Build better products with continuous product discovery | Teresa Torres

Everything in our backlog is a bet. Everything. Whether we do discovery or not, everything is a bet. Discovery is helping us make a better bet. Now, sometimes in our organizations, we need to do a lot of discovery and make as good of a bet as we can. But there's other times we can make a risky bet. Like, there's times in business where it makes sense to make a risky bet. If you work somewhere where all of your bets have been risky 'cause you're doing zero discovery, the best way to kill any appetite for discovery is to say, "Let's stop making bets until we discover." No. Don't do that. Keep making bets. In parallel, start doing some discovery so that eventually, those bets get better. And I think the reason why people make this mistake is they think about it as phases. First I discover and then I deliver. No, you're always delivering and you're always discovering. And the more you build this discovery habit, the better those bets are going to get with time. So it's not that you do one first and then the other, it's you're always doing both. And the benefit of always doing both is with time you make better bets.

(instrumental music) Teresa Torres is a speaker, a teacher, a consultant, a product coach, and also the author of Continuous Discovery Habits, which is the number one most recommended book in my newsletter Slack community. I'm also pretty sure Teresa is in the top five people in the world when it comes to the number of product managers that she's worked with, taught, and impacted. In our chat, we get deep into two topics, the Opportunity Solution Tree framework, which is a really simple but incredibly powerful framework once you know it, and two, we go deep into how to create a system within your team where you're talking to customers regularly. We talk about ways to make a case for spending more time talking to customers and doing user research, the most common mistakes people make when interviewing and generally how to interview customers better, how to automate this process so that you don't spend a bunch of time, and so many other ways to bring you and your organization closer to your customers. Teresa is amazing, and I can't wait for you to learn from her. This episode is brought to you by Persona. Persona helps founders, product managers, and engineers easily solve any identity related problem, including handling KYC, AML, and basically all manner of identity fraud. You can integrate Persona in an afternoon and personalize your flows using their SDK to meet your users on any device. Persona's identity building blocks allow you to manage your entire end-to-end onboarding flow, verifying that each new user and their data are legitimate. Persona is trusted by both startups and the world's largest companies, including Square, BlockFi, Gusto, and Udemy. And for a limited time, Persona is offering listeners of this podcast a free end-to-end KYC and AML solution where you can collect a user's government ID and/or their selfie and automatically verify that those two pieces of data are legitimate. You can also enrich that information to automatically see if the person exists on various watchlists. Just go to withpersona.com/lenny to get started. So many product managers are basically treated like project managers. They get hired thinking they'll be deep in product strategy, vision, and getting to know their customers, only to wind up organizing other people's work and refining backlogs and organizing tiny, tiny features. If that sounds familiar, you need Dovetail, because Dovetail gets that the true heart of product management is understanding what customers want, why they want it, and how to give it to them. That's why Dovetail built a suite of user research products that help you get to the core of what your customers really want and why they want it. Dovetail offers powerful analysis tools to help you identify themes, patterns, and insights in your customer interviews, allowing you to make better data-informed decisions about what solutions you should build next. Organizations the world over, like Atlassian, Canva, DataDog, GitLab, Nielsen Norman Group, Sketch, Deloitte, all use Dovetail to get a better understanding of their customers and build better products. Try Dovetail's products for free for as long as you need. You can sign up and dive straight in at dovetailapp.com/lenny. Teresa, thank you so much for being here. I don't know if you know this, but your book is consistently the number one most recommended book in my Slack community, and also I've personally learned so much from you, from your writing and just your tweets and all the ways that you share your lessons. And so I'm really excited to delve into continuous discovery and all the things that you teach. And so again, thank you for being here, and welcome.