finding a specific movie to broader concerns such as determining the quality of a show.
3. Thinking deeply and engaging in critical thinking exercises at work can lead to a deeper understanding of customer needs and the ability to build better products.
4. Instead of trying to force organizational change, focus on changing the way you individually work within the organization.
5. The shift to digital products requires a continuous mindset for product evolution and decision-making, necessitating the continuous inclusion of the customer in the process.
6. Don't delay making bets until full discovery; everything in the backlog is a bet, and discovery helps make better bets.
7. The speaker recommends automating the recruiting process by making it easier for product teams to conduct interviews every week.
8. Embedded scheduling in surveys allows for easy customer interview scheduling, enabling tailored and strategic positioning to capture the attention of consumers and B2B end users.
9. Well-functioning product trios, consisting of the product manager, the designer, and the software engineer, have the ability to work together effectively in a shared understanding, resulting in reduced disagreements and a continuous search for better options.
10. Interviewers should focus on having a natural, casual and conversational interview style, avoiding long lists of questions.
11. Creating a natural conversation involves the skill of eliciting stories through curiosity-driven questions.
12. Interviewing should focus on being genuinely curious about the interviewee's experiences and actions, allowing them to naturally recount their timeline.
13. Interviewers can extract valuable insights from interviewees by simply being curious about their experiences and asking specific questions to help the interviewees recall and elaborate on their actions.
14. Starting with an outcome, being empowered to come up with solutions, and collaborating with adjacent teams are crucial in managing dependencies. In larger companies, there may be cynicism towards user research, but making decisions based on at least one interview is better than making decisions with zero data.
