Teresa Torres

Weekend Reading: A/B Testing Is Hard, To Pivot Or Not, And More

Each week, I read dozens of blogs, countless articles from my Twitter stream, and one or two books. In Weekend Reading, I highlight the best, as it applies to developing great products. A Personal Approach To Organizational Time Management by Peter Bregman "choosing what we are going to ignore

How To Find Common Ground When Engineers Don't Like Features

Have you ever found yourself in an argument with an engineer about the value of a feature? Take a look at the following exchange: Engineer: I don't think we should let companies message candidates who haven't applied for their jobs. Product Manager: How come? Engineer: It

Find Big Wins by Setting Exponential Goals

I've spent a lot of January working with folks on goal-setting. Setting the right goal can be hard. Whether it's picking the right metric or determining the target, there are plenty of places where goal-setting can go wrong. The biggest mistake I see is,

Weekend Reading: A Product / UX Rant, Choosing Metrics, and Setting Goals

Each week, I read dozens of blogs, countless articles from my Twitter stream, and one or two books. In Weekend Reading, I highlight the best, as it applies to developing great products. Who Owns Your UX Philosophy? Brad Feld in Feld Thoughts I have a lot of respect for just

3 Use Cases For Better Communication With Kindling

I recently rolled out Kindling, an idea management app, across my company. If you aren't familiar with idea management apps, there's no shortage of them. This blog lists 44. The idea is to get more people involved in idea generation and evaluation. The various software packages

Weekend Reading: Experimenting, Deliberate Practice, the Rise of Paperbacks, And Much More

Each week, I read dozens of blogs, countless articles from my Twitter stream, and one or two books. In Weekend Reading, I highlight the best, as it applies to developing great products. The $100,000 Experiment | Brad Feld in The Wall Street Journal "A long time ago, I realized

Be Truthful, Be Concise, Be Relevant, Be Clear

Whether it's dashing off a quick email or laboring over user stories, how you communicate can have a big impact on the outcomes you drive. Writing well is a critical product skill that you should deliberately practice. As an undergraduate, I learned about Paul Grice's maxims

What do you want to see on Product Talk in 2013?

Thank you so much for reading Product Talk. I'm committed to making it even better in 2013, and need your help. I'd love it if you could take 3 minutes to fill out a quick 5 question survey about what you would like to see on

Looking Back On The First Year of Product Talk

I started Product Talk in November 2011. It's been a great first year of blogging. I've learned a lot. Some posts that I thought would be hits didn't gain traction and others that I thought would be sleepers really took off. More importantly, I

Ignore the Competition, Talk to Your Customers Instead

I love this post, Do You Care More About the Customers or the Competition?, by David Meerman Scott on Web Ink Now. Take a minute. Go read it. Everywhere I've worked, people on my team have been obsessed with the competition. Every day they read about who is

The High Cost of Interruptions

In this post, I argued that you should ignore bugs. It was easily the most controversial blog post I've written. If you haven't read it, go ahead, read it. I'll wait. It was fun. Naturally, some people disagreed. If you read the comments, you&

Why Ignoring Bugs Will Make Your Product Better

Do you have a bug management system with thousands of bugs? Do you have meetings to review high priority bugs? Do you argue over how to use priority and severity? Why? Bug management is a waste of time. Bugs fall into three categories: Bugs that need to interrupt work. These

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

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,

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 for

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

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