S3 Ep. 6: How Do You Nurture Product Discovery as a Leader?
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Hope Gurion: No product gets to product-market fit or scales while achieving its acquisition, engagement and retention goals without customers genuinely preferring that product its competitors. And no customers stick with products for the long term without the product teams continuously discovering what matters to existing customers and prospective new customers. So how do you help your teams practice continuous discovery? In this episode of Fearless Product Leadership, I’m speaking with my friend and partner, Teresa Torres, author of the new book, “Continuous Discovery Habits” as we answer the question “How do you nurture product discovery as a leader?”
Product leaders seeking to empower their teams know that discovery is one of the critical activities that their teams must embrace and practice to be successful. However, few organizations truly embrace continuous discovery as a core tenant of their ability to being outcome-driven. Product leaders create the conditions to set their product teams up for success. What can product leaders do to nurture discovery within their teams and help their leadership teams value this critically important part of the product development process? In this episode of Fearless Product Leadership, I speak with Teresa Torres about how leaders can nurture continuous discovery. Teresa is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and discovery coach for product teams. She’s coached hundreds of teams at companies of all sizes, from early-stage start-ups to global enterprises, in a variety of industries. She has taught over 7,000 product people discovery skills through the Product Talk Academy. She’s the author of the book Continuous Discovery Habits and blogs at ProductTalk.org. She also happens to be a good friend and my business partner. Let’s dive in as we fearlessly tackle the question “How do you nurture product discovery as a leader?”
Teresa, thank you so much for joining me. It's kind of odd for as long as I've known you that I haven't yet had you on the podcast so I'm glad we're finally getting to that so thanks so much for joining today.
Teresa Torres: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Hope: I thought it might be helpful as we're going to talk about you know really how as a product leader to help really nurture discovery in your teams and in an organization, that may be unfamiliar or not doing enough discovery in their decision making that we could talk about what that really looks like for product leaders. And I thought it might be useful to start with how we even started working together when I was a product leader trying to help my teams do more discovery, make better decisions, help the organization see the value of discovery and so I'd love to hear your perspective on how we started working together and got to know each other, and how that has impacted your career.
Teresa: Yeah, actually it's kind of funny because Hope, you were my first, like major client I think I had worked with one or two other companies like a handful of companies doing just little piecemeal, mostly user research projects for them; but I think you were my very first discovery coaching client. I had maybe four or five months before he reached out to me, I had sort of made this deliberate decision of, I don't really like consulting, I don't want to do the work for the company, I feel like companies need to do it themselves. I really wanted to shift to, how do I teach companies how to do this. So, I made a deliberate decision with Product Talk that I was going to start blogging for leaders and try to create the case that their teams needed to be working this way.
About four months after I made that decision. I still remember that email you sent me because you sent me like a two-sentence email and it was like, “Hi Teresa, you write about things my team needs help with. Will you coach us?” and I loved it. I loved it because you asked for a coach, not for a consultant, and it was just so direct and to the point. So, my memory of how we met was just it was kind of a magical moment of like, “Oh, this content marketing shift that I made is working, somebody came to me” That was really fun. Then, the other thing that stood out to me about that very first phone call we had, we talked about what are the things that your team needed to help with and I'll be honest, at this point I'd only worked at early stage startups, I was a little intimidated by the fact that you were the chief product officer at CareerBuilder, an $800 million revenue generating company at the time.
Hope: Despite the lack of discovery, FYI.
Teresa: And I remember going into that call, a little bit nervous like, “Can I really help the C level executive at a much larger company than I've ever worked at?” As soon as we started talking and you started talking about the challenges your teams were having. I was like, Oh, I can help with this, this is exactly the area I can help with. So, we had a really good conversation and then I love how you ended the call you said, “How can we test if this is a good fit for both of us?” I think when we did out of that call was, we just started with a group coaching session for like three product managers for four weeks, and we just tested it out. What was great is that you had a really clear need. I think if I remember right, your teams needed help with like we have hypotheses, how do we test them quickly and effectively? Then we immediately started working on this four-week curriculum for how do we help people tested an assumption? That was probably the earliest seed of what's now the continuous discover habits curriculum and book,
Hope: Which is awesome and I'm so glad that we have the same memory, although you have more detail about it than I do, I was in the fog of, “Holy crap, I've got some eight teams that need help. Who can help me?” So that's great. It was a great start to our relationship working together. We worked with multiple teams over the years and it was just as helpful for me as a product leader to think about: How can I really help enable them what do they need to get access to customers? What do they need to formulate a good hypothesis? How did they best communicate what they've learned within the organization? How can other teams see what other teams are learning? Which led into us doing discovery demos and a number of other things also led me to my next role where you were helping another company, with their discovery practices, sort of. Do you want to describe that a little bit?
Teresa: Yeah, so this was, I think, several years later. I've now been working as a discovery coach for a long time, and I was working with this company Beachbody. I don't remember how I connected with them. I think their CIO Eduardo had just reached out to me on LinkedIn, but I might be miss-remembering that. Oh, that's not true. I'm not connected to, I got connected to Beachbody through another consultant and this guy Mac. Mac, I wish I could remember your last name, I apologize, but Jeff Patton actually connected with me with Mac. Mac and Jeff were super good buddies, they've done a bunch of work together, and Mac wanted somebody to come in and be a second person in assessing the product team, and Jeff was too booked, and so I kind of jumped in and filled in, and that led to me coaching some teams there. What’s interesting about Beachbody is that they were the company that makes P90X and does exercise fitness kind of stuff. Very traditional, like a multi-level marketing company that like that multi-level marketing ethos is like how the company operates. Sell stuff, sell as much stuff as you can as quickly as possible. There’s certainly much more about it, I mean they create quality products. I was a big P90X fan, so I'm not dissing their products, but the culture is very much a sales and marketing and just grow our footprint, and they really had an IT model, and their CIO was trying to shift it to a product model, I think there's still a lot of back and forth like even in our assessment and even our conversations with him we were really direct about like, “Is this really what you want to be doing?” I think he genuinely did, but it was a really hard organizational culture to do that. Then I think about six months into working with them, Eduardo said that he was looking for a VP of Product or a Chief Product Officer I don't remember the title, and I think you connected with him right around the same time and you ended up taking that role,
Hope: I ended up taking that and has, you know, still have some scar tissue from that but generally, and I think, and as it relates to like how challenging it is for a product leader who's trying to help their teams do discovery; how much the sort of understanding and desire from the rest of the leadership team plays a role in really helping teams practice discovery and in that particular organizational context, the CEO was the ideas guy, and it had led him on a path of being super, duper successful. So, hard to argue with the fact that like it didn't, didn't need to do a lot of discovery ultimately approved itself out in sales or not but it also led to a lot of orphaned IT projects over the years, that didn't necessarily create cohesive valuable digital experiences and that was largely what the IT organization was trying to unwind and trying to create a product team model and discovery based decision making. So, yeah you, you did some work with my team, so when I took over that model, and I believe it was working with the coach team at that time, coach office, that you started actually creating the opportunity solution tree structure.
Teresa: So, the first thing I'll say is I think Beachbody is really illustrative for a lot of reasons and I think you touched on a couple of them. I think Eduardo, their CIO at the time was genuinely interested in helping Beachbody shift to a product-led organization, and maybe the CEO is also interested in that. I don't know I've never talked to the CEO.
Hope: I'm not sure he knew. I think he left it as it was an IT issue, so an IT solution.
Teresa: I think what's hard is that Beachbody is this wildly successful company. I mean we're talking billions wildly successful company. They make great products the customers love them, they're super loyal, so there wasn't a lot of impetus for change. I think that's one of the really hard things is that if it's not being led by the CEO, and there's not an impetus for change, why in the world would the organization change? So, a product leader comes in, Eduardo and says I really want to drive this change, but that's not enough. I think that's the one thing I want to highlight is that I don't think Beachbody did anything wrong, rapidly successful company. Clearly great leadership, and it still wasn't the right time or place for this type of organizational shift. The other leaders weren't on board.
Back to your question of I was working with one of your teams, their customer segment that they were focused on were the people that coach for Beachbody. So, Beachbody has all these fitness products, they realized that to help people stick to it, it helps for them to have a coach. This is part of their multi-level marketing program, if you're a coach, and you bring on other people, you get a percentage of what of their revenue kind of thing.
Hope: Also, engagement and retention driving. Yeah, it's a different way to drive engagement and retention as opposed to a digital experience.
Teresa: Yeah, so you have somebody keeping you accountable to your fitness programs are going to keep buying more and also Shakeology is a big product for them, the more you talk to your coach the more Shakeology you're going to buy. It’s this really nice virtuous cycle. In fact, I learned a lot about business models, working with Beachbody because they're phenomenal at identifying revenue streams. I definitely want to like highlight we're not bashing Beachbody.
So, I was working with one of Hope’s teams, they were focused on the coaching segment. When I first started working with them, I don't believe anybody on the team had talked to a coach, except for maybe their design, but I'm pretty sure their product manager and their engineer had never talked to a customer. So, we're literally talking from talking about zero exposure, and part of that was because Beachbody had this culture where they had business stakeholders who were essentially the product managers, they were customer facing, whether they were marketing people or account management people. I don't really remember the exact roles, but they basically brought requirements to the product team and the product team was very much order takers, like we typically see in IT environment.
So, I started working with this team, they were super hungry and eager to learn. They were doing all the things I was asking them to do, they started talking to customers regularly, they started really starting to understand, they literally talked to a coach every single week and as most people who started doing this experience, they quickly got overwhelmed with what they were hearing, they wanted to ping pong back and forth from need to need. In our coaching calls I almost always had to like help them recenter and refocus and say, “Okay, here's our priority for the week” and I'm one call I also remember this like it was yesterday because it was during the Stanley Cup Finals; when the sharks were in the finals and I was traveling to the Bay Area to go watch the game. It was the last call I had to do before going to the game, which the Sharks have only been in the finals once this was a very big deal. On that call, they said to me, “Theresa, we've learned a lot of really awesome discovery tactics, but you always have to tell us what to do. And we don't know how we're going to do this on our own.” The reason why I mentioned that that was right before the Stanley Cup Finals is because that was really gut-wrenching feedback to me. The last thing I want is for this team to be dependent on me, and I did enjoy the hockey game, but I also was very distracted trying to think about how in the world am I going to solve this problem. I had actually for years been trying to solve a different, but related problem, and that's when I was a product manager working with my designers and engineers, we would often get back a test result that was maybe unexpected results so maybe you would deem that a failure but it didn't meet our expectations, and the rest of the team would want to start brainstorming, and they would come up with ideas that were not related to the problem we were trying to solve. So, to me it felt like we were like throwing the baby out with the bathwater like we were just, we weren't addressing the flawed assumption, we were just jumping to new ideas. At that time I did not have the language to communicate like what was in my head and why it felt like we were getting the wrong ideas. So, I tried really hard to visualize, like what is it that I'm doing?
So, the feedback I got from your team at Beachbody really brought all of that back up of like “Oh I still haven't solved this problem because if you, if I could visualize what's in my head as we're going through this, then they can look at that visual and know what to do next, just like I do.” That's had been like years in the making, but that team really pushed me to get this out on paper. At the same time, I was reading “Peak” by Anders Ericsson, and he's the researcher who the 10,000-hour rule comes from. He talks about what it takes to develop true expertise in a topic, or an area, and he talks about it takes deliberate practice, and one of the things he highlights is that a key difference between experts and novices, is that experts have more sophisticated mental representations of their domain. So that jumped out at me. Then I was like, “Hmm, I think it's this mental representation that I've been trying to externalize” and that was the catalyst for me to sit down and say okay, how am I representing discovery work in my head; and that's what led to the opportunity solution tree, and it took a few iterations, but it helped your team.
Hope: It always does!
Teresa: I remember it helps that team right away like I only worked with them for 12 weeks, I think we were five or six weeks in, and I can visual I can still see their tree in my head, like they got to the point where they mapped out the opportunity space, they started to see the big picture. They started to see how the dots were connected, and it was awesome.
Hope: Yeah, so the other major event in that, and as you mentioned there, it was like the Coach team I think they were called Team Beachbody but they, they talk to coaches, all the time. There were tons of discovery going on, like you said, by the sort of stakeholder group. The problem was they were talking to the most elite coaches. The ones at the top, top, top of the pyramid that were representative of the many 1000s who was fired to that level. So, when we were doing discovery with that team, we started to really understand all the different sub-segments of coaches that we needed to serve us with our digital products. It really, once the team started doing the discovery themselves, completely changed the dynamic because now they were bringing information our stakeholders, didn't necessarily know, and so it was that sort of surprise and delight of getting an important insight that was valuable to the stakeholders because the team themselves was doing discovery, and that changed our relationship and began to sort of sow the seeds for why discovery was so important, and the coach team, who really represented the majority of the revenue in the company, was sort of our earliest sort of pilot, let's say pilot customers in terms of using discovery.
So, one of the things I was hoping we could touch on, again you do most of your work with teams. I work with a lot of product leaders especially new product leaders coming from other disciplines or know that there's more effective ways that their teams could be working and really want to see what's the fastest way that we can put this into practice and realize the benefits of it. What do you see as some of the sort of, you know, raw ingredients or catalysts for leaders and to really expand the use of discovery in their organization so it's not just for this project this one time, and that becomes more continuous?
Teresa: Yeah, I think this Beachbody example is also really indicative of this. So, we have an organization that isn't really set up well to support a digital transformation. We don't know what role their CEO played; they still have an IT model. Most of their product teams weren't exposed to a customer, the discovery decisions were being made by business stakeholders. So, a very classic like traditional IT model approach, and even so; when the product teams started engaging with customers every week, they were able to have an impact, they're able to go back to their stakeholders and make the outputs they're being asked to deliver better. So I think as a leader, it's easy to get caught up in the bigger digital transformation and to think about, well I got to get my CEO on board, I got to get the rest of my leadership team on board, we got to do all the right things. I think all of those things need to happen eventually, but I think the easiest place to start is how can you remove the obstacles that are preventing your teams from talking to a customer every week? What does that look like? Do they know they have permission to talk to customers? Can you help them with recruiting? Can you help them with coordinating? Making sure that not all the teams are talking to the same customers. Can you make it easier for them to intervene in an interview? In your one on ones, are you asking them when was the last time you talked to a customer? Because what I know, Hope you and I both agree on this, like when we see teams talk to customers every week, a lot of the other discovery activities started to fall into place. So, I'm a big advocate of almost ignoring the organizational change challenge, because it's so hard, and instead just starting with, what's a really teeny tiny place that we can start. And if I was the leader or product leader in an organization like Beachbody or really any organization that was just getting started with discovery, I would just start really small and say how do I enable each and every one of my teams to have at least one conversation a week with a customer, and it could be a 20-minute conversation. Then I think from there, other pieces will start to fall into place.
Hope: Yeah, I find that when that starts to happen. First of all, it creates a sort of indelible memory like you can't unsee what you saw in that conversation or observation, and it usually creates a hunger for more if we learn that in one interview what is it that we don't know? The other thing that I find being helpful in this situation is when we can get to a shared goal with even the person, what if it was a dictated solution, how do we abstract that back into Well no, we're successful, when this happened so it creates that sort of you know guiding light for those initial customer discussions; just as a way to start planting the seeds for how to be outcome-driven, how to learn continuously, how to not fixate on a single solution. So, those are the top two that I think
Teresa: I think the outcome piece is really important. And the more that you can help your teams develop an outcome mindset that can be really beneficial. I think on the org transformation side, getting the outcomes is really hard. So, like if you can't convince your leadership team to stop dictating solutions. That's going to be a hard place to start. But a highlight, you can still encourage an outcome mindset in your product teams, even if the rest of the organization isn't there yet, so if your product teams are being handed a fixed roadmap, you can still help connect the dots for your teams, between that roadmap and the implied business outcomes, so they can still be doing discovery from outcome mindset, even if the rest of the organization hasn't changed.
Hope: Yeah, that's great. You touched on this a little bit but when, when a leader is really trying to help their teams in practice more discovery again in service of, addressing customer needs in a way that delivers value for their companies like how you mentioned, providing access to customers and, you know, reducing friction and the ability to make it easier for them to have the customer conversation and not have the customer conversation, but how else can a leader really think about, not like mandating dictating, “Hey, go do discovery this week” but really cultivate and nurture that discovery orientation within their teams. What else can I do?
Teresa: When I interviewed Petra Wille, she had this great quote, which was: “We don't need to motivate people, we just need to not demotivate them.” I think that's really relevant here. I don't think we need to motivate our teams to do discovery. I think the challenge is, even leaders that are totally bought in they drink the Kool-Aid they want to have empowered teams, they've read Marty's books, they know, like they're sold. The challenge is that doesn't mean we know how to manage empowered teams, and we have a trust gap. So, here's the challenge; Let’s say, Hope you work for me and I give you an outcome to focus on and I have totally drunk the Kool-Aid, I want you to figure out the best path to the outcome, and then you get started, your work, your four weeks and we do a one on one, and I have a concern about the direction you're going. I'm starting to worry you're not going to hit your outcome. As your leader I feel responsible for you hitting the outcome, I'm going to be measured based on whether you hit the outcome. And what happens in that moment, we fall back to what we've always done in the past, and we start to dictate solutions, and we just undid everything we've said in the past and everything we've encouraged that team to do in the past, because they know when the rubber hits the road, they're going to be told what to build. So why in the world would they put in the effort, you could discovery.
So, the key is that as leaders we have to be really aware of how what we're doing is going against what we're saying. And this is why we have phrases like walk the walk like walk, don't just talk the talk. I wish it was easy because it's really not like I even struggle with this. Hope and I, we've worked together on a course and I really want to just jump in and do it. I've run into this with my admin Karen, literally every single day, I'm constantly debating, but it just be easier for me to do this myself, but as a leader if we want leverage, we have to learn how to guide people instead of dictating to people. So, I think the key is in those moments when it looks like a team isn't going to hit their outcome. How can you be a coach? What does a coach do? A coach asks powerful questions to help the teams see the gaps in their own thinking. So, you can, there's some really easy ones we can do from a discovery standpoint. Tell me about how you got to this decision. What did you learn about your customer that you're using to justify this decision? What else did you consider? Are there other customer segments you should be talking to? Just being curious about how they got to their decision and helping them see where maybe they have some gaps in their thinking.
Hope: I think those are great questions to ask. I think the other thing that is often spoken but I have to try to unpack with leaders and teams when they start to get stressed out about either their outcome or their progress is like, what, what is the accountability model that they're using in their organization? Because sometimes you know there is this like I'm accountability is purely like I'm, I'm going to have to answer to some executive who might have a nasty tone, what that they're going to take when they're frustrated with things. Other times there's you know penalties like financial penalties. So, when you're trying to encourage people to learn and take accountability for their decisions like it inevitably is coupled with like what's the accountability model that you as a leader, are creating within your teams that encourages them to learn and make the best decisions, versus stay risk-averse and just accept dictated solutions because that's the path of least resistance. So, that's usually something I try to unpack early with teams and leaders so that we can sort of say, “Well if the worst-case scenario is, you're not going to make progress to this goal and there's literally zero accountability in your organization, then why not consider multiple ways that you can see that” and have that much more confidence when you do pick a path.
Teresa: I think part of that too is the leader has to support the decision that the team made. I often see leaders say, “Oh well, Johnny made that decision and I disagreed with it.” Throwing Johnny under the bus. That's their agenda because they feel accountable and they're trying to protect themselves. I don't think it's because they're bad people and they're literally trying to throw Johnny under the bus. It's just that we're falling but we feel threatened, right, because we're going to miss our numbers and we fall back to this really rudimentary behavior. Whereas I think, the thing that we have to develop the mindset of Johnny's decision is my decision. I might have made a different decision, but this is that whole disagree and commit mindset of my job is to support Johnny and to get Johnny to making better decisions. So, I'm going to support that decision and if we don't get there, then I'm going to make sure that Johnny has what he needs to make a better decision next time.
Hope: I think another ingredient that sometimes gets missed, is that when you've defined success as deliver the thing, if it's not delivered in the way I imagined at, then it's not right, as opposed to, again going back to how would we define success, how would we know when the decision that Johnny made was the right decision because we can see it, as evidenced in this behavior change that we expected this outcome that occurred or progress towards that outcome. I find that, if that isn't clearly understood and discussed by the team, it's really difficult to have productive conversations between the team and the leader. So, if you're not sure you're feeling uncomfortable and be looking at, well, how are we defining success for this, and if there, if that's not clear or we're not sure that the way we've defined it is going to get you the best results from the team or decision make from the team; maybe that's where we should focus our energy as leaders.
Teresa: The other thing I'll say is that sometimes when we shift to the outcome mindset, we think, “Oh, this team has to deliver this outcome and if they don't, they failed.” I think there's some challenges with that like I really hate it when a company ties compensation to outcome, especially when you're new to outcomes. I think it's always a bad idea. It's especially a bad idea when you're new to outcomes, because here's what happens; let's say you're a brand new startup and you have a sales team and you're on your first MVP of your product and you're not even sure you have the right product, and you send your sales team out to sell it. If they don't sell it, it's not necessarily their fault. You may have the wrong customer segment, you may have the wrong product, there's this sort of exploration that has to happen before we find product market fit. That's true with any product outcome at any stage of product. If you've never put any energy into trying to move that metric, it is going to take time to explore and figure out what will move the needle, and we can't punish a team for that exploration. In fact, we need to be encouraging that team. So, when a team misses an outcome. We shouldn't say oh you failed. We should say, “Okay, let's look at what are the types of things that you tried. And what have we learned?” and if they tried a diversity of things and some worked and some didn't, then we need to capitalize on those learnings and then the next quarter, we need to exploit the ones that worked and really drive that metric, whereas we forget that we can do that. Instead we say, “Oh, you just failed let's move on.” Now if they didn't try a diversity of things, now we have a performance problem, right, if you don't know how to reach your outcome you better be trying lots of different ways to get there. If you're not putting the work in, that's a separate issue. I think the key is to distinguish between just because you didn't hit your outcome, that's not necessarily why.
Hope: Yes totally, you are right; and especially when we're working in, a new space. This isn't like an optimization challenge it's something brand new. We're trying to create a new product in the market or grow after a new segment. Lots of exploration has to be factored into that time horizon for the outcome and how do we back that up to earlier indications that show us we're on the right track. So, what about other -not just the product leader, but other stakeholders who are new to discovery or believe that they've conducted sufficient discovery, how do you see them engaging with product teams in healthy ways and what do unhealthy ways look like?
Teresa: I think it's easy to talk about the extremes where stakeholders, throw ideas over the wall and we like to think of that as bad; we don't want our stakeholders to have ideas. We want them to bring us problems, that's not quite right, I'll come back to that in a second. We have the other side of the pendulum where our stakeholders, just give us outcomes. They don't have any ideas, and they're just going to give us full autonomy. I actually think both of those ends of the spectrum are not realistic. Stakeholders have ideas, stakeholders are in the positions they're in because they have a lot of domain expertise, they probably also talked to customers. So, I think the key is that it's fine for stakeholders to suggest ideas. It's that we need to help put those ideas into the broader context.
This is one of the things I like about the opportunity solution tree we can say, “Here's the outcome we're focused on” when you get when you get an idea from a stakeholder. “Here's the outcome that we're focused on is that still the most important thing. Okay, good. Here's how we mapped out the opportunity space, here's what we prioritize. Do you disagree with that decision?” If they say no, then say okay your idea is great but it doesn't address this current need. We're going to table it for later. So, we get away from having to constantly say no; and we're just focusing on, this is what we're focused on right now, this is what we believe our priority is it doesn't currently support our priority. Has anything changed about our priorities because we can shift focus if we need to, so that we're staying open to their input. The more that we do that, we're introducing our stakeholders that outcome language and the opportunity language and reminding them that ideas are cheap and that there's a million of them and that we're overwhelmed with them and that we got to put them into context. And what ends up happening with time is that we see stakeholders start to talk about opportunities and outcomes, which is great. But I would say if you're not getting ideas from your stakeholders, you also have a problem, because there's some of the people that are closest to our customers.
Hope: Yeah, I see a couple of things happen sometimes with, with teams that a leader can help with. One is when the stakeholders see lots of problems, things that aren't working exactly as they want or expect within the organization, but they don't have like a single outcome, let alone, a narrow set of outcomes that they're working towards but they see lots of, lots of opportunities, let's say. So, if they're not used to using that framework or there's teams that aren’t working actively on those problems it's hard to even know what, how do I even relate this opportunity to the team that can most help explore it, or at least help me understand or at least recognize that nobody's working on it right now because of these other things.
So, I see that happening right and again that's where the product leader really has to be a partner to the stakeholders to help them see this is sort of like across the opportunity space, across the outcomes that we're working towards. It fits or it doesn't write as opposed to this poor stakeholder having to jump from team to team does anybody going to pick up this fall. Then, and then the other is, you know, really involving stakeholders in the assumption generation part of discovery, like when we're it's great if they're contributing ideas. Awesome. When we're at that solution evaluation but also getting them involved in that assumption generation is, I think key because they then are actively engaging with the team about what, what, what needs to go right what could go wrong, what are the risks, how could we mitigate those risks, because many times those risks are not necessarily just within the way the solution actually functions it's usually about like the way it goes to market, or the way the organization is going to support it. So, having the stakeholder participation there is something that, again, the leader can help encourage but stakeholders, I don't know if you've seen examples of that work.
Teresa: Yeah, actually. So, in my master classes we have people that work in all different types of organizations, many of them their company looks nothing like the methods that we teach. What I tell them, if you're constantly getting bombarded with ideas from stakeholders, one of the best things you can do is have his story map their ideas with them. Because we've all had the experience of like we have a vague idea in our head we think it's the best thing ever. And then we start to map out how it might work and we realize, “Wow, this is just not going to work at all” What typically happens is the stakeholder brings the idea to the product team, the product team does that work on their own and they go back to the stakeholder with the conclusion this idea won't work; and the stakeholder disagrees, it's still a vague idea that's perfect in their head. Whereas if they story map together, and then start to surface assumptions together. Usually the product team doesn't have to be the person that says no. The stakeholder looks at the idea and says, “Oh, we can't support this from a go to market strategy. This isn't going to pass compliance or legal, or this is way too much work or actually I don't really like this idea anymore” and it goes away.
Sometimes, the opposite happens sometimes the product team thinks is not a very good idea, and after story mapping they realize wow there's a lot of power in this idea. So, a lot of this like whether it's the opportunity solution tree or assumption mapping or story mapping. A lot of this is how do you externalize your thinking so that people from all these different perspectives, your leadership, your stakeholders, your product teams your engineers can all align around, how are we tackling creating business value.
Hope: I'm glad you said that because it is the lack of externalized thinking that causes so much time wasted, so much frustration, so much interpersonal conflict in her sensations, and the more that the teams use these techniques, the easier it is to align. I think that's really for a product leader trying to really get the best out of their teams towards those outcomes as fast as possible. The more that you're using your techniques really justice like greasing the wheels for good decisions. T
This is great, thank you so much for spending time and doing the walk down memory lane with me. You have a great book out, where everybody can learn all the techniques but why don't you tell us a little bit more about how people can get in touch with you and about your new book, and the product talk courses and masterclasses.
Teresa: Yeah, so I do have a new book out, it's called Continuous Discovery Habits, it was written to be a guide for product trios. So, for your product managers or designers or engineers; to give them a structured and sustainable approach for how to do continuous discovery. The structured bit is how do I know what to do when the sustainable bit is just how do we do it 50 weeks of the year. How do we do this continuously, so we're always keeping a close connection to our customers.
Here's what I'll say for product leaders that are listening, I hear all the time, especially when I was part of the collaborative gain and I'm sure hope hears this as well, what's hard for product leaders is the product landscape has radically changed in the last 10 to 20 years. So, if the bulk of your professional working experience is in this older traditional model for Product Management. I understand how uncomfortable it can feel to manage teams that are working this way, when you never work that way yourself. What I would recommend, is that the book will give you a very clear picture of what your team should be doing. I think it'll help you start to think about, how do I support this way of working. So, even if you are not an individual contributor, I actually think the book will give you will help you kind of close the gap between how you may be worked as an individual contributor and how you now want your teams to work today.
Then, if your teams do need help with putting the book into practice or even as a leader if you want help in putting the book into practice. We have a few different programs. The first is just a monthly membership program. We have a Slack community where we just help each other out. Help each other out, put the habits into practice. We do community calls, twice a month, we do fireside chats with people who are working in this way, it's just meant to give you a community of support, while you're trying to adopt these practices. Then through the ProductTalk Academy we have a master class that goes through the whole process, so it's an introduction to the whole process. We work through a case study; every student gets hands-on experience with feedback on how to do some of these activities. And then we have a set of deep dive courses that address each individual skill. So right now, we have one on defining outcomes that hope teaches we have one on continuous interviewing and we have one on opportunity mapping, and later in the year we'll be releasing courses on identifying assumptions and testing assumptions. Then of course, I blog it ProductTalk.org and there's a ton of free content there as well.
Hope: Yeah, I always recommend that when people say well you know my teams, you know, they need, they need help. I'm like, first of all you could just go to Google.com, you can go to productalk.org There's a lot of content out there and now you've got the book like I think, like it is a great time to be in product because there's more support than there has ever been better tooling than that or ever been on the analytic side on the prototyping side on the testing side, and to have, you know, coaches and courses like the ones who provide I think really helped teams, learn, and maximize even if they're brand new to leading product or working in product so great, great time to be in a great industry. Thank you so much, Teresa, it's been a lot of fun chatting with you today.
Teresa: Thanks for having me. It's been a blast. I like the walk down memory lane.
Hope: It was excellent, thanks so much.
I want to say thank you to Teresa Torres for sharing her expertise in this episode.
If you’re a product leader seeking to nurture a product culture and leadership team that values continuous discovery, I’d love to be of help. Contact me on Linkedin or Twitter or schedule an initial consultation with me using the Contact Me page at fearless-product.com.