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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