Melissa Suzuno

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

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

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

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

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’

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

Product Talk is Growing: Meet New Instructor Ellen Brandenberger

Product Talk’s North Star metric is to increase the number of product trios who adopt a continuous discovery cadence to their work. This is what inspired Teresa to write the Continuous Discovery Habits book and shift Product Talk to a course-first business. And this outcome is also the reason

Product in Practice: One Product Manager’s Quest to Adopt Continuous Discovery at Her Company

Adopting continuous discovery can feel like a big, audacious goal. If you’ve never spoken with a customer, how will you be able to set up interviews every single week? If you don’t currently work in a product trio at all, how will you be able to work and

Tools of the Trade: Using Personal Knowledge Management to Solve Problems and Boost Creativity

The world of digital products is evolving quickly. Whether you’re trying to keep track of everything you learn about your customers during continuous discovery, keep tabs on the latest thought leadership and learnings from others in the industry, or keep on top of all the newest products on the

Product in Practice: Getting Engineers Involved in Brainstorming

Getting a group together to generate ideas—an activity often referred to as “brainstorming”—doesn’t always go smoothly. In the past, Teresa has written about the major reasons why traditional brainstorming doesn’t work: social loafing (people tend not to work as hard in a group setting), conformity (people

Tools of the Trade: Recruiting Customer Interview Participants

When it comes to continuous discovery, there’s no such thing as “the perfect tool.” Instead of seeking the best tool out there, it’s much more effective to look for the best tool for your team. Teresa often says, “The best tool is the one that your team will

Product in Practice: Building to Learn at Singularity Creations

Saying no is a huge part of excelling in your product practice. If you say yes to every request that comes your way—whether from customers, salespeople, or executives—you can quickly get overwhelmed and lose focus. But this isn’t always easy. Product people naturally want to solve any

Product Talk Is Growing: Meet New Instructor Ellen Juhlin

Product Talk’s North Star metric is to increase the number of product trios who adopt a continuous cadence to their discovery work. Teresa shared this goal at the beginning of 2022 when describing her plans to scale the impact of Product Talk. Explaining why Product Talk has become a

Product in Practice: Opportunity Mapping Led to a 20% Lift in LTV at Grailed

What do your customers care about? This seems like a simple enough question, but many product teams struggle to answer it honestly. Often the first instinct is to frame an answer in terms of what your business cares about. But remember: Your customers don’t care about your business outcomes.

Product in Practice: Mapping Opportunities at trivago

A lot of product teams claim to be focused on their users. They might even have regular steps in their processes that remind them to put their users’ needs first. But even if this is the case, there’s always more they can do to improve. This is why Teresa

Product in Practice: Automating Customer Interview Recruiting at Zonar Systems

Not having enough time is one of the main reasons people say they can’t interview customers every week. And this is not just an empty excuse—most product people’s calendars are packed. So the idea of trying to carve out time to recruit and schedule interviews might feel

Tools of the Trade: A Look at Pendo’s Discovery Tech Stack

The beauty of continuous discovery is that there’s no single right way to do it. This is why Teresa often talks about guiding principles and core concepts, but encourages everyone to find what works best for them. For example, while Teresa recommends creating a product trio that includes a

Product in Practice: Assumption Testing with Engineers at Orion Labs

Engineers are often reluctant to participate in discovery. This is only natural: Through years of bad habits, many of us have shown engineers that we only value them for the code they can write. This is a common mistake that Teresa addressed in a Core Concepts post, saying “We’ve

Looking for a Product Job? Here’s How to Assess a Company’s Continuous Discovery Habits

No company is perfect, especially when it comes to continuous discovery. But some companies are decidedly better than others. You can probably easily list off where your current company is nailing it and where there’s room for improvement when it comes to adopting continuous discovery habits. You likely have

Tools of the Trade: A Look at the Discovery Tech Stack at 99designs

In case you missed it, Tools of the Trade is a new series on Product Talk. In each edition, we talk with a continuous discovery champion (or group of champions) from one organization. We learn about where they are in their continuous discovery journey, which tools they’re using to

Tools of the Trade: A Look at Optimal Workshop’s Discovery Tech Stack

Continuous discovery is about changing your behavior. That’s why Teresa named her book Continuous Discovery Habits. You don’t just think your way into continuous discovery. Sure, it’s important to understand the underlying concepts. But the concepts don’t mean much if you’re not making real changes

Product in Practice: Finding the Best Way to Communicate with Different Stakeholders

Continuous discovery is more of a journey than a destination. You can pick up the habits and fold them into your daily practice, but there will always be room for improvement. Plus, your work environment is always changing, so you’ll constantly need to adapt to your current settings and

Product in Practice: When Travel Ground to a Halt, Seera Group Used Opportunity Mapping to Discover a New Market

Hi there, Product Talk readers! We can’t wait to share our latest Product in Practice with you. For this story, we spoke with a product team leading the Digital Hotels vertical at Seera Group, a travel and tourism company based in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). The team

Product in Practice: Iterating to an Actionable Outcome at tails.com

Hello Product Talk readers, we’re excited to share the latest Product in Practice with you! For this story, we caught up with Sonja Martin, Product Manager at tails.com. Sonja shares how her cross-functional team has changed their approach to defining their desired outcome over time. Want to check