Understanding Continuous Discovery with Teresa Torres

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