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.
Show Notes
Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Teresa talk about in this episode:
How Teresa first got involved in product management.
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.
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.
Teresa says product leaders need to be deliberate about their ideas, as this will help them make more strategic decisions.
Teresa explains the framework of continuous discovery.
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.
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.
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.
We have to be customer-centric in how we set and frame our outcomes.
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.
Teresa talks through how to communicate discovery work on roadmaps without getting tied to a fixed timeline.
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.
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.
Teresa talks about the target audience for her book.
Resources Teresa Torres | LinkedIn | Twitter Product Talk Continuous Discovery Habits
Episode Transcript
Speaker 1: Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day-to-day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole, the systems the processes and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers with the help of some boundary-pushing
Speaker 2: guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions. We'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product. Duct leader. This is the product Thinking
Speaker 1: podcast. Here's your host Melissa Perry. Hello everyone and welcome to the product Thinking podcast. Today, our guest is Teresa Torres who just wrote the book. Continuous Discovery habits Theresa is a product coach and a product teacher. She's done a lot of really cool stuff. So, Theresa, how did you get into product management and can you explain to our audience a little bit about what you're doing now with your clients?
Speaker 2: Yeah. So I started actually as a designer and really not even a designer because I learned design in college. I started got introduced to a human centered design. German college, but that was like the 90s and nobody was really hiring full-time designers. To my very first job was actually, as a front-end developer where I did design work, she's kind of a funny entry point into things and then over the course of a couple different jobs.
Early-stage startups, I realized, I'd actually always been doing product work. I just hadn't worked at organizations. The newest product was, or what product work was. And so I always like to tell product trios, which is usually who I coach, and I've actually dabbled in all three roles at various points in my career, which is a lot of fun.
One. And then I did a lot of my background was really stage startups where I have to play lots of different roles, which is super fun. I got introduced to the business side, really early on by 32, I was a start-up CEO of somebody else's company, which if you're being offered a CEO job, somebody else's companies.
Not sure that I would take it again. I mean, I've already do it over again. I learned it's fun, it was great. But I'd rather be a founder of be the CEO of my own company. And then I really just saw the same problem everywhere. Like, no matter where I worked product team. Not spend enough time with their customers and this is really foreign to me because I was introduced to human centered design and integrate feedback throughout the development process like as a 20 year old in college.
So in 2013, I just sort of got fed up and seeing the same problem everywhere and decided, I really want to tackle this problem in particular. And so I started Consulting Consulting gradually led to coaching coaching gradually led to teaching. And so now, I mostly focus on course, design and teaching Teaching, courses, through the product, talk Academy.
I occasionally, take on some coaching teams. Although hooker ring on, it has mostly takes on our coaching and then I wrote a book and I teach at Northwestern, I'm already thinking about what the next book is going to be soon. I'm not going to trying hard not to think about myself.
These days is a teacher and a writer. And I still do a little bit of coaching for past
Speaker 1: clients. Cool. Cool man, you and your glove for fun. And you're like, all right into this, but when I finished is giving the bill trap, I was like, I'm never riding again and it's just taken me until this year, like, three years later to be like, okay fine, maybe, maybe I'll write another one
Speaker 2: but you know what? Like I really thought I was going to write one book. In fact people ask me like do you want to write more books? And I was like no like it was hard enough. I just wanted to write one book and I poured everything I knew into this book and I was like anyway I part of me was like, I want to write this book and then figure out my next turn.
And I kind of want to be done and move on to my next thing like that's what I'm feeling and then 2020 happened, 2020 is when I wrote the book but probably towards the end of 2020. My name is too late to kind of change course on the book because most of it had been written had already started the review process. I was committed.
Like people been waiting for this book for a long time. Was not going to pull the plug on it that late and start over. But I was really influenced by what happened in Minnesota with George Floyd and like just all the social unrest around the world and I started reading All these products that replicate social inequities in the products themselves, you know, biases like hand soap, dispensers that don't detect darker-skinned, things like that and I realize that like I kind of missed the boat.
Like I had an opportunity to infuse more of those sort of ethical questions throughout the book, do talk about ethical assumptions and how to surface ethical assumptions. And there's a big part of that in my identifying Solutions chapter. But I really feel like a lot of people are talking about the ethics of the products that we're building, but it's the same problem.
Um, I see everywhere, there's lots of people that right, product, management books, there are very many people that write really good how to product management books, right? And so, I feel like my superpower as a communicator is to get to the how to like this is what the day-to-day looks like. And so I really want to do that on the ethical side of products.
Because I feel like so many of us right now, reacted to 2020 with we care. We want to be part of the solution but we don't have. So I think I don't think I have a choice. I think I have to write them.
Speaker 1: The reason we should talk more because Kathy Pham was just on the podcast, a couple weeks ago, too. And she's teaching all about product ethics and product management in government, at Harvard talks. A lot about it. We should all talk about that because I've been, if you see our class into that too, that would be awesome because I
Speaker 2: think my next quarter whenever that ends up being is I really want to figure out how to bring this stuff to the public sector. I think that's awesome. In the same way that product people should cooperate with their customers. I think politicians and policymakers should Co-create with their constituents. So I have no idea how to make that happen but I really want to. Oh, I
Speaker 1: love it. We have. Okay, I've got so many people to tell you. After this is really, really fun. I feel like this is a really hot topic right now to something that has been kind of burning with me to get more people to think through and to really think about. So, we have a lot to dive into, and I think what you've been talking about to, with your continuous Discovery, habits very like, that's the first step to really thinking about product, ethics, is understanding your users understanding, what you're going after as Without good Discovery we can't really get into how do we make good
Speaker 2: products. Yeah. So I recently read design Justice which is this phenomenal book and it talked about this idea of if you want to create ethical products that you should design with people, not for people and I read that and I got goosebumps because that to me is the heart of continuous Discovery. Like let's not shove products onto people.
Let's go create products with them and I've gotten pushback from Big thought, leaders about this, co-creation Which really because people think that like, oh, it means I'm going to go ask my customers. What should I build like a doll? We have to recognize that customers are experts in themselves in their world, in their needs and that like they should have a say in which problems were solving in which an and how we solve those problems.
It does not mean we're going to say, hey tell me what I should build right. And I think one of my goals with continuous Discovery happens in with all of the work that I've been doing for the last eight to ten years, depending on how we draw a boundary. And I started. It is really, just how do we bring the customer into that process and how do we include them?
How do we make sure it's working for them. So, that language in the design justice book, it felt like, oh, that's what I've been trying to teach people to do for a really long time. I just didn't go hard, I didn't look at the question of like, who are we including when we Define the customer and who are we?
Implicitly leaving out, because we all know all product people know, we can't design a design a product for everybody. Right. You have to have a Target customer but we can be a lot more thoughtful and deliberate about how we Define that, where we draw the boundaries, who we include as a result, like, are we being explicit about?
We're designing for these. People are not these people, and it's not just about race and gender and ethnicity. It's things. Like, do you assume your customers have a broadband connection and are you leaving out everybody that lives in a rural area? Or are you, are you a B2B company?
That is focused, only on the big-ticket Enterprise clients. And then, what does that mean? Like, are we just not going to serve our mom and pop businesses? I don't want to live in a world where mom and pop businesses are around, so it really opened my eyes to that. And I think I started to layer those ideas onto the continuous Discovery habits framework. And I was like, wow, this is like a hand in a glove. Like it's so compatible because continuous cover happens is all about. Learn about your customer integrate with your customer. Bring your customer into the process. I love
Speaker 1: that. Yeah, we when I was talking to Kathy about this to, we got into a little bit about Out how I think, I look a lot of companies just stop MVP and when you have to start right figure out where do I start and how do I build it? Of course you want to like narrow it down and think about your target audience.
You want to First go after. But then especially when you scale and you're like a huge company, like there's really no excuse for not taking into account, you know, accessibility and other people and all the different types of customers that you would serve. Like, at that point you almost become like a commodity.
So, like sure you can pick and choose but how That reflect on you, if you want to be like a commodity, like like Airbnb, right? Like you want everybody to use you? You can't just say, oh, well, we designed for this target market over here. It's like know you've been around for so long, your huge, you got tens of thousands of people working for you.
Like it's it feels it's a cop out at that point. It feels like we're just not doing good product management.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I would argue even before your big, like you're making really early decisions that are going to have long-term Downstream effects. And it doesn't take A lot to just one of those the major theme in the book, make your thinking explicit externally visualize it so that is a team you can examine right. So yes you might still decide where a teeny.
Tiny startup. We need money. We have to go after the big Enterprise clients but at least you're being deliberate about that rather within what a lot of us do is we just chase the next contract and we're not explicitly saying we're focusing on this segment and not this segment. And at later on the road, because your explicit about it, you're going to remember too.
Doesn't it you're going to be more aware that you actually made the decision? And I haven't done this in my own business. I know, we actually you and I are on similar, kind of trajectories and where we just met with our businesses. But like, I used to spend 80% of my time coaching and 20% on my courses.
So what does that mean? I'm serving companies where the head of product is already sold on working this way, they have a ton of budget and they're willing to invest in their teams. It's a teeny tiny percentage of the market, who am I leaving out everybody else. And so I decided this year that I'm going to focus on the everybody else.
You and I might make less money as a result because most of the money isn't Consulting. Although frankly, the course, business is not a bad business to be in and I'm doing fine. Nobody used to feel sorry for me, right? But like, I really want to serve the individuals who don't have the luxury of working for those leaders because those are the people that need the most help and that's also where we're going to find the underrepresented folks that aren't even getting jobs.
At the companies that are willing to make these Investments.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's where the interesting opportunities arise to, right?
Speaker 1: The people who are not really being served. So this gets us into your continues Discovery habits because I assume you're going to be doing some of that for your, for figuring out where to go there. So, can you tell us a little bit about what is the framework for continuous Discovery habits? How would you describe it? Why should people do it?
Speaker 2: So, I just grabbed this in two different ways. So, first is just, what are we doing in Discovery? And I think the first is its, I tried to come up with regardless of the framework or the tools, or your favorite methods. What's The underlying structure to the work that we do and this is what led to the opportunity solution trade because I think that underlying structure is as simple as we start with outcome, which is a common Trend right now, hopefully people are familiar with that.
Is then we have to discover the opportunities which is jargon but it just means customer needs pain points and desires. And then we have to just bet that if we address them with drive that outcome and then we need to discover the solutions that would address those opportunities in a way that would drive out. And so, with that structure, what I was looking for is Some people, I teach story based interviewing to discover opportunities, the job has to be done, folks.
Teach job to be done. Interviewing. But they're discovering what I would call opportunities design. Thinkers say, go observe your customers in person in their environment. That's a way to discover opportunities. I don't think the way matters so much as long as that's a part of your process.
Just like we have a million ways to discover Solutions. We can design, thinkers will tell you to prototyping get qualitative feedback. Lean Startup books will tell you to test your Assumptions and get quantitative feedback like they're all good, right? But I feel like there's these three components understand what the end looks like.
What does success look like to find the outcome? That's usually your business value, right? Your outcome usually represents how you're going to create value for your business and then Define the opportunity space. That's how you're going to create value for the customer. And then make sure that your solution ladders up to both.
And in the methods can can be swapped in and out, Based On A team's preference. That's one part of what I would say is, The set of Discovery activities. And then I think for continuous Discovery, I want to see teams engaging with customers every week and that it's the team that's building the product that's doing that.
And that what they're doing during those customer engagements is that they're conducting small research, activities, to figure out what are the right Solutions.
What are the right opportunities to ensure their driving now come. I think you just hit on
Speaker 1: something that has been a major source of frustration for me. And I love how you put it on here because I get asked the question all the time. I'm sure you do too. How does this process different than design thinking how is the escaping the build trap process, different than three satori's has continues Discovery habits. And I'm like, I don't this. Keeping the build traps on a process. It's like it's just product and I love what you said. It's not so much about what method you're using to get into the interviews or discover the opportunities. It's just about figuring out what the right opportunity is however you actually wanted to find that
Speaker 2: which I asked all the time. What's the difference? Opportunity solution, tree an impact mapping, okay great, they're both ways, a visually externalizing. You're thinking you should do that. If you have your own made-up, way of visualizing externalizing, you're thinking do that, right? I think the key is not very many, people do the work to understand the underlying principle behind the method and they don't know what to do when.
So by coming up with this, like whether use the opportunity solution for your not, like understanding that you should be outcome-focused. You need to find the right problems to solve, and then you need to find the solutions that Fit both that problem and drives that outcome is enough. Now, you can look at any tool framework method and say which part does this help me with okay.
Ours, help me with setting an outcome job, has to be done, helps me with discovering opportunities. David Blaine's Works going to help me discover Solutions. I could literally pick any thought leader in the space and think of like their big idea and tell you where it fits in that structure. And I think that's a big missing piece that teams just need help with that translation.
Speaker 1: Yes, please. It's just figuring out what's fit for purpose at that time. But like, you know, some of them do exactly the same thing, other ones are fit for purpose, for different types of things you're looking at. So, for the people who don't know about your opportunity solution, tree, what is it, like, how do you describe it? And when do you think what is the right time to use it? When would you turn to it?
Speaker 2: Yeah. So it was designed to help a team figure out how to find the best path to their outcome. So anytime you're starting with a new outcome I would start a new opportunity solution tree. Now, if you're not outcome focused yet and you're like, how do I even get to that outcome? It's this simple. If you have a Target customer segments and you have a theory of the value, proposition for them, you can set a mountain, right?
So, like the example I give is, I may not even have a product that might be pre startup phase. I just want to start a company. I'm passionate about podcasters and I know I want to help them grow Their audience. I don't have to know my problems, I can set it out. Come again, that room. I would sit outcome of.
How much did I help Melissa grow her audience? Right. And then do that. Going across all the podcasters I'm serving. So I don't have to know what my product is yet. With that in place, I can go interview people. I can go observe people, I can start looking for what are the needs pain points and desires that are related to trying to grow a podcast audience, right?
And I can map out that opportunity space. And once I have understanding the opportunity space, I can start to evaluate what are other products and solutions doing in this space. Where are there? Gaps, where can I have a differentiated product if I already have a product I can start. To evaluate. Where do what do we already serve in this opportunity space where our own gaps? Where can we differentiate from our competitors? And then that sets me up really nicely to make the good strategic decision of, where do I want to play? And then that's where I can start to get into discovering Solutions and working my way across that opportunities face
Speaker 1: is there like a specific level that you find works really well for the opportunity solution tree? Or is it like high level for a company is more like
Speaker 2: team-based. Yeah, I usually use it at the team. Also a team is responsible for an outcome and they're trying to figure out what in the world should we build. I have worked with leadership teams at companies that try to do like a cross company opportunity, solution tree. I don't think it works. What?
I think works better at that stage is the cross company experience map. But how do we across the organization, build, a rich, understanding who our customer is what their opportunities face looks like in a experience way. Yep. Where is the opportunity solution tree is really designed to help. You reach and out by doing that across the company, it gets really messy because there's lots of competing outcomes within a company.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense and I feel like inferior, you kind of need the same thing at the company. What, you know, you were just saying, mentioning it before. I think one of the biggest issues that I've seen for companies is not that deliberate, who are we going after right now? And the prioritization, you know, as you were talking about with your business and that leads to so many other problems.
Like people not knowing how to run map and not know how Prioritize and getting into that. So I love the idea of the whole experience mapping at the top to kind of set that strategy understand, like, where the opportunities are. And then basically, we'll dive into the opportunity solution trees to figure out what we're actually going to build.
Yeah, so I think at the
Speaker 2: leadership level, there's let's across the company. Co-create, this experience map and that the leaders need to do. It's almost like a kpi tree, right? Like every company I've tried to grow profits, we need to increase Revenue reduce costs based on this. Experience map and our theory of the products and services in our vision of the future.
What are the metrics that matter? Most to our business and then the outcomes of the team's work on our roll up to that, right? And I think that's a lot of that strategic context, that Marty Kagan talks about that is just missing in an organization where cherry-picking outcomes, we don't see how they relate to each other.
We don't see how they let have a ladder up to business outcomes. And so then we find teams in these situations are, like, they're running hard after a metric, and they're moving them. Reckon it looks like they're having success but they're not creating any business value because it's just kind of a sham outcome.
So I do think there's like a equivalent to the tree that is a tree structure is just how do you Branch out?
These are the outcomes that matter to our business and its really closely tied. But this is how our business model works.
Speaker 1: Yeah. That makes a ton of sense. I always say, like, when I talk about my partner strategy canvas, I always look at things called, like, I call him strategic intense, but they're always like the business-focused piece and then we need something like the opportunity solution tree to do the product initiative. Herbs and the solutions over on the team
Speaker 2: level. Yeah, cool.
Speaker 1: Did you know I have a course for product managers that you could take, it's called Product Institute over the past seven years. I've been working with individuals teams and companies to upskill their product chops through my fully online school. We have an ever-growing list of courses to help you work through your current product.
Dilemma visit product Institute.com, and learn to think like a great product manager. Use code thinking to save $200 at checkout on our Premier course product management. Ins. So one of the things too that we were just talking about was, you know, being able to roadmap getting into this. So if you're going into work with a company and they're like three said, we want continuous Discovery habits, you know, come fix it.
What are you trying to set up, like, what needs to be there? What are the prerequisites that are needed? So that this can actually be
Speaker 2: successful. This is a really good question because I think this is like, my sales process. This is what I bet in the sales process, I want to see, durable product trios already in place. So what do I mean by that? Manager designer and engineer working together, jointly responsible for what to build they may have never done that before.
But like from a team topology standpoint that used to be in place and they need to be on one part of the product for the long term so not like yeah we're a trio but we have 17 projects because the work to discover the opportunity space, the work to truly discover Solutions and to do this continuously is a full-time job. So that's the first thing I'm looking for is, do we have a stable team that's in place that owns a part of the product that they're going to? Over time.
And then the second piece is due to have an outcome and I'm less concerned about. Is it a well-formed outcome? Is it the right outcome? I just want to see from leadership that they've made some move away from build these fixed outputs because at the team has been told to filled, fixed-fixed outputs and I come in and say interview customers discover the opportunity space.
They're gonna be like we got to get started on these outputs and I will cause more problems than I'll help those are the two primary prerequisites. That I look for thankfully. That's also where R, the industry is going, and I don't need a company to have those in place across all of their teams. I just need the team that I'm coaching to have that in place.
So for a lot of companies, they're in the middle of their digital transformation and they just identify like to front teams that they're trying to create bright spots to figure out. Comes, they give them create durable teams giving some Focus. It's like they're creating a little sandbox for how we going to learn to work this way.
Speaker 1: So one of the things you mentioned in the book too about outcomes kind of gone. Wrong is the story with Wells Fargo, right? Like You can chase that. Can you tell us a little bit about like, where can the structure sometimes? Be misinterpreted, what are like bad practices when setting the outcomes in, like, unleashing your team to go get
Speaker 2: them? Yeah. So first, I'll clarify, I've never worked with Wells Fargo. That story came from reading the news and reading Wikipedia But Here was the just a bit people might remember this too is all over the news in 2016. There is this huge like Firestorm it throughout the media that Wells Fargo is opening checking accounts savings accounts.
And And mortgage accounts under people's names without their permission. And I started to think about like why does this happen? And this is the classic example of like sales team is going off the rails, and it's because we incentivize out was, which is a lot of Y in the product world. We talked about don't pay compensation to outcomes because it leads to all these sort of Miss behaviors and I inferred that like, well, some of the news articles started to dig in and found that maybe Wells Fargo leadership is putting like setting unreasonable, go And then attaching it with these outsized incentives.
So what does that do? Your incentivizing people to cheat? Probably not explicitly. I don't think any leader at Wells, Fargo said go cheap, right? But you're creating a system in place where it's not surprising. That cheating, my occur, very careful someone to slander Wells. Fargo here. I really do think like, I think, Wells, Fargo is a good company, and I've talked to many people that work there and I think if they are a very customer Centric company, Yeah, but you have to be customer Centric and how you say your outcomes and especially how you frame them.
So for example if you just set your outcome is increase, the average number of accounts per customer. We just sounds like his what they might have done again. I don't have any first-hand knowledge of this story. You run the risk of okay, we doing that at all costs, whereas you can actually frame that he'll come a little better and say, let's learn about our customers and figure out what makes them want to open more accounts and so Really important that you combine this outcome mindset with a really strong customer-centric mindset.
And I think that chapter opens with a Peter Drucker, quote as along the lines of like the purpose of a business is to find and serve a customer. And in today's business climate, we're losing sight of that. We think the purpose of a business is to create shareholder value. Shareholder value should be the side effect of finding and serving a customer, right? And so I wanted to include that story even though I feel like it does expose me a little bit because I am not. Yeah, it scares me a little bit, but I wanted to include it because I see teams go too far with outcomes and they forget the customer centricity peace.
Speaker 1: Yeah. You know, what, in the case of like, Wells, Fargo and other places to every every company is sometimes really good companies, get caught up in something like that, right? Where and it is something that, you know, you don't even catch until it's too late and I think it's a good lesson for everybody.
It doesn't mean that the entirety of Wells Fargo Correct, or anything. It's just like, hey, we saw, we were actually motivating people and I think a lot of people in management. Do you think this, hey said, a really lofty goal motivate people to go get it and we're going to see like progress, right?
And that's just like a natural business management methodology, but I think it's such a great warning on where it could go wrong. And I've seen it happen to like other companies to, and in big ways and small ways tons of them. When you just think, like, hey I'm gonna set this really ambitious goal and then I'm going to to compensate people for trying to hit it.
And as soon as you do that, man, I've seen some really wild stuff like I had one company. When I came in to do an assessment on them, that's about like the road maps and and the stuff they were building and they were like, well, all our bonuses are tied to what we deliver on our roadmap. So in December, we basically just do whatever the hell we can to ship everything out and meet those roadmaps. So we get our bonus and then we spend all of January on doing it because it was a bunch of broken code that We make any sense and it's easy to get into that
Speaker 2: trap. You know what, this is, what's hard and this is I have turned down work with companies that compensate their teams based on whether the hit it. Okay, ours are their outcomes and I feel like if you really want to do Discovery, will that is the wrong model. We need to treat our employees like the adults that they are and Trust, they work at your company because they care about the customer and they're genuinely doing the right thing and that they're going to show up at work and do the best they can.
And given what they have available to them each day and their compensation does not need to be times, they're out, right? And I don't even think I need to be needs to be tied to their outcome, like most people especially knowledge workers do what they do, because they care and they're intrinsically motivating and Daniel Pink's book, Mastery does a great job. I mean Drive does a great job of summarizing like their psychology behind this.
He put in extrinsic reward like compensation on this and you just killed Peoples, Natural intrinsic motivation. So not only do I think it leads. These really messed up incentive systems that encourage wrong Behavior. I just don't think you need it at all. I think you're going to get more from your people.
If you just make it all about your customer and our goal is to serve our customer. I think most people genuinely want to do that and organizations do more to get in the way of that. Then they do to like help support that.
Speaker 1: I could not agree more. Like I just think we have a sometimes, outdated perception on management of like, you know, it's not about like beating people up. The stick, giving them some leeway to go out there and learn and I feel like people love doing Discovery stuff. Like I love learning about their customers every time. I've seen teams go do it. Well, they're like, man, I feel, I feel like I made a difference
Speaker 2: here. That's exactly what it means. Is that every human they hear a customer problem. They genuinely want us all to. It's like going to a bar with a friend and hearing about their problem, and with the friend wants is empathy, and what you want to do is solve the problem, right? Like it's like, oh yeah.
Human thing, like we hear about a need, we want to address it and so I think if we just create the environment where it's easy for teams to talk to customers, it's easy for teams to have the freedom to figure out how to solve those problems. They'll do the right things but you can't have only half the equation. It's like what I was trying to get at with that Wells, Fargo story, and I don't know if this is true Wells Fargo but from the news reports that sounds like they only had half the story.
They said that, he'll come, they forgot the customer centered piece, we have in, that's an important part.
Speaker 1: So, When teams are trying to do to build up their continuous Discovery habits make space for this. In the company's, there's two things I kind of want to dive into a little bit that I've seen be an issue one. I get this question all the time and I'm sure you do too which is how do we communicate the discovery work. We're doing on road maps in a way where we can talk about it at the company but nobody's trying to sell it, you know,
Speaker 2: robots are tough, right? So International road map, here's a list of features, there's when you're going to get them and companies like that. Because then marketing can plan and customer. Success can plan and your sales team can plan. And when I say your sales team can plan, they can start selling those features.
Here's what's wrong with that. We're assuming that we can predict the future. We know when things are going to released, we don't engineering is uncertain because in certain problems, we can't forecast uncertain problems. Says the first thing. Like that's just a fantasy. We don't know when things are going to release and frankly it's about time we just acknowledge that right?
Like how many hours a week do engineers? Waste, trying to estimate things that are impossible. All to estimate. So I wish we would just acknowledge it'll release when it's ready because quality and that is. So that's the first part of it. The second part of it is, I actually think it's this output mindset.
We're doing our marketing launches around out. We're doing our sales strategy around out, there is nothing instead. If we fully switched to outcomes instead of talking about a list of features on our roadmap, we could talk about this quarter. We're focused on this outcome. We have this Target in mind which means we're going to work on this outcome until we hit.
His Target and when we do, we'll move to this next outcome under this outcome. We've identified these customer opportunities. We're currently working on this one and because we're currently working on it. We can tell you what Solutions were experimenting with. We think we're this next opportunity is the net most important one after that.
And in the future, we know this whole other branch of opportunities is going to be relevant and we're going to have to get to them and what I like about that. So it's just the now, next future roadmap format combined with opportunities and then Only solutions in the nap and what I like about this is that we have near-term, certainty. We know what we're building right now.
We may not know we're releasing it but we know what we're building right now. We know what we're learning right now as we go a little further in the future. In the next category, we should based on are interviewing in our understanding of the opportunity. Space have some guess, it was what's next?
And then we all have an infinite list of things for the future. Right. So that seems like it matches better the like ambiguity and uncertainty in our work. But now we have to solve the problem of It's no it's to sell in marketing is no, it's a market. And that's that, final piece of the output to outcome much shift.
Is that if we're doing good, Discovery in the now stage, even before it releases, we should have customer testimonials, we should have impact. We should know. Not just that are our marketing releases should not be. We launched this feature. Our marketing releases should be. This feature is now available to you.
And here's what Melissa had to say about it. Here's how it impacted Melissa's business. So if you're doing Um, Discovery and you're getting feedback throughout the process from your customers. Even if the dates unknown, your marketing team can work on that because they're pulling from your Discovery work to get the value proposition in the benefit and the impact and they can have it ready for whatever day it launches or they could decide to do it two months after it launches when they have even more customers.
So what's hard about this is that like it's not just a product and change its kind of a whole company output to outcome
Speaker 1: change. Yeah that's like a big shift mentally. I think one of the big pieces of For fact, I hear from CEOs and from, you know, Executives. When we think about it in that kind of way, maybe you have a good solution for this is, how can I tell what's in my now thing? Is it going to be like a year from now? Or are you going to release that thing? Two years from now? Or is it gonna be like next week? Do you travel like? Think about just general like, swag estimates of like, this is a quarter versus a year project or anything like
Speaker 2: that. Yeah, so part of your Discovery should be testing feasibility assumptions. So the problem the problem with the way we estimate right now, as We get Engineers if you're working in scrum which is what most people are doing. Here's a two week, Sprint estimate, these stories, the engineers have done, nothing to look into what it's going to take to build those stories.
So they are there sweats, right? But we don't treat them like swags, we treat them like truth and the whole rest of the organization starts planning is if they're going to release, which is why everybody thinks that engineering is in doing a job and why engineering gets mad at the rest of the company? And there's always this tension, it doesn't have to be that way, right?
Lung, keeping your Discovery process, you're taking Solution and you're breaking it down into its underlying assumptions. A whole set of which are feasibility assumptions as Engineers test. Those feasibility assumptions. They're getting the data. They need to make better estimates.
So the closer you get to being ready to build something to better. Your estimate should get, and you're going to be able to say this looks like a three-week project. This looks like a six-week project. This looks like a three-month project. So you still get that data. You just get it. After you've actually collected, you still get the estimate, you just get it out. After you've collected data about the complete unknown
Speaker 1: Century sit. Are you telling me that is an executive wants better estimates. They have to do Discovery work. Pretty much. I think that's amazing. Oh my God, I hope everybody's listening to that. And now the next time you say, hey, we don't have time to do Discovery. Well, you don't have time to get a roadmap. That's accurate either. So,
Speaker 2: here's the thing, like so many teams, I like the truth. I have to give a roadmap and they're stressed out about it and they're trying to figure out the perfect things to put on the roadmap and they're hammering their Engineers to give perfect estimates, I just ask one question, did you hit your last roadmap? Nope, we're their negative consequences.
Nope, he felt a little bit bad and you moved on. So, why are we stressing about this ridiculous charade? That everybody knows is not true and nobody expects us to meet it, but we just play along. You're gonna hit your robot. Gonna hit her up. You're gonna hit Them up. Oh, you didn't hit your own app.
Okay. What's your next road map? It's kind of crazy town. Yeah. It's just
Speaker 1: like a back-and-forth always were like, uh, next time you better put better estimates on it and it's like we won't change anything. We just keep doing exactly what you were doing and there's more and more pressure to just make stuff up and like shoved into a road map. So it a
Speaker 2: lot of ways. It feels like that story that a new clothes like nobody wants to acknowledge like this piece of paper means absolutely nothing and we're spending on some companies spend months like I do come. He's always start in July working on their January for the next year roadmap. That
Speaker 1: kills me because he was
Speaker 2: so much. Let's just spend all that time talking to our customers and doing Discovery and you won't have to have a road map. You'll have had shipped five months of value. Instead of having a piece of paper, you're going to ignore all here. Yeah, it's like he
Speaker 1: can't even come up with what to put on the road maps. If you're not doing the discovery work, you're just like making it up. I just see so many people go through this process for setting the strategy for the next year, where they're like, Like, oh, we'll just lock ourselves in a room. And everybody build. Bring a list of the stuff you want to build and we'll figure out where it fits in. Like no, no metrics, no outcomes, that is tied to no business value calculations. Just like it was, shove it in
Speaker 2: there. I kind of like, pretty covid. I kind of get why business works this way. Like, we're coming from a business culture, where we're still rooted in Industrial Age. Like everything is predictable, it's all about efficiency. It's all about planning. I mean, honestly, in the 50s and 60s, we started Not real strategy and Porter and mintzberg and like positioning and markets and we should have stepped away from.
It's not just about efficiency, we're still trying to do that. And then I think the internet added this whole other layer of pace at which markets change the feedback type of feedback, loops we can build into our businesses. And so, we're seeing rapid change in what wins in business. But we're seeing really slow change and how businesses operate, here's what I'm hopeful of the Higher World got a really heavy dose of what it really means to live in uncertain, ambiguous, world, the entire world.
Like, if that's the lesson we get from 2020, I'm gonna be thrilled, right?
I mean, it was a very expensive lesson and I'm trust me. I wish we never had to go through covid, but if the teeny tiny Silver Lining is that all these companies, recognized that that 6-month that roadmap, they spent six months creating literally had to be thrown away overnight. Maybe just maybe a Percentage that will start the question. And why in the world? Are we doing this?
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's such a good point. I saw so many companies scrambling last year to change course and figure out what to do. Even before that though, the companies I've seen be the most successful, right? They're not ignoring business value. They're not ignoring their investors. So, you know, they still got to, I like if they're public, they still worried about Wall Street all the time, but they're still so concretely focused on the problems that they're solving, right?
They're not like, oh my God, what can I do to? Just like you know, check this box for wall. Street it's like alright I know wall Street's beating down our door but the only way we're going to win is for me as an executive rights block out that noise for a little bit and just focus on, you know what we do?
Well, how we double down and then what more problems can be solved. And I think that's so key. It's so important to just like come back to, you know, the opportunities that you're talking about and and, you know, figure it out as we go and I see those things like emerge as we do Discovery, right?
If you're a road maps, will just be be living. It's like we like to talk about. But if you're doing the continuous Discovery habits that you talked about, like the you'll always have the next thing on the road map. You don't have to stop and build one every July. It's just like the next opportunity will naturally be on there because you've been discovering it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I love that. You just said we don't have to stop because I actually tell every team that I work with no matter what the context. If you find yourself stopping to do something, you're already doing it wrong, right? Like you will ask me. When do I stop to synthesize? My interviews. Know, you're interviewing continuous.
When you synthesize, as you go, what am I stopping to do my roadmap? Know, you're working your way across the opportunity space, this is what you're doing. Now, this is what you're doing next, that is continuous. And that is why unlocks true agility? The whole world can change. And if you are doing continuous Discovery habits, the only thing that changed in a covid world for you as you started working from home, which I realize is a big change and maybe your next opportunity changed.
But that's it. You have to throw away a whole road map, you don't have to do redo a whole five month planning. You just said, you know what, this new opportunities coming in, that seems a lot more important.
Let's do that next.
Speaker 1: It seems like such a smarter way to work today and I like to go back
Speaker 2: to your Wall Street comment. I think that a lot of product teams, don't spend enough time on business patent, and that subtitle of my book is discover products that create customer value and business value. And I think I meet some teams that only focus on business value, I need some teams only focus on customer value, we're not doing our jobs if we're not doing both and that's where I think.
Ink that kpi tree. We're literally starting with grow profit. And if you're a non-profit, it's increased impact on your mission. It's still the same. Instead of increase Revenue, its increased donation dollars, right? Like the underlying formula is the same for all organization. You need to keep your costs and control and you need to increase the way that you create value.
And there has to be a theory of how your products and services are going to create that value. And then that's what gives you that metrics tree and gives your team's the context. They need for not just how are they going to serve the customer, but how are they going to serve the? In a way that creates value for the business.
Speaker 1: I completely agree. I completely agree. So I've seen this big shift to with agile, lean and everything that was coming out where people just start, realizing business value. Really just stop talking about it. And I actually got like, y'all down a couple of times from people where they were like you're talking about business value, but we need to be focused on the customer value and I'm like, well, you don't work for a company out of the good of your own heart.
Like, you know, we all want to get paid and A company wants to do well as well and serve a customer through it, right? Like we don't make money, we can't serve our customers as well. But I'm hoping, you know, with the practices that you're talking about and it's moving on a little bit from those Lean Startup days.
We're coming back to like a nice balance between the business side in the customer side, which is exactly where we should be. Yeah, you know, in some
Speaker 2: ways, the pendulum just swung too far. The other direction, like we saw in the 90s and the early 2000s, this rise of the voice of the customer in us and it was all about the customer and that's all. Because that was completely missing from a lot of organizations. But then with time we swam to point, we started to forget about business value.
And what happens when we forget about business value, the way that I like to frame it for teams, especially ones that really believe their job is just to serve the customer is if you don't trade business value, you're not going to serve the customer at all, because you're going to go out of business, your products will get cut, right? Because no business leadership team is going to say, yeah, let's keep this product. That doesn't make us any money.
And we see this like the best example of this is Google Reader because Google has a bajillion dollars, like they're not hurting for Revenue, they're still not going to keep a product that didn't create enough business mountain and it customers loved Google Reader.
I see regularly, Google Reader used as the example of the product. That was killed the everybody. Misses the most but I had no business mom. And so that's what happened. That team didn't earn the right to serve their customers over time. So I think if you really want to be customer Centric you have to create business value
Speaker 1: in such a good. A product managers. So your book continuous Discovery habits. Everybody can buy it now. Who should be reading this? Who's your target audience for this and where can they find the book?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I'll tell you my primary audience are people working in product. Trios are people who want to start working in product trios to product managers designers and Engineers. It's really written to be a Hands-On guide. For literally, what do I do day in day out? How do I put some practical methods to these pie-in-the-sky?
Trendy ideas I have heard from Leaders though, that there's the secondary audience, which is we have a lot of product leaders who are managing teams, and they want their teams to do Discovery, but they feel in this awkward position because the leader of the team but they've never worked by themselves. So what the book can do for those leaders is give them a really clear picture of this is what your team should be doing. This is what good looks like.
Speaker 1: That's so important leaders to understand to. Yeah. And where can people pick it
Speaker 2: up? Yeah, so it's widely available around the world. The easiest places on Amazon, it's in paperback and Kindle. Inaudible version is coming eventually. As soon as I find of my life to work, narrate it hoping by the end of the year, but that's like a road map without put on a deadline committing to that, but I do was to have the audible version by the end of the year.
If your anti Amazon, I get it, it's available on print, the print on demand, which means you literally could walk into your favorite independent book retailer. And even if they don't carry it, they can order it for you and you can buy it from where you want. That's awesome. I didn't even know that existed
Speaker 1: definitely want to do that. Don't thank you so much for being. Come on the show Teresa and where can people connect with you as well to learn more about what you do. Yeah. So the best place to go
Speaker 2: is product talk to org. In addition to the book, we have a whole bunch of services to help you put the book into practice because we know reading a book is often not enough. So you can learn more about those there. And then I'm also on Twitter, I'm on LinkedIn, some tea Taurus on Twitter, you can just search for Theresa, Taurus on LinkedIn. You'll probably find me there and I love to connect about this stuff. So feel free to reach out. Great. Well, thank
Speaker 1: you so much for being here. Make sure that you go pick up Teresa's book and if you are enjoying the product Thinking podcast, we would really appreciate you leaving a review wherever you're listening to it. So other people can find us to. We will see you next Wednesday.
