Teresa Torres

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

4 Questions I Always Ask When Interviewing Product Managers

This post is part of the So You Want To Be a Product Manager series. As part of my consulting practice, I often help companies recruit product managers and interaction designers. As a result, I do a lot of interviewing. I've talked with a lot of folks who

Social Contagion: How I Went From No Mobile Gaming to Addicted in 36 Hours

I spent this past weekend with my siblings. Four of the five of us, plus my brother-in-law, spent a good amount of the weekend playing Words with Friends, Draw Something, and Scramble with each other. Now up until this point, I had mostly avoided mobile games. If I&

Even Knowing The Rules, Why We Still Can't Write Stories Like Pixar

There's been a lot of buzz this week about the Pixar story rules being tweeted by Emma Coates (@lawnrocket). But don't expect a whole new crop of Pixar-like storytellers to suddenly emerge. Knowing what makes a good story, and writing a good story are two

Why the BranchOut Decline Isn't Surprising

Earlier this week, ERE wrote this article about the rapid decline of BranchOut over the past 30 days. Peaking at 13.9 million monthly active users at the end of April, they are now down to 6.5 million monthly active users, losing 7.4 million monthly active users in

What a Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist Can Teach Us About Building Great Products

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character) I just finished reading "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman", a series of short stories or essays by Richard Feynman that reads like a memoir. Not only was this book a delightful read, but it

User Stories Are Better Than PRDs

In the previous post, we focused on how product managers share customer knowledge with engineers. We discussed how user personas are an effective way of  telling the customer's story. We also looked at how some teams share artifacts (videos, audio, written reports) from usability tests to help communicate

Sharing Knowledge: From Product Manager to Engineers

This is the second post in a four part series on Sharing Knowledge in Product Management. The first part looked at sharing knowledge from customers to product manager. This part examines from product Mangers to engineers. Part three will examine from engineers back to product managers. Finally, part four will

Sharing Knowledge: From Customer to Product Manager

This is the first post in a two+ part series. I have content in mind beyond the first two parts, but want to gauge interest before deciding whether or not to continue. These first two parts are sections of a paper I wrote in a class called, "Creating and

Interesting vs. Meaningful

About a year ago, I was struggling. I was the CEO of a technology startup. We were going through some tough times, but we were okay. I wasn't. Looking back, I realized that my struggle was that while I was interested in what we were doing, it simply

Should You Learn To Code?

I'm launching a product today. I forgot how exciting it is to launch something that I made, from concept to launch. In this case, I didn't just define the product, I also wrote a good amount of the code. I haven't written code in

Build Your Visual Communication Skills

As product managers, we communicate with everyone: engineers, designers, sales, account managers, marketing, you name it. Our products are complex and we are seen as the resident experts. We clarify product requirements with engineers, help our sales team overcome objections, and assist our customer success team on getting the most

How To Talk To Your Customers (Despite Henry Ford and Steve Jobs)

"If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse." - Henry Ford (supposedly) "It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to

The "Why" Behind Product Feedback

I was talking to a startup founder recently and he was telling me about the feedback he was getting on his recent product launch. To keep things simple, we'll describe his product as follows: he is creating a platform where buyers can meet with sellers to exchange information

How to Frame Your Product Vision

More often than not, I see product managers frame their product vision as a solution - sometimes even as a solution without a clear problem. In some cases, this happens because the product manager hasn't clearly identified a suitable problem. But other times the product managers have done their

Great Product Books: Where To Get Started

I often get asked for book recommendations related to product management. This is a hard question to answer. There are a lot of great books out there. But I think the most important aspect of being a good product manager requires working from the perspective of the whole business. It&

What Product Assumptions Are You Making?

When a team sets out to develop a product, they generate a series of hypotheses. In my experience, good teams are explicit about these hypotheses and test them before they invest too much time into a particular product plan. However, more often than not, I see that development teams are

Turning Big Ideas Into Great Products

I love seeing big ideas turn into great products. In this talk, Jack Dorsey talks about the big idea that eventually led to Twitter and his new big idea behind Square. Few people have the ability to go from big idea to successful product like Jack does. Even for ideas