Teresa Torres

Happy Birthday, Product Talk - Thank You!

I was sitting in my doctor’s office after a harrowing couple of weeks. I can remember it like it was yesterday. On the prior Sunday, I had passed out in the shower. I thought I had the flu. I could barely crawl from the bathroom to my bed. It

Stop Wishing and Start Doing

"I wish my leadership team would pick one strategy." "I wish my engineering team would contribute ideas to our project." "I wish our user experience team would ask for my input earlier." "I wish our sales team would stop saying yes to feature

You Don’t Want to Miss Out on This

It’s easy to have ideas. You could rattle off ten right now. I bet you hear dozens from across your organization every week. This isn’t the hard part of your job. The hard part is putting those ideas into context. It’s deciding which ideas to pursue. It’

What Your Product Team Says About Your Company Values

Are you committed to creating a great user experience? Do you believe in data-driven product development? Are you motivated to create products that your customers love? I’m guessing most of you answered yes to all three of those questions. Let me ask you a different set of questions.

The 4 Most Common Barriers to Outcome-Based Product Management (And How You Can Overcome Them)

If you read my last post on outcome-based product management and thought how do I get there, you aren’t alone. I received dozens of emails, tweets, and comments from product leaders just like you asking this very question. In an ideal world, every product manager would start at

The Path to Better Product Decisions

I spend most of my time helping product teams make better product decisions. I’m starting to notice some patterns. I see three critical areas where we often fall short. First, we don’t always start from a holistic or systems view of the problem we are trying to solve.

The Dos and Don'ts of Hypothesis Testing

I see many product managers struggling with how to design and run good product experiments. It’s hard to know what to test and for how long. Few of us are trained to think like scientists. The tools are hard to use. We often overgeneralize our conclusions. It’s great

Let's Talk Innovation: A Conversation with Tim Meaney and Teresa Torres

In April I visited Tim Meaney and the rest of the Kindling team. For long-time Product Talk readers, you already know that I’m a big fan of idea management software and of Kindling specifically. (See related posts below.) While I have met Tim several times on his recent

How To Write Product Requirements That Engage Everyone on the Team

Why do you write product requirements? We used to write long product requirement documents to communicate the solution we wanted our engineering teams to build. But over time we learned that outlining every detail of the solution upfront leads to overcommitting to solutions before we know whether or not they

Product Managers Don't Own the Problem (And Designers Don't Own the Solution)

Imagine a product team discussing new commenting functionality on their company blog. “We should let people comment anonymously.” “That will only attract trolls. We should require real names.” “We should require unique names, but allow pseudonyms.” You won’t find a shortage of debate on this topic across the Internet.

Take a Team Approach to Product Delivery

Jim, like many product mangers, spends most of his day with his engineering team. He clarifies requirements, triages bugs, and seeks out hidden dependencies. Sally, on the other hand, spends most of her time with customers. She's understanding their context, uncovering pain points, and identifying opportunities to delight.

Your Title Doesn't Matter

If you’ve been reading Product Talk for long, you’ve probably noticed that I sometimes blur the lines between product management and user experience design. I started out as an interaction designer back in 1999. Back then we were arguing about the differences between interaction design, user interface design,

Fix Delivery to Make Time for Discovery

“How do we know if we are building the right things?” “We are building feature after feature but to what end?” “How do we know what customers really want or need?" Have you heard these sentiments before? I am hearing them more and more. Underlying each quote is a

Why You Can (And Should) Experiment When Building Enterprise Products

Every time I speak about hypothesis testing, I get a series of questions about how to run experiments from people working on enterprise products. The assumption behind these questions is that hypothesis testing only works with consumer Internet products. And the assumption behind that belief is that the only way

Run Experiments Before You Write Code

The Lean Startup has a flaw. It’s a simple one. It advocates the feedback loop: Build -> Measure -> Learn. I agree wholeheartedly with this loop. The flaw is in where you should start. I prefer: Learn -> Build -> Measure It’s a subtle difference, but it’s

My Favorite Books Read in 2014

I’ve read 60 books (so far) this year. These were my favorites. If you like these reviews, I’ll be launching a blog after the new year about the books that I’m reading. I’ll share details in an upcoming newsletter. If you don’t get my newsletter,

Don't Rely On Confidence Alone

You find yourself in a conference room with your product team. The white board is covered with sketches. You have an idea that everyone is excited about. You mapped it out. You have a plan. Your engineering team is anxious to get started. This is what makes building products fun

How to Estimate the Expected Impact of a Product Change

Your design team is excited about a new signup process. They are convinced it will increase registrations. Your sales team keeps asking for the same feature over and over again. They think it’s responsible for lost sales since your biggest competitor features it prominently. Your product manager wants to

The Power of Gratitude

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Good food? Gratitude? Friends and family? Yes, please. A few years ago I decided I didn’t want gratitude to be a once-a-year holiday. Instead I wanted to develop a daily habit. So I read about gratitude journals and tried to keep one.

What to Do When You Don't Have Enough Traffic To A/B Test

You’ve read the Lean Startup. You’ve drank the Kool-Aid. You’re ready to start experimenting. There’s only one problem. You don’t have any web traffic. If the only tool in your toolbox is A/B testing, then this might be a problem. Fortunately, there are

The 5 Components of a Good Hypothesis

Update: I've since revised this hypothesis format. You can find the most current version in this article: * How to Improve Your Experiment Design (And Build Trust in Your Product Experiments) “My hypothesis is …” These words are becoming more common everyday. Product teams are starting to talk like scientists.

Putting the 4 Levels of Product Analysis Into Practice: A Halloween-Themed Example

It’s Halloween week! The pumpkins are carved, the candy bowl is full, and the neighborhood is about to be crawling with princesses, ninja turtles, and pirates. You’ve only got one last thing to do before the fun begins. You promised your neighbors hot apple cider - with rum, of

Hypothesis Testing Mistake #1: Not Knowing What You Want To Learn

Have you ran an experiment in the past day, week, month? Can you clearly articulate your hypothesis? Do you know under which conditions your hypothesis will pass or fail? Do you know how to interpret the data in a way that drives successful product decisions? Many of us are new

The 14 Most Common Hypothesis Testing Mistakes Product Teams Make (And How to Avoid Them)

I’ve been working with a product team on how to get better at hypothesis testing. It’s a lot of fun. They were introduced to dual-track Agile by Marty Cagan and are doing a great job of putting it into practice. As they explore how to support backlog

Know Who You Are Building For and Why

It’s easy to be fooled by the Facebooks and the Googles of the world. Everyone uses their products. They make it easy to rationalize why everyone will use your product. But when you draw this conclusion, you skip right from A to Z, ignoring all the steps they took