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Stakeholder Management for Product Teams: Show Your Work, Don't Sell Your Conclusions

Audio Version ($) Everyone I talk to is rushing to add AI features to their roadmap. And every stakeholder has an opinion about what they should be building. The challenge is we are forgetting our discovery fundamentals. We are reverting back to a feature factory. Delivery is getting faster and easier,

From Customer Interviews to an Opportunity Solution Tree—In Minutes

Most product teams know they should be interviewing customers. And more teams than ever are actually doing it. That's the good news. The bad news? Many teams are struggling with what comes next. I've written before about the challenge of interview synthesis—going from a stack

Context Engineering: 5 Familiar Strategies from Real Product Teams

Audio Version ($) I've been getting a lot of questions about why I'm diving so deep into Claude Code. So I want to take a step back and provide some context. Last March, when I started building my first AI product—the Product Talk Interview Coach—I

Context Rot: Why AI Gets Worse the Longer You Chat (And How to Fix It)

Audio Version ($) Have you ever noticed that AI gets worse the longer you talk to it? I first noticed this when I was trying to fix bugs on Replit. I'd spin in an endless cycle of asking the agent to fix something and it would report back that

How Does ChatGPT Work? A Guide for the Rest of Us

Audio Version ($) Everybody is buzzing about generative AI and there's a lot of jargon that comes along with it: tokens, embeddings, attention, neural networks, transformers. Whether we are talking about ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, the large language models all work the same way. But understanding how they work

Exploring What's Just Now Possible: How AI-Powered Discovery and Expert Feedback Are Driving My 2026 Roadmap

Audio Version ($) 2025 was full of many surprises. Some good ones—I launched two new podcasts, I built my first AI products, I completely changed the way I work thanks to Claude Code. And some tough ones—I'm still struggling to fully recover from a severe ankle break

How to Use Claude Code: A Guide to Slash Commands, Agents, Skills, and Plug-ins

Audio Version ($) I've been going deep on Claude Code. I'm finding this has been a better strategy for getting value out of AI—rather than trying every new tool on the market. By focusing on one tool, I've been able to learn how to

2026 Product Conference List

We are starting to pull together our list of 2026 product conferences. This list is by no means exhaustive. If you know of product conferences that are not on the list and you think they should be, please send an email to conferences@producttalk.org. We’ll also keep updating

How to Build AI Workflows with Claude Code (Even If You're Not Technical)

Audio Version ($) My writing process used to be messy. I'd start with a brain dump of everything that was swirling in my head. Then I would try to structure it into an outline. But I often lost patience with that. So I'd just start writing. Then

How to Choose Which Tasks to Automate with AI (+50 Real Examples)

Audio Version ($) Every morning, I sit down at my computer with my cup of coffee and I type /today into Claude Code. I take my first few sips of coffee as I watch Claude retrieve new tasks from my Trello board, generate a today.md file with a list of

Lessons from 9 AI Product Teams: Emerging Themes from Just Now Possible

Audio Version ($) Stack Overflow built four versions of their AI-powered search, then killed it. Arize's team started building when "agent frameworks" didn't even exist. eSpark's former teachers are now writing eval code in Python. Over the past few months, I've

How to Use Claude Code Safely: A Non-Technical Guide to Managing Risk

Audio Version ($) I love that Claude Code allows me to build out my own personal operating system. I now have personal workflows for managing my to-do list, keeping up on academic research related to my work, hosting two podcasts, writing long-form weekly articles, designing courses, and much more. I used

Stop Repeating Yourself: Give Claude Code a Memory

Audio Version ($) "Can you critique the landing page for my new Story-Based Customer Interviews course?" I used to waste hours trying to get ChatGPT or Claude to adequately critique my work. I'd get frustrated by the generic feedback, the poor writing, and the suggestions that just

Claude Code: What It Is, How It's Different, and Why Non-Technical People Should Use It

Audio Version ($) Why is everyone talking about Claude Code? I'm seeing it pop up everywhere—in my LinkedIn feed, on product podcasts, and in my Slack communities. And it's not just developers talking about it. It's product managers, writers, researchers, consultants, you name it.

AI Changes Everything (And Nothing At All)

Audio Version ($) Every product team is wrestling with the rapid change brought on by generative AI. It's impacting our roadmaps and how we do our jobs. But not everything is changing. Many of the fundamentals stay exactly the same. Last week, I delivered this talk as part of

The Product Operating Model Explained: From Pilot Teams to Full Transformation

Audio Version ($) The product operating model is everywhere these days.  Since Marty Cagan and the Silicon Valley Product Group released TRANSFORMED: Moving to the Product Operating Model in 2024, it’s become nearly impossible to attend a product conference, scroll through LinkedIn, or walk to the office water cooler without

Customer Interview Analysis: Where AI Helps and Hurts

Audio Version ($) It's easy to get overwhelmed by continuous customer interviews. When you conduct a customer interview every week, the data starts to pile up. You collect hours of transcripts. If you aren't disciplined to synthesize each interview as you go, you can quickly fall behind.

21 Ways to Use AI at Work (And Build Your AI Product Toolbox)

Audio Version ($) I recently shared 15 ways I'm using AI at home—from fixing cooking disasters to researching school bonds. Each use case helped me build new AI skills: learning to chat with a large language model (LLM), providing the right context, verifying results, and much more. Now

15 Ways to Use AI at Home (and Fill Your AI Product Toolbox)

Audio Version ($) AI overwhelm is real. Whether you are a complete novice who isn't quite sure where to get started or deep into building an AI product, it's easy to feel like everyone else is light years ahead. AI is a disruptive technology. People are adopting

Q&A Session: Building AI Evals for the Interview Coach

I am falling deeper into the AI rabbit hole every day. Now, that’s not to say that I believe all the hype about AI. What I mean is that I’m excited to see what’s just now possible with AI (some may even say I’ve become a

How I Designed & Implemented Evals for Product Talk’s Interview Coach

What does generative AI make just now possible? This is a question that I’ve been obsessed with over the past few months. While I’ve been primarily working alone, I don’t want to go on this journey in isolation. I believe there’s so much benefit to working

Building My First AI Product: 6 Lessons from My 90-Day Deep Dive

Back in March, I was still struggling with how fast everything was moving with AI: RAG, MCP, agents, tools, evals, prompt engineering. It was a lot. Don't get me wrong. I was using ChatGPT and Claude in the web browser every day. But I was struggling to keep

AI Prototyping: How 11 Real-World Teams Are Transforming Their Work with Lovable

If there’s one AI tool that should be impacting your product discovery work right now, it’s AI prototyping. Tools like Lovable, V0, Bolt, Replit, Base44, and Magic Patterns feel like magic. They make it easy to spin up an interactive prototype in minutes. It’s incredible. If you

Behind the Scenes: Building the Product Talk Interview Coach

I’ve been diving deep into how generative AI can help us build new skills. I’m firmly in the “AI should augment (not replace) humans at work” camp. I’m concerned about the short-term impact on entry-level employees. I’m concerned about brain rot in the rest of us

Expecting Resistance: Handling Stakeholder & Leader Concerns During Product Operating Model Pilot

Trying to adopt the product operating model? One of the keys to success is remembering that it’s not just about product teams—it’s an organization-wide transformation. This is why Hope Gurion and I have been doing a series on organizational change. In our years as product coaches, we’

Managing Pushback: Handling Pilot Team Resistance During Product Operating Model Rollout

Trying to undertake a major change like rolling out the product operating model isn’t easy. A lot of companies struggle with this. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. There are teams out there that are successfully making this transformation. And I know that because I’ve seen

Preparing Leaders and Stakeholders to Support Product Operating Model Pilot Teams

A single champion can often inspire an organization to shift to the product operating model—especially if that champion is the CEO or CPO. But that’s only the first step. Your transformation will get stuck without support from people throughout your company. Over the past few months, I’ve

Building Skills: Setting Pilot Teams Up for Product Operating Model Success

Change is exciting, but too much change can feel chaotic. When making a big change like adopting the product operating model or continuous discovery, how do you tap into the excitement while also controlling the chaos? This is a question that Hope Gurion and I have been exploring over the

How to Choose the Right Pilot Teams for a Product Operating Model Transformation

Is your company shifting to the product operating model? Are you trying to figure out where to start? If so, this series on organizational change is for you. Hope Gurion and I are reflecting on our experiences as coaches who have worked with hundreds of teams, sharing what we’ve

Ask Teresa: Do Product Teams Really Ship Value Weekly?

A good continuous discovery team is interviewing customers, mapping opportunities, and testing assumptions every week. But for teams new to discovery, it can be hard to find time for all of these new activities. Part of that is because they are still thinking about discovery as a phase that happens

Product in Practice: Evaluating If a New API is Needed

It’s one thing to iterate on an existing product. It’s a whole other challenge to identify brand-new products to offer. The same is true for API products. The difficulties you face from going to 0 to 1—understanding your customer, identifying what will differentiate your product, building early

Product in Practice: Transitioning Customers to a New API

Continuous discovery is for everyone. You don’t have to be building a consumer-facing app or website to enjoy the benefits of this way of working. But we understand there’s reluctance about adopting discovery outside of traditional business to consumer (B2C) digital products. Whether it’s hard to visualize

Product in Practice: Getting Started with Several APIs (And the Challenges I Faced)

A few years ago I was drowning in administrative work. To deliver high-quality online courses we were patching together several different tools to create a good student experience. We used Teachable as our course platform, Slack for our community, Zoom for our live sessions, Google Calendar to send out course

Common Usability Issues with Web APIs: And How Discovery Can Help

Last week, I shared that we often get asked, “Do API teams need to do discovery?” You won’t be surprised to hear my answer is yes. I even recorded a short video about the topic: But to really get the point across, I’m writing a multi-week series about

Understanding Web APIs: What They Are and How They Work

A common question we get is, “Do API teams need to do discovery?” My short answer is yes. But I realize to effect change in the industry, I need a longer answer. Over the next several weeks, I’m going to do my best to provide a more complete answer.

Avoid This Common Organizational Transformation Mistake (And What to Do Instead)

Is your organization kicking off or in the midst of an organizational transformation? Are you shifting from outputs to outcomes or working to adopt the product operating model? If you answered yes to any of those questions, keep reading. Hope Gurion and I recently kicked off a new series on

Ask the Community: Tracking Opportunities Not Related to Your Outcome

When you conduct story-based interviews every week, you quickly begin to collect a range of opportunities. And while some of these opportunities might be related to your current outcome, that’s not always the case. It can be hard to know what to do when this happens. You might be

Join 4 Upcoming Events on Continuous Discovery with Teresa Torres in March 2025

I’m hosting a lineup of free events this March! I’d love for you to join one. March 10th & 26th: Product Discovery Discussion Sessions for Senior Leaders I’ve been hosting monthly product discovery discussion sessions for senior leaders (think executives, VPs, CPOs) about the challenges they face

The Impact of Working in a Product Trio

I was scrolling through my LinkedIn feed and a post caught my eye. It read: “Marketing owns defining the ideal customer profile.” And then went into details on why. A quick scan through the comments showed that not everyone agreed with this statement. Some people argued a different role owned

Is Your Organization Ready to Adopt the Product Operating Model?

Many companies are either starting on or in the midst of an organizational transformation. Their goal is to adopt the product operating model (as described in Marty Cagan’s book Transformed) or something akin to it. Much of this is being fueled by the success of the FAANG companies (Facebook,

Making Continuous Discovery Work for You: The SPICEY Approach

At the beginning of a new year, we’re often excited to make improvements and change our ways of working. “This is the year when I’m going to adopt continuous discovery,” you might be saying to yourself. “I’m going to transform my product team and our entire approach

Let’s Connect in 2025: A Look at the Year Ahead

Welcome to 2025! As we kick off a new year, it’s time for my annual letter. For the past several years, I’ve used my annual letters to reflect on the past year, share where I intend to focus during the upcoming year, and provide a guide for folks

Tools of the Trade: Building Opportunity Solution Trees in Vistaly

If you’re committed to adopting continuous discovery habits, opportunity solution trees are one of the most important ways to track your learnings and progress. And there’s no shortage of tools out there that can be used to build your opportunity solution trees. Back in September 2023, we explored

Join 4 Upcoming Events on Continuous Discovery with Teresa Torres in January and February 2025

I’m hosting a lineup of free events throughout January and February! I’d love for you to join one. January 7th & 22nd: Product Discovery Discussion Sessions for Senior Leaders I’ve been hosting monthly product discovery discussion sessions for senior leaders (think executives, VPs, CPOs) about the challenges

Y Oslo 2024: When It Comes to Discovery, Something is Better Than Nothing

I recently spoke at the Y Oslo conference in Oslo, Norway. I was asked to give a ten-minute overview of my continuous discovery framework and then participated in a fireside chat where the host, Cecilie Smedstad, asked me to go deeper in a few areas. We covered how to manage

Product in Practice: How Passion.io Applies Continuous Discovery to the Employee Experience

If you’ve been reading Product Talk for a while, you probably already know that the majority of the stories we share in the Product in Practice series focus on how product teams are adopting continuous discovery habits in their work. The details vary, but we generally speak with members

Ask the Community: What Do You Do When You Inherit a Giant Product Backlog?

Old product backlogs can be the place where ideas go to die. But they can also be a treasure trove of feedback from your customers. And in some cases, they might be a mix of both. The trouble is, you might not know until you spend some time reviewing your

2025 Product Conference List

We are starting to pull together our list of 2025 product conferences. This list is by no means exhaustive. If you know of product conferences that are not on the list and you think they should be, please send an email to conferences@producttalk.org. We’ll also keep updating

Join 4 Upcoming Events on Continuous Discovery with Teresa Torres in December 2024

I’m hosting a lineup of free events this December! I’d love for you to join one. December 4th: Continuous Interviewing: Unlock the Power of Story-Based Customer Interviews This webinar is designed to help you better understand what a good customer interview looks like. We’ll cover: * Why most

Product in Practice: Mapping Business and Product Outcomes to Stand Out in the Job Search

The job search process is often unpredictable. How long will it take to hear back from a company? What questions will they ask you during your interview? Will you even enjoy working there? While it’s not possible to remove all the uncertainty and ambiguity from the job search, Teeba

Ask Teresa: Does the Engineer in the Product Trio Need to be the Tech Lead?

Working as a product trio is the foundation for discovery. Without input from a product manager, a designer, and an engineer, it’s difficult for us to account for the cross-functional perspectives we need to build successful products. However, most companies tend to have more engineers than product managers or

Customer Recruiting for Continuous Discovery: Get Easy Access to Customers Week Over Week

In all of our Product Talk Academy courses, we ask students, “What’s your biggest hurdle to adopting continuous discovery?” Overwhelmingly, the #1 response is: access to customers. This doesn’t surprise me. In Continuous Discovery Habits, I wrote that the only way to make continuous discovery sustainable is to

12 Hurdles to Effective Product Trio Collaboration

If you’ve ever felt like working as part of a product trio was hard, you’re not alone. We often field questions or comments from people who are skeptical about how this type of collaborative decision-making can work, so we’ve known anecdotally for quite a while that this

Tools of the Trade: How HiveMQ Automates Customer Interview Recruiting with Orbital

If you want to make continuous interviewing part of your discovery, you have to automate the recruiting process. It sounds simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. While many product teams want to talk to customers every week, they struggle to make this a reality. Whether they face

Tell Us About Your Team: Take the Continuous Discovery Habits Benchmark Survey (2024)

For years, I’ve shared that Product Talk’s primary outcome is to increase the number of product teams who adopt a continuous cadence to their discovery work. This has been our North Star metric. It has guided our work. It inspired me to write my book. It’s what

Join 4 Upcoming Events on Continuous Discovery with Teresa Torres in September and October 2024

I’m hosting a lineup of free events throughout September and October! I’d love for you to join one. September 23rd: Opportunity Solution Trees: Overcoming the Most Common Mistakes In this one-hour webinar, I’ll introduce the most common mistakes teams make when getting started with opportunity solution trees

Product in Practice: How Botify Broke Down Silos and Moved to Product Trios

Working as a product trio can be a major transformation. If you’re not used to working this way, it involves changing everything from the coworkers you collaborate with most closely and your communication style to the mindset you bring to work every day. The product team at Botify knows

Ask Teresa: For Customer Interviews, Who Counts as a Customer?

Whenever I introduce the topic of customer interviews (the foundational element of continuous discovery), I get a lot of questions about who counts as a customer. Everyone thinks their company context is unique—whether they’re B2B or B2B2C or some other combination of letters and numbers. And while yes,

Product in Practice: Why Ramsey Solutions Rotates Engineers in Their Product Trios

It’s no secret that engineers can be hesitant to participate in product trios. They might feel anxious about taking on tasks that are new to them and outside their regular routine at work, like speaking directly with customers. They might fear that any time not spent coding is time

Tools of the Trade: Switching from Miro to Jira Product Discovery for Opportunity Solution Trees

I recently sat down with the Consider and Contact team at Hemnet to discuss why they switched from Miro to Jira Product Discovery for building their opportunity solution trees. This was a detailed conversation where the team walked through: * Why they started building opportunity solution trees in Miro and why

Shifting from Outputs to Outcomes: Why It Matters and How to Get Started

A clear outcome sets the scope for discovery. It defines how much latitude a team has to explore. It sets a clear measure of success. But many teams struggle to set the right outcome. Whether they have a hard time negotiating with stakeholders, feel pressure to commit to multiple outcomes,

Join 4 Upcoming Events on Continuous Discovery with Teresa Torres in August 2024

I’m hosting a lineup of free events throughout August! I’d love for you to join one. August 6th: The What & Why of Continuous Discovery In this webinar, I’ll introduce participants to the continuous discovery framework I outlined in my book Continuous Discovery Habits. We’ll cover:

Ask Teresa: What Do You Do with Atypical Customer Stories?

When we interview customers, our goal is to learn as much as we can about their context. This will help us understand their specific needs, pain points, and desires (otherwise known as opportunities) which will inform our product decisions. But what happens when you hear a story that stands out

Don't Use Generative AI to Replace Discovery with Real Humans

I’m disappointed to see the rise of generative AI tools that are designed to replace discovery with real humans. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of generative AI. I use it daily in both my personal life and at work. But when we use generative

Product in Practice: Testing Assumptions Was Tricky But the Convo Team Didn’t Give Up

Identifying and testing assumptions is a critical part of continuous discovery. But what happens when your assumption tests don’t go as planned? Whether you encounter technical difficulties, have a hard time finding customers to connect with, or run up against any other number of problems, it can be tempting

Product Trios: What They Are, Why They Matter, and How to Get Started

Product trios are cross-functional product teams who are responsible for both deciding what to build and then building it. The goal is for a product trio to represent balanced perspectives while still remaining as small as possible to facilitate and expedite collaborative decision-making. In this article, we’ll cover what

Product in Practice: Getting Value Out of In-App Surveys Takes Iteration

Committing to continuous discovery means changing the way your product team operates. It’s no longer about making decisions purely based on your intuitions or stakeholder requests, but finding ways to integrate touch points with customers into your work every week—if not every day. This can sound overwhelming. Your

Join 3 Free Product Discovery Webinars in May 2024

In May, I’ll be hosting three webinars. If you are working on your discovery habits, check out the lineup and come join one. May 6 - Opportunity Solution Trees: Overcoming the Most Common Mistakes In this one-hour webinar, I'll cover the most common mistakes teams make when

Product in Practice: Shifting from a Feature Factory to Continuous Discovery at Doodle

Leading a product team (or several teams) comes with its own set of challenges that’s often similar to but distinct from the hurdles individual product contributors face. There’s pressure coming from all directions—your company leaders expect you to deliver business results while your product teams may be

Story-Based Customer Interviews Uncover Much-Needed Context

Customer interviews are one of the most impactful activities a product team can do. But only if we use the right methods. An early customer interviewing mistake is to spend your interview time exploring your solution ideas. You might present a prototype and ask, “What do you think?” Or even,

Join 4 New Events on Continuous Discovery with Teresa Torres (March 2024)

I’m hosting several free events over the next two weeks. I’d love for you to join one of them. March 25th: The What & Why of Continuous Discovery In this webinar, I’ll introduce participants to the continuous discovery framework I introduced in my book Continuous Discovery Habits.

Ask the Community: How Do You Shift From Functional Teams to Value-Driven Teams?

When an organization shifts from delivery or feature teams to product teams, the first step is often a change to team structure. Delivery and feature teams are often structured by function—front-end teams, back-end teams, mobile teams, etc. These teams can rarely deliver value on their own. Instead, they hand

Tools of the Trade: Using Pendo to Manage Customer Requests

When you’re building a product, you can easily get overwhelmed by ideas. There are the ideas your product trio comes up with based on your discovery work, the ideas that come from your customers in the form of specific requests, and the ideas that come from stakeholders within your

Product in Practice: Adopting the Discovery Habits is An Iterative Process

Continuous discovery is not a linear journey—as much as we might want it to be. Like a lot of learning, it often feels messy and chaotic. But if you stick with it, you may eventually find you can look back and see how much you’ve progressed. That’s

The Interview Snapshot: How to Synthesize and Share What You Learned from a Single Customer Interview

When you start interviewing customers every week, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by how much you are learning. When we use our customer interviews to collect specific stories about past behavior, every conversation can uncover dozens of unmet customer needs, pain points, and desires (AKA opportunities). I recommend teams

Product in Practice: Introducing Opportunity Solution Trees at Texthelp

There are all kinds of ways to introduce continuous discovery habits. If you’ve been at your company for a while, you might get inspired after reading a book or attending a conference. If you’re joining a new company, you might want to try a new tactic out with

Product in Practice: Bringing the Discovery Habits to WebMD

The larger and more complex your company is, the more challenging it can be to introduce continuous discovery. It’s not just about training people to conduct interviews, use opportunity solution trees, or test assumptions—though those are all important activities—it’s also about convincing them of the value

Ask the Community: What’s a Mistake You Made Early in Your Continuous Discovery Journey?

You’ll often hear Teresa say that there’s no single right way to do continuous discovery. Something she might not say as often (that’s just as true) is that there’s no single wrong way to do discovery, either. Because discovery involves changing the way you work on

Tools of the Trade: Finding People to Interview Before You Have Customers

The foundation of continuous discovery is weekly touchpoints with customers. These touchpoints will allow you to collect stories that help you identify opportunities and build out your opportunity solution tree. It sounds simple, but what happens if your product is so new that you don’t have any customers yet?

Product in Practice: Making Customer Interviewing a Habit in an Early-Stage Startup

Founders have all sorts of reasons for starting companies. Sometimes it’s because they’ve personally experienced a pain point and want to address it. Sometimes they’re dissatisfied with what’s available on the market and think they can do better. And sometimes it’s because they have an

2024: Focusing on Finding Joy in My Work

Happy New Year! Every year, I kick off January with an update on how the year went and I share my plans for the upcoming year. This year is going to look a little different. You might remember that at the start of 2023, I announced that I wasn’t

Product in Practice: Continuous Discovery Fuels Innovation at Sauce Labs

Can a single course change your career trajectory? For Mike Donovan, Senior Vice President of Product at Sauce Labs, the answer to that question is a resounding yes. Can a single course change your career trajectory? For Mike Donovan, Senior Vice President of Product at Sauce Labs, the answer to

Product in Practice: Creating Opportunities for Deliberate Practice at BBC Maestro

How often have you read a book or article and been inspired to take action on it? And how often have you actually taken action on it? Chances are there’s a big gap between how inspired you feel and which concrete actions you end up taking. If that’s

Ask Teresa (and the Community): What Do You Do With Stakeholder Feature Requests?

Let’s say you’ve got a good thing going with continuous discovery. You’re creating a regular habit of talking to customers, you’re identifying opportunities and assumptions and building out your opportunity solution tree and starting to run small tests to explore different ideas. Everything is going great

Product in Practice: Iterating on Outcomes with Limited Data

We often hear from people that building an opportunity solution tree is hard work. And perhaps one of the most challenging parts of building opportunity solution trees is defining the outcome that you put at the top. As a quick reminder, your outcome should be something the product team is

Opportunity Solution Trees: Visualize Your Discovery to Stay Aligned and Drive Outcomes

Opportunity solution trees help product teams chart the best path to their desired outcome. They keep the team aligned as they manage the messy cycles of continuous discovery. In this article, we’ll cover what an opportunity solution tree is, the benefits of using one, how to create one, and

The Power of Opportunity Solution Trees: 7 Key Benefits Revealed

Opportunity solution trees are a simple way of visually representing the paths you might take to reach a desired outcome. The root of the tree is your desired outcome—the business need that reflects how your team can create business value. Next is the opportunity space. These are the customer

No Time for Discovery? Here’s How to Fix It.

It’s true that discovery takes time. Interviewing customers, building opportunity solution trees, running assumption tests—these are all activities that take your attention away from delivery. But I’m also a firm believer that discovery doesn’t come at the expense of delivery. Both activities should happen in tandem

A Conversation with Petra Wille: My Approach to the Continuous Discovery Habits Community

Reading is one of my favorite ways to spend my time. I’ve designed my business to allow plenty of time for reading books, articles, interviews, etc. As much as I love reading, I firmly believe that reading alone is rarely enough to help us change our behavior. Most of

2024 Product Conference List

We are starting to pull together our list of 2024 product conferences. This list is by no means exhaustive. If you know of product conferences that are not on the list and you think they should be, please send an email to conferences@producttalk.org. We’ll also keep updating

Product in Practice: Stepping Into Your First Product Leadership Role—What to Expect

Stepping into your first product leadership role is a major change. As an individual contributor, you’re focusing on your own projects and progress, but as a leader you are now responsible for the team (or teams) that report up to you. You may find yourself less involved in the

Assumption Testing: Everything You Need to Know to Get Started

A regular cadence of assumption testing helps product teams quickly determine which ideas will work and which ones won’t. It’s one of the highest value activities we can do. And sadly, most product teams don’t do any assumption testing at all. And those that do, don’t

Evaluating Solutions: The 5 Types of Assumptions that Underlie Our Ideas

Assumption testing is at the heart of what good continuous discovery teams do week over week. It’s how we evaluate which ideas will work and which won’t. But before we can test our assumptions, we have to identify them. That’s not always as easy as it sounds.

Ask Teresa: My Leaders Still Want Roadmaps with Timelines—What Should I Do?

Many teams, like sales and marketing, have time-bound goals, like reaching $X in bookings or generating Y leads by a specific date. Product teams are also held to time-bound goals. Empowered product teams, for example, are asked to deliver outcomes each quarter. But sometimes companies take this too far. They

Tools of the Trade: Visualizing Discovery with Opportunity Solution Trees

The opportunity solution tree helps visualize all the work that goes into continuous discovery. Instead of relying on someone else (like a coach or leader) to tell them what to do next, product teams can use an opportunity solution tree to keep track of their desired outcome, the opportunities they’

Product in Practice: All It Took Was One Product Trio to Inspire Change—The Hemnet Story

You don’t necessarily need anyone’s permission to get started with continuous discovery. In fact, some steps—like story mapping and identifying your assumptions—don’t even require anyone else to participate. You can easily go through these activities on your own. But at the same time, continuous discovery

How Can Product Leaders Support Continuous Discovery?

In addition to delivering a keynote at the Product at Heart conference (in case you missed it, you can find the video and transcript of that presentation here), conference co-organizer Petra Wille also invited me to participate in a fireside chat at the Leadership Forum event. We discussed a few

Product in Practice: Learning to Interview Continuously

It’s no secret that Product Talk is built on the foundation of continuous discovery. Yes, all of the content we create—whether it’s this blog, the Product Talk Academy courses, the community, or the Continuous Discovery Habits book—focuses on the various facets of continuous discovery. But it’

Everyone Can Do Continuous Discovery—Even You! Here’s How

One of the most common responses I get when I talk about continuous discovery is: “That would never work in my organization.” But after working with thousands of product people and organizations of all kinds, I can tell you that everyone is capable of making progress on their continuous discovery

Bringing Order to Chaos: Using Opportunity Solution Trees in Everyday Life

If you’re a product person, you’ve developed a set of skills that help you in your job. You know (or you’re in the process of learning) how to identify opportunities, consider different solutions, and identify and test your assumptions. And if you’re working within the continuous