Teresa Torres

Reward Ideas With Good Feedback

On Tuesday, we looked at how to get the entire company involved in idea generation. One of the key steps we highlighted was to give feedback on every idea. Giving good feedback is an art form in and of itself. When you open idea generation up to your whole company,

You Aren't The Only One Who Can Have Innovative Ideas

One of the hardest parts of product management is making visible how you evaluate ideas and make decisions about what to build. Everyone has ideas. Rarely are you sitting around dreaming up what to build next. More likely, your wading through feature request after feature request trying to identify what&

When Helping Hurts

A sales rep comes to you and asks for a small product change to satisfy a prospective client. Your manager wants to A/B test her latest idea. Your friend in client services keeps asking for an updated FAQ even though nobody reads the one you do have. One of

Do One Thing Well

Most product managers know that your product should do one thing well. If you do one thing well, your customers will know exactly when and why to use your product. If you do one thing well, you have a hope of being the best at what you do. If you

Global Product Management Talk: Writing Compelling User Stories

Yesterday, I was the guest speaker on the Global Product Management Talk hosted by Cindy Solomon. For yesterday's show, Roger Cauvin was the co-host. We were discussing how to write compelling user stories. As many of you know, this is a topic that I've covered in-depth

Remembering Steve

One year ago today, Steve Jobs passed away. I can't think of any other person of whom I feel more conflicted. It's hard to argue with Steve's results. After all, he brought us the candy-colored iMacs, the iPod, iTunes, the iPhone, the iPad, and

Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Writing User Stories

Over the last few weeks, we've taken a look at several aspects of user story writing. As the primary means of kicking off conversations between product and engineering in most Agile environments, user story writing is a critical skill to develop. Let's review where we'

Writing Acceptable Acceptance Criteria

You've written your user stories, engineers have accepted them, development is in progress. Now what? More often than not, odds are you left off one of the most important parts of a user story - the acceptance criteria. Acceptance criteria tells you when a user story is ready

The Art (Not Science) Of User Story Prioritization

Over the past couple of weeks, we've looked at how to write good user stories, how to use themes to manage your backlog, and how to measure and predict the impact of user stories. Today, we'll take a high-level look at how to prioritize user stories.

Predicting The Impact Of Each User Story

On Tuesday, we looked at how to measure the impact of each user story, looking at both measuring the effectiveness of the mechanics of the feature and also the impact of the story on our overall product goals. Today, we'll look at how to predict the impact of

Measuring The Impact Of Each User Story

On Thursday, I wrote about how to use themes to stay focused on your product goals. But using themes is not enough. You also need to identify how you are going to predict and measure the impact of each user story. Let's return to our previous example and

Using Themes To Wrestle An Ever-Growing Backlog of User Stories

One of the biggest challenges with writing requirements as user stories is that with time your backlog can become an overgrown mess of assorted stories that seem to have no rhyme or reason. When writing a PRD, it's easy to keep the whole product in mind. After all,

User Stories Aren't As Simple As They Seem

In April, I wrote User Stories Are Better Than PRDs. To date, it's been one of my most popular posts. It covers the basic format of user stories: As a user role, I'm able to do some functionality, for some explicit benefit. It looks at each

So You Want To Be A Product Manager

Overwhelmingly, the top product-related question I see on Quora, LinkedIn, and Twitter is how do you become a product manager. Product managers come from all walks of life. There is no single path to your first product role. Seeing this question so often led me to write quite a few

The Most Common Mistakes People Make In Product Manager Interviews

This post is part of the So You Want To Be a Product Manager series. There are a ton of great articles about what you might get asked in a product manager interview. I refer you here, here, and here. I've also written about what I always ask

Dear Product Manager, Nobody Is Looking At Your Resume

This post is part of the So You Want To Be a Product Manager series. Now that you have narrowed down a target list of companies, let's focus on how to get the attention of the hiring manager. In a perfect world, you would apply for a job,

You'll Never Be a Product Manager There: Choosing The Right Companies

This post is part of the So You Want To Be a Product Manager series. When we talked with Colin Murphy a couple of weeks ago, he hit on a key element of a successful job search. Colin, looking for his first product role, said, "I realized early on

To Portfolio Or Not To Portfolio

This post is part of the So You Want To Be a Product Manager series. Most product and design job requirements ask for a portfolio. What do you do if you don't have one? I'm not a big fan of public portfolios. They lead to poor

Moving From User Experience to Product With Laura Klein

This post is part of the So You Want To Be a Product Manager series. We've heard from Oded and Colin who had some product experience from the context of account management type roles. We've heard from Zaz who switched to product from engineering. Today, we

Moving From Engineering To Product Management With Zaz Harris

This post is part of the So You Want To Be a Product Manager series. I hear from a lot of engineers who want to move into product management. Typically, they like writing code, but they want to get more involved in the decision making and have a good perspective

Mastering the Product Manager Job Search With Colin Murphy

This post is part of the So You Want To Be a Product Manager series. I have a few more interviews lined up for what's turned into an ad hoc series on how to find a product manager job. After that, I'll shift focus back to

Oded Korczyn: On Becoming a Product Manager

This post is part of the So You Want To Be a Product Manager series. Over the past two weeks, I've talked about how you don't need experience to become a product manager and how you can gain experience right now. I regularly hear from folks

Gain Product Management Experience By Starting Right Now

This post is part of the So You Want To Be a Product Manager series. Last week, I wrote about how you don't need specific experience to become a product manager. Too many people get caught up in the chicken and the egg problem of how can I

You Don't Need Experience To Become a Product Manager

This post is part of the So You Want To Be a Product Manager series. What does it take to get into product management? What's the requisite experience? Are certificates worthwhile? Do you need an MBA? As a hiring manager, I've hired half a dozen product

Brainstorming: More Questions Than Answers

There's been a lot of confusion around brainstorming these days. First, there was the New Yorker article by Jonah Lehrer claiming that brainstorming doesn't work. Scott Berkun wrote a rebuttal arguing Lehrer's logic was flawed. Twitter exploded with comments. I'm going to