Understanding Continuous Discovery with Teresa Torres
Aug 25, 2021
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Product Discovery Coach, Teresa Torres, discusses the heart of continuous discovery, the importance of defining the customer boundaries, and the framework for discovering opportunities. She emphasizes the need for deliberate product leadership and highlights the dangers of misaligned incentives and unethical behavior. The podcast also explores the connection between design justice and continuous discovery, as well as the significance of stable teams and outcome-focused leadership for successful continuous discovery habits.
Continuous discovery involves creating products with the team and incorporating customer input.
Defining the customer and setting clear boundaries is vital in product design.
An outcome-focused approach and aligning solutions with defined opportunities are key components of continuous discovery.
Deep dives
Continuous Discovery Habits
In this podcast episode, Teresa Torres discusses her book, Continuous Discovery Habits, where she emphasizes the importance of continuous discovery in product management. She shares her own journey into product management and the motivation behind her focus on customer-centricity and discovery. Torres highlights the need for organizations to shift towards an outcome-focused approach rather than just output-focused, and she introduces the concept of the Opportunity Solution Tree as a framework for finding the best path to desired outcomes. She also addresses the challenges of traditional roadmaps and suggests a shift towards outcome-driven roadmaps that prioritize customer value and impact. Torres advocates for the integration of business value and customer value in product management to ensure long-term success.
The Misuse of Outcomes: Lessons from Wells Fargo
Using the example of Wells Fargo's account opening scandal, Torres highlights the importance of setting appropriate outcomes and avoiding misinterpretation or misuse of outcome-based incentives. She emphasizes the need for customer-centricity in setting outcomes, as overly ambitious goals without considering ethical and customer-focused practices can lead to negative outcomes. Torres suggests aligning business value and customer value as complementary goals and encourages a shift towards an outcome-focused approach that prioritizes customer needs and business success.
Rethinking Roadmaps: From Output to Outcome
Torres challenges the traditional approach to roadmaps, which focus on output and fixed timelines. She proposes a shift towards outcome-driven roadmaps that emphasize continuous discovery and customer value. By focusing on customer needs and impact, teams can prioritize opportunities and solutions in a more flexible and adaptable manner. Torres suggests integrating customer testimonials and impact data into roadmaps to communicate the value of features and solutions, instead of relying on fixed feature lists. This shift towards outcome-driven roadmaps allows for more agility and responsiveness to changing market conditions and customer needs.
Continuous Discovery Habits: Building a Customer-Centric Culture
Torres explores the prerequisites for successful implementation of continuous discovery habits within organizations. She emphasizes the importance of forming durable product trios, consisting of product managers, designers, and engineers who work together on a focused product area. She also highlights the need for leaders to shift their mindset towards outcome-driven approaches and prioritize customer value alongside business value. Torres advocates for continuous engagement with customers and an iterative discovery process to create a customer-centric culture and drive long-term success.
Balancing Business Value and Customer Value
In this episode, Torres emphasizes the necessity of balancing business value and customer value in product management. She highlights the importance of creating products and services that not only meet customer needs but also generate business value. By aligning business outcomes with customer-centric practices, organizations can ensure sustainable growth and success. Torres emphasizes the role of continuous discovery in identifying and addressing opportunities that create value for both customers and businesses, and she encourages product managers to prioritize this dual focus to drive impactful outcomes.
Teresa Torres is a Product Discovery Coach, author, and keynote speaker. She is also the founder of The Product Talk Academy where she helps product teams adopt continuous product discovery practices. Teresa joins Melissa to discuss how product managers can implement strong continuous discovery habits into their product practices and how to communicate that work via roadmaps.
Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Teresa talk about in this episode:
How Teresa first got involved in product management. [1:12]
The heart of continuous discovery is not about shoving products on our team, but about creating products with them. It’s also about bringing the customer into the building process and figuring out how we make our products work for them. [6:28]
We need to be always careful of who we are including when we define the customer and who we are leaving out. We can’t design a product for everybody but we can be more thoughtful and deliberate about boundaries. [7:26]
Teresa says product leaders need to be deliberate about their ideas, as this will help them make more strategic decisions. [9:41]
Teresa explains the framework of continuous discovery. [11:26]
There are three components of discovering opportunities: understanding what success looks like to us in our organizations, defining the opportunity space, and making sure our solutions align with the other two components. [12:40]
It doesn’t matter what method we use to discover opportunities. What matters is that we need to be outcome-focused, we need to find the right problems to solve, and then we need to find solutions that fit both the problem and the outcome. [14:15]
A big issue with many companies is that they aren’t being deliberate about their target market. They miss out on opportunities because of this. [17:50]
We have to be customer-centric in how we set and frame our outcomes. [22:20]
We need trust that our employees work at our companies because they care about the customer. We need to trust that they’re going to do the right thing and do their best at work every day with what they’re given. When we do that, their compensation does not need to be tied to their outcome. [25:59]
Teresa talks through how to communicate discovery work on roadmaps without getting tied to a fixed timeline. [28:35]
We don’t have to be constantly looking for the next task because if we are following continuous discovery practices, we will always have the next opportunity there. [37:15]
We need to focus on both business value and customer value. We have to serve our customers in ways that will create value for the business. [39:04]
Teresa talks about the target audience for her book. [41:45]
Resources
Teresa Torres | LinkedIn | Twitter
Product Talk
Continuous Discovery Habits
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