Getting2Alpha
Getting2Alpha
Teresa Torres on product discovery & re-imagining organizational change
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Intro: [00:00:00] From Silicon Valley, the heart of startup land, it's Getting2Alpha, the show about creating innovative, compelling experiences that people love. And now, here's your host, game designer, entrepreneur, and startup coach, Amy Jo Kim.
Amy: Teresa Torres is a rising star in product management, and the author of the popular Product Talk blog.
She's got a unique perspective on product discovery shaped by her background in cognitive science, UX design, startup management, and organizational change. I first met Teresa years ago at Stanford, where she took my online community design course. She was brilliant and passionate back then, and she's evolved into a force of nature, sharing deep and hard one product wisdom with her clients.
Someone who's focused on the long game of product management.
Teresa: I don't tend to pay too close attention to like, what are the hot technology trends? What I [00:01:00] do follow and what I love following is sort of the trends and how we work. So again, the lean startup I think is one of the best trends we've seen in the last 20 years and how we build products.
I love that it's spreading like wildfire. I love the community Eric has built around that. What I don't like is when those trends become dogma. I get emails all the time from people like, why don't you ever write about the jobs to be done framework? Or why don't you ever use the term MVP? I try really hard to write about product management and product discovery specifically in a way that is, uh, methodology agnostic because it's what I've seen is in some companies.
The jobs to be done framework resonates really well, and it works. And in other companies, they just can't wrap their head around it. Even if it's the best framework ever, it's not going to work in that context. So I do like to follow those trends because usually when they become trendy, there's a sign that something there is working.
But I try to balance that without becoming too dogmatic about one or the other.
Amy: Listen in and learn how one talented product manager is [00:02:00] forging a new path and shaking up the change management game.
Welcome Teresa to the Getting2Alpha podcast.
Teresa: Thanks. I'm excited to be here.
Amy: I'm thrilled that you're here. It's a very full circle moment for me. For those who don't know you, give us a whirlwind tour of your background. How did you get started in design and tech and how did you decide what to pursue along the way?
Teresa: Yeah, that's a great question. You know, it really dates back to my undergraduate days. Actually, I entered college as a chemistry major, but that only lasted about three weeks and I ended up pivoting and focusing on a cognitive science program. Um, and it was, it was really serendipitous. I didn't know what cognitive science was, uh, and I just fell in love with every aspect of it.
It introduced me to human computer interaction at a really early stage in my career, and that's something that. I think being human centered is. [00:03:00] Still grossly undervalued and, and critically important to building good products. So I'm really fortunate to have been introduced to that really early on. And I also, because it was a cognitive science program, I also got an opportunity to explore education and learning.
And I was really interested in, um, developing educational software at that time. I never actually went down that path, but that education and learning background, I use quite a bit today because I work as a coach teaching product teams. And so I started my kind of full time employee experience as an interaction designer and as a front end developer, um, and I worked at a couple early stage startups just doing whatever was needed.
I think in my second company, I moved into product management formally about halfway through that role, but it wasn't really a conscious choice. I don't think I knew what product management was at the time. Basically what happened was. I was always really curious and I just wanted to contribute wherever I saw gaps and a lot of the things that product managers [00:04:00] do, I thought were what you do when you're human centered.
So I just started doing them, looking for what are opportunities that we can solve. So I found myself in product management and what I liked about that was it allowed me to really see the business from a lot of different angles and not just from the user perspective, but how are we, how are our products viable, not just usable.
And again, all of that just became really critical throughout my entire career. It's what led, I was a startup CEO at one point. I've been a product executive at another company and you know, the last few years I made this shift into, I would now work as a product discovery coach. And a lot of what led to that was me just realizing that what I loved doing was investing in people and teaching.
And I think at my core, I'm a teacher and a coach and. You know, if there's anywhere in business that needs some investment in, I would say it's product [00:05:00] management and how we build good products.
Amy: Awesome. So you work with cross functional teams in your current role and you basically change the way that they work, right?
Teresa: Yeah. I think that's the simplest way to put it.
Amy: How did you evolve your approach to doing this? Which is what really big corporations called change management, but you're doing it in this very agile and flexible way. How did you evolve your approach? How did your previous experiences prepare you for that?
Teresa: Yeah. So one thing that I left out when I was kind of talking about my career path is In 2011, I decided to go back to school, uh, while working full time and I got a master's in learning and organizational change. And really what drove that is I had been a startup CEO during the economic downturn. I took over that company, basically at a point of crisis, we were, Uh, running out of money.
We had a high burn rate. We had spent all of our venture capital. We had been [00:06:00] a fast growth, hot, trendy company, but our customers were companies looking to hire and universities that we built an online community platform for universities to engage their alumni. Well, during the 2008 economic downturn, what we saw was companies stopped hiring, so they didn't want our recruiting products and universities either saw their endowment shrink or their state budgets get cut.
And while all universities say they want to engage their alumni during a tough market, it quickly becomes a nice to have and not a must have. So we saw our revenue drop 30 percent in a three month time period. And we basically realized we needed to change what we were doing and quickly. What was fascinating to me was even in a small startup where all of our employees had made a decision to work at this risky company.
Even when our market conditions were so extreme that if we didn't change, we were going to go out of business. People still resisted the change. Um, they didn't want to give up on what we were [00:07:00] doing. They, the new unknown was terrifying. And I found as a leader, one of the hardest things was how do I bring my team along with me through this change?
You know, my product background and my design background didn't really equip me for that. And so I decided to go back to school and learn more about learning and organizational change. And it's had a really big impact on. Uh, sort of how I've gotten to where I am in my coaching business, because I've, like you said, there's this whole field around change management, but actually if you just think of that term, there's sort of a problem with it.
We have this belief that we can manage change, but the reality is we all change on our own terms on our own time. So my program actually uses the term organizational change because it kind of acknowledges that we can't always manage change. And if we look at the statistics of most change management projects.
The vast majority of them fail. It's a lot like the vast majority of products fail. Like we're just not very good at it. So I don't take this big top down [00:08:00] organizational change, like change management approach. Instead, I like to start with a small team and to look at this team behaves one way today, and our goal is for them to behave a different way by the time we're done working together.
And rather than me imposing my way of working on them, I co create with them. My goal is to work with them to understand their organizational context and what's going to work in their environment to get them behaving the way that they want to be behaving.
Amy: How does that relate to product discovery?
Teresa: You know, the work that I do with teams is product discovery. So the irony is that I teach teams how to do product discovery and I do it by doing product discovery. That's a little bit meta, but we can break it down. So for a product team, they're trying to discover what are the opportunities.
They have some desired outcome. We want to increase engagement. Um, and they're trying to discover what are the opportunities in the space. To increase engagement. So they might go out and they might interview [00:09:00] customers. They might observe customers using their app. They might do some traffic analysis and they're looking for where are their opportunities.
And then they're basically making a decision about which opportunities are most compelling and they're generating solutions and testing solutions to see if they deliver on those opportunities. You know, as a coach, when I work with a team, I'm doing the exact same thing. What I'm trying to discover is where are there opportunities to change the way this team works?
And sometime, you know, I have some ideas in the back of my head based on what our desired outcome is, which is continuous discovery. Um, so I'm looking for where are there opportunities to get more access to customers? Where is there more opportunities to make it continuous and not project like, where is there, where are there opportunities to add a little more structure to the way they think about discovery?
Where are there more opportunities to experiment? And then I'm co creating with my team. So we're constantly prototyping ways for them to work. Now, this idea of a [00:10:00] prototype when we're not talking about a product can be really confusing. But, you know, it's anything from we'll try, can you talk, can you interview one person a week?
And for some teams, That's easy to do for other teams. Just trying to do that uncovers all these organizational barriers. Maybe the sales team doesn't want, I'm talking to customers. Maybe they've never done an interview before and we have to work on interviewing skills. There's all sorts of things that come up that I could never anticipate ahead of time, which is why I really view it as a co creation activity.
Amy: Got it. That's really interesting. So when you're working with teams and you're working across, you know, different landscapes, different size companies, what is one of the most common mistakes that you see people make in the earliest stages of testing their idea? They've got an idea. They're setting out to test it.
What mistakes do you see people make that you help them learn to overcome?
Teresa: I think the biggest one, and this is especially true with [00:11:00] earlier stage startups or founder led startups, but I see it just as frequently at large companies, is we fall in love with our ideas, right? And so the challenge with that, we think the value is in the idea.
And the challenge with that is if we learn through discovery that the idea is not going to work, it's really hard for us to see the truth. And we look for reasons why the data might be wrong. So we spin our wheels a little bit, whereas instead of falling in love with our ideas, really what we want to do is we want to fall in love with an opportunity or more even better.
We want to fall in love with an audience that we want to serve. So rather than falling in love with this idea of a Facebook newsfeed, if we're working at Facebook, maybe instead we want to fall in love with this idea of how are we going to connect people around the world? There's an opportunity to connect people around the world, or maybe even better than that would be, let's get to the people behind it.
Why is it important that [00:12:00] people connect with each other? And why is that? Let's fall in love with that, with that opportunity and with that desire to outcome rather than the specific idea, because we're going to learn along the way that our idea is not perfect. We want to have the freedom to evolve and adapt our idea.
While still serving the customer that we really, that's motivating us day to day.
Amy: That's awesome. Let's talk about your writing. Now you write a well known blog called product talk. What was the thing that prompted you to start sharing your knowledge in this form and applying what you just talked about to your writing?
How do you decide what to focus on, what to include and what to leave out?
Teresa: You know, to be honest, when I started product talk, I wasn't thinking about an audience at all. I started product talk to figure out what I thought about product management. It had nothing to do with readers. That's obviously changed over the years, and I can talk about that a little bit.
But basically what happened was I started my [00:13:00] graduate program in the spring of 2011, and I started product talk in the fall of 2011. And what happened in those intermediate months was I took two to three quarters of classes where I was required every week. To write a blog in my graduate community about what I was learning and what I found was that writing was such a powerful reflective practice.
That I wanted to bring it to my profession. So I wanted to, it just started as a way of, I wanted to become a better product manager. I wanted to hone my own skills and I saw the power of doing that through writing. So, you know, to be honest, some of my early posts are terrible and I was just fumbling my way towards my own thoughts about product management.
And then maybe a year or two in, I can't even tell you if anybody read my blog in the first year or two. I didn't really care. It wasn't until maybe a year or two in, the people started to email me. I started to get some feedback that my writing was helpful to them. And I was really fortunate. Like, it just felt good to know that [00:14:00] something that was providing a tremendous amount of value to myself was also valuable to other people.
Of course, it was a good ego hit. And so then I started to get a little bit addicted to that and I started researching, what do people want to know? And how do I answer what they want to know? And I took more of this market lens, but in some ways it was a distraction because I started writing for. People who wanted to be product managers for a little while.
I went down the side path and it's because those are the people who ask the most questions. Like if you look at Cora, we look in LinkedIn groups. The most common question is how do I become a product manager? So I wrote a whole bunch of content about that. And I even started coaching people who want to be product managers, but I realized that's not what I'm passionate about.
Like, you know, bless everybody who wants to be a product manager. I hope you find your path. But that's not where my passion is. My passion is working with people who are product managers, who really want to be an A plus product manager. And so, and I really want to serve product leaders [00:15:00] who are serious about developing their teams and supporting them in their roles.
And I think the reason why I identified with that so strongly is. I spent most of my full time employee experience either being the only product manager at an early stage startup, where I was 100 percent responsible for my own professional growth, or I was managing a team and I had to think about how am I going to invest and develop my team?
And so, because those were challenges that I could relate to, it was really easy for me to fall in love with those customers and now that them as an audience. And so about. Maybe two to three years ago, I made another choice and I decided that I really wanted to write for senior product managers and for heads of product.
And my writing significantly changed. I really focused on how do we go deep on product management? So. I do have an article about how to write good user stories. That's from my early days. I would never write that article today because your senior product manager, that's not the question they're asking.[00:16:00]
There's no head of product that's thinking my team needs to write better user stories, right? They're asking bigger questions. Are we going to meet our goals? Are we going to build a product that anybody wants? And this is really where I feel like there's not a lot of great writing. That's changing. We're now seeing some really good thinkers pushing the envelope there.
We have a long way to go, I think is the short of it.
Amy: So I love that you're focused and articulate about what you're passionate about because to me, that's where your superpower is. How would you describe your superpower? You're now working with teams. You've been doing this for a few years. You're getting traction and changing how they work.
What's your superpower that lets you do this? What are the kind of things that light you up?
Teresa: You know, I got some feedback from a team that I coached that I think encapsulates it perfectly. One of the teams that I work with told me that I push my teams really aggressively, but I do it in a really non judgmental [00:17:00] way.
I loved that feedback because I do want to push teams aggressively. If we're going to change, we need to make big, bold steps. But if we're going to push someone to take a big, bold step, we have to understand when they can't take that step. And if it's too big, then we got to slow down and say, okay, how do we make this feasible?
And I really think that combination really, um, encouraging people to do more than they ever thought they could do. But understanding when they don't meet that bar and really helping them find the intermediate steps that do allow them to meet that bar is my superpower. In some ways, I think it's what makes me a teacher and a coach by nature.
And I think it's also how I live my own life, right? Like, I, Always I'm going after big ideas and I'm honestly always falling short. And I think if I got stuck on judging myself for falling short, I'd be pretty miserable. But by setting that big goal and falling short, I know I got a lot further than I [00:18:00] would have if I just took a tiny step.
Amy: That's awesome. So who's on your radar, whose work are you paying attention to and being influenced by these days?
Teresa: Yeah, that's a big list in the world of product discovery. I would first and foremost, I've said this on a number of interviews. I don't think I can give enough accolades to Marty Kagan, SVPG, Silicon Valley product group.
His writing, his exposure, his sort of notoriety has done so much for. Continuing the conversation about what is product discovery, really moving this idea of how we build a product, all the work we do to deliver and scale a product. Is not the only part of product management. There's this whole other half of are we making good decisions about what to build?
And I think if marty kagan's sort of been working at that tirelessly for the last more than a decade Maybe two decades and you know He's sort of the who's who in the world of product management right now And I love watching his [00:19:00] work and then I think jeff patton in the world of product discovery is right there with him Jeff is a road warrior.
He works with so many companies when you meet him in person It's so clear how passionate and genuine he is You He doesn't blog and I really wish he would because he, every time I talk to him, he's full of so many insights. Um, but he wrote a really good book called user story mapping and he has a few other publications here and there.
If anybody ever gets an opportunity to see him speak, I would highly recommend it. And then I think the Lean Startup Space has brought us a whole bunch of other great thought leaders. I mean, Eric Ries. I think the book, The Lean Startup helped us take a giant step forward in the world of building products.
A lot of it is misinterpreted, but for people that really read the original book and take the time to, to think about the, the thoughts in it, it's, there's nothing better. And then Tristan Cromer is a blogger who blogs about Lean Startup principles. I love everything he writes. And then, you know, I, like you, I take a cross functional approach, so I pull from anywhere I can get.
I love, there's a lot of great [00:20:00] UX thinkers, um, I love Cindy Alvarez's blog, uh, I've known Laura Klein forever and I love her writing. It's great that she's funny, so she's also really entertaining. And then, you know, actually I have a handful of people that are more, that I would say are more kind of old school, traditional product managers, but what I love about them is that they have a really good.
Appreciation for the challenges of big companies. So like I put rich Mirinoff in that category. You know, we don't, we talk a lot and we don't always agree because we have very different approaches to product management. But anytime I run into an organization that has a really messy organizational challenge, he's the first person I call because that's his superpower.
And there's probably 20 other people I can mention, but you know, we only have a little bit of time.
Amy: So it sounds like he's a fixer.
Teresa: Yeah. And I think he, um, He just likes the mess. You know, I get frustrated by the mess. I really like to work with a team because I can handle a handful of people. Right. And I feel like we're co creating and it's [00:21:00] fun.
And then when we hit roadblocks, I'm just managing a few people to work through them. The bigger organizational challenges, you know, when stakeholders aren't aligned or, you know, They're talking about team, read it, org designs. How do you organize your product team? I can't get excited about that. It just seems messy and awful to me, but that's a richest sweet spot and someone has to do it.
Those, those challenges matter. I'm not trying to trivialize them. They matter a lot. And if your team structure isn't good, you're going to run into all kinds of challenges. Uh, so it's good knowing somebody who not only is really good at those challenges, likes doing it.
Amy: What product trends or tech trends are you following?
You know, what's got your attention?
Teresa: Yeah, I love this question. In some ways I'm kind of anti trends starting in like maybe 2001, we kept saying it was going to be the year of mobile and it took until long after the iPhone for that really to happen. I think we're seeing the same thing with virtual reality and even augmented reality.
I think we think maybe even self driving cars, I think we think it's going to [00:22:00] happen faster than it is. Although maybe self driving cars are an exception, although now I think the human policy side of that is going to slow it down. I don't tend to pay too close attention to like, what are the hot technology trends?
What I do follow and what I love following is sort of the trends and how we work. So again, the lean startup I think is one of the best trends we've seen in the last 20 years and how we build products. I love that it's spreading like wildfire. I love the community Eric has built around that. What I don't like is when those trends become dogma.
I get emails all the time from people like, why don't you ever write about the jobs to be done framework? Or why don't you ever use the term MVP? I try really hard to write about product management and product discovery specifically in a way that is a methodology agnostic because it's what I've seen is in some companies.
The jobs to be done framework resonates really well and it works and in other companies, they just can't wrap their head around it. Even if it's the best framework ever, it's not going to work in [00:23:00] that context. So I do like to follow those trends because usually when they become trendy, there's a sign that something there is working, but I try to balance that without becoming too dogmatic about one or the other.
I think the like real trend that I love is that we are sharing a lot more about how we work. And we're sharing a lot more about what we're learning and we're all getting better because of it.
Amy: Right on. I love that. So tell us a little bit about the book you're writing.
Teresa: Yeah. You know, for a long time I thought I should write a book.
Most consultants write books at some point, but I'm not very good at shoulds. I need to have a really strong why. Behind what I'm doing. Otherwise, I just am not motivated. So I haven't written, I haven't written a book, but four or five months ago, I started noticing working with my teams, but they all had the same challenge.
So I would work with them on product discovery skills. So I'd teach them how to interview. I teach them how to synthesize what they're learning from interviews. I teach them how [00:24:00] to run good experiments. I always got really good feedback, and I could see in the work that they're doing that they're learning the skills.
But the big gap that I saw was that they didn't know what to do when. They didn't know, okay, we've run an, how do we know when we've run enough experiments? Or how do we know when we've considered enough ideas? Or how do we know how to make trade offs between one opportunity or another opportunity? And it just, or the sort of the other problem I saw was They do all this great research, but then they'd come up with ideas that weren't connected to the research.
It's like there was this structure that was missing that helped us think about product discovery that guided our work. So I started to just noodle on that problem and I started to play with different structures and I started to test them with my teams. And about three months ago, I landed on a structure that's working extremely well.
I use it in every single coaching session. Um, I call it an opportunity solution tree. It's not rocket science. It's a really simple [00:25:00] visual that helps teams connect the dots between what's the desired outcome they're trying to drive. What are the opportunities they're learning about through their generative research that drives that desired outcome?
And then how do their solutions, their various feature ideas, their various service ideas, how do those connect to those opportunities? And then for each of your solutions, what experiments do you need to run to build support for that solution? And what this visual does is all on one canvas. It helps you.
It's really a critical thinking tool that helps you see your thinking. It helps you connect the dots between your solutions and your opportunities. It helps you evaluate, are you working broadly enough that you're going to drive your desired outcome? It helps you evaluate, have we tested all the risky assumptions behind the idea and it's ready to go?
It helps you with, are you considering enough ideas or are you falling in love with your idea and you're fixating on one solution? That's a lot [00:26:00] and it's a lot for one really simple diagram to do. So when I saw that happening, I freaked out because I thought, wow, this needs to be in the world. And then I thought, wow, I need to write a book about this.
So that's what I'm doing. And I'm blogging about it along the way. I can't write fast enough. It's just pouring out of me. I'm really excited about it.
Amy: So that's it, producttalk.org.
Teresa: That's right.
Amy: Awesome. Well, I've read your blog post. I loved it. I think it's got great wisdom for a lot of people. And thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your journey.
And what you went through and where you're at now. I think what you're doing is innovative and really transforming the way that some teams are working, which is a very noble cause. Save time, faster, smarter product work.
Teresa: Yeah. Thank you. This has been a lot of fun.
Amy: Awesome. Talk to you soon.
Outro: Thanks for listening to Getting2Alpha with Amy Jo [00:27:00] Kim, the shows that help you innovate faster and smarter.
Be sure to check out our website, getting2alpha.com. That's getting2alpha.com for more great resources and podcast episodes.