Teresa Torres, product discovery coach and author of the book 'Continuous Discovery Habits,' talks to Maze about the principles of continuous discovery, tactics to implement it, and how to make better product decisions with customer feedback.
The Optimal Path is a podcast about product decision-making from the team at Maze. Each episode brings in a product expert and looks at the stories, ideas, and frameworks they use to achieve better product decision-making—and how you can do the same.
Liked what you heard in this episode? Read Teresa’s full article over on our blog, In The Loop.
You can follow Teresa on Twitter (@ttorres) or check out her website.
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Ash Oliver:
Welcome to the Optimal Path, a podcast about product decision making brought to you by Maze. I'm your host, Ash Oliver, UX Designer & Design Advocate. Great products are the result of great decisions, decisions that deliver value for customers and the organization. In this podcast, you'll hear from designers, product managers and researchers about the ideas informing decision making across all aspects of product development.
Ash Oliver:
Today, I'm joined by Teresa Torres. Teresa is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and coach. She teaches a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery that helps product teams infuse their daily product decisions with customer input. Teresa, I'm so excited to speak with you today.
Teresa Torres:
Thanks for having me.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah. So, I've read the book and it offers so many invaluable insights for product teams, and product teams specifically trying to adopt continuous product discovery. So, I wanted to jump right in and maybe have you get started with some definitions. So, can you define what product discovery is and what you refer to as the underlying structure of discovery?
Teresa Torres:
Discovery really is just a term to represent the work we're doing to make good decisions about what to build. Historically, businesses made discovery decisions by just sitting in a room and thinking, "What should we build?" And what we've seen over the last 20 years is an evolution towards including the customer a lot more in the process. And so, what's emerging out of those more modern practices is that we're shifting from an output focus to outcome focus, we're looking at what's the impact of what we're building and then we're looking at how do we create customer value by discovering needs, pain points and desires, and then discovering solutions that address those needs, pain points and desires.
Ash Oliver:
I remember being really struck by the description that you provide in the book around continuous discovery. I'm wondering, can you describe what that cadence looks like? What are the actual elements that are included under continuous discovery?
Teresa Torres:
I define continuous discovery as, at a minimum, weekly touch points with customers by the team building the product, where they're conducting small research activities in pursuit of a desired product outcome. And a lot of people ask, "Why do we care about this continuous cadence?" And what we're recognizing is that a digital product is just never done. If you look at the Netflixes and the Facebooks of the world, they didn't just put something out there and then stop developing. Netflix is a pretty amazing evolution if you look at their history. They started as a DVD-by-mail company. They evolved to a streaming company. They now make their own original content. And that's just the reality of digital products. We're never boxing something and then shipping it onto a store shelf. Instead, we can constantly be improving it. And so we want to be looking at how do we make sure we're getting constant feedback from our customers about whether or not we're building the right things?
Ash Oliver:
Even thinking back to a statistic that I had seen that about 70% of teams really believe in research, but only about 30% of teams are actually conducting any scale of research activities. I'd love to introduce the concept of the "product trio" because I think it might be helpful in approaching how to close the gap between doing virtually no research and actually getting to a more modern and mature practice. So, could you describe what the product trio is?
Teresa Torres:
A key part of the definition is that the research has to be done by the team building the product. That's what makes the research actionable, believable and timely, is that we want research to serve the decisions we're making right now. And so, a product trio is typically comprised of a product manager, a designer, and a software engineer. It's the same people that are building the product. It's not a separate discovery team.
Teresa Torres:
And I will share, when I first started talking about this weekly cadence about five years ago, people thought I was crazy. I literally used to get laughed at like, "That's great Teresa. Nobody has time to do that." But that's changing. I meet teams all the time that are now engaging with customers on a weekly basis. We have amazing tools that help facilitate this. And while there's still plenty of teams that are not doing any research, I think it's rare to find a team that isn't aware of these ideas and isn't starting to look at how do we move in this direction?
Ash Oliver:
Absolutely. I'm curious if there's anything top of mind that you can think of as far as what are the indicators from the best product trios that you've seen? What are some other characteristics that these product trios have that you've noticed?
Teresa Torres:
One of the keys is that most of us don't have a lot of experience truly collaborating. Sure, we work with our coworkers, but we do it in a very hierarchical, there's always a decision maker kind of model. Whereas, with the product trio, the key idea is that they're jointly responsible for decisions. And I think the way to make that work is twofold. One is they have to do their research together, so they're working from the same knowledge base. And then two, throughout the book, I share a number of ways for that team to externalize their thinking. So, visualizations is a really nice way to help a trio stay aligned, which then helps make that collaboration even easier.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah. And I think one of the things that really struck me was the externalization of the thinking, so that every one can evaluate the thinking. It seems really simple, but it's massive.
Teresa Torres:
Humans are pretty amazing spatial thinkers, and we don't really tap into this all the time. And a lot of people think, "Oh, I don't draw well. I can't do that." But it's not really tied to drawing skills. You literally could draw boxes and arrows and you're starting to tap into your visual thinking skills. And I think, in particular, when you're working in a group, everybody's working from a different source of knowledge and that's what makes it really hard to align. Whereas if you take the time to put on paper, "Here's what I'm drawing from, here's what you're drawing from, here's what this other person's drawing from," you can now start to realize you're pulling from different knowledge bases, and you can start to build a shared understanding. And then, you're also freeing up your working memory to not have to hold all the pieces in your head. And now you have more cognitive energy to actually process it and examine it.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah. And that really couldn't be more helpful, especially more of these complex problem solving areas.
Teresa Torres:
When you're interviewing weekly, you're taking in a lot of data. And so, when a team is just trying to hold it in their head and make decisions based on it, they're going to fall prey to a whole bunch of cognitive biases. They're going to respond to the most salient thing, the most recent thing. Those are not necessarily the most impactful things when we're looking at impact on your outcome.
Ash Oliver:
Yeah. And I think that gets us into the predicament of what you describe as the "ill-structured problem." The book talks about these wicked problems and how product teams, specifically product trios, can shift the mindset. So, as you mentioned earlier, this mindset going from less about the output and more focused on the actual outcome. I'm wondering if you could talk about the actual framing of the problem in order to help solve it from this perspective.
Teresa Torres:
The ill-structured problem is a little bit of academic jargon, but it's really just looking at the complexity of the problems that we're working on. So, if you go to a product team and you say, "Build this feature," the work that they need to do is more complicated than complex. We can define a feature, maybe some of the delivery work is complex, but a lot of the big, open-ended decision-making has already been made. Whereas, when we start with the outcome, there's an infinite number of ways we could reach that outcome. And so, in that type of problem, what's key is we have to start, first, think about how are we going to frame it? How are we going to structure the problem space? And we talked about discovering customer needs, pain points, and desires. That's a really nice way to frame "how might we reach an outcome," because it's going to guarantee that we're both customer-centric while also creating business value.
Ash Oliver:
So, for instance, maybe the team is more impact-led, but there are still maybe some gray areas and it's maybe difficult to shift entirely away for that delivery mindset to more of that outcome mindset. How do teams tactically go about shifting this perspective?
Teresa Torres:
One area where we've gotten a lot better, and our tools have certainly gotten a lot better, is with instrumentation of our product. So, we're now able to measure what was the impact of what we released. Just because we have those analytics in place doesn't necessarily mean we're taking the time to evaluate the success of a given release. First of all, if you haven't instrumented your product, you need to do that. But then I think the second step is building up this discipline of building in a reflective loop on each of your releases. Before you release, what impact did you expect to have documenting that? And then, at an appropriate time after you release, to actually evaluate that and to examine the gap.
Ash Oliver:
So, that brings us to Opportunity Solution Trees, or OSTs. And I think that's a pretty good segue, when you're thinking about the combination of externalizing your thinking, but also really documenting and aligning around what the expectations are. I'm wondering if you could maybe provide some further context to OSTs. What are they and, specifically, what do they resolve for teams and the business?
Teresa Torres:
So, an Opportunity Solution Tree is just a visual that I created. That helps a team map the best path to their desired outcome, and it follows the structure of discovery. So, it starts with the outcome at the top of the tree. And then from the outcome, you're going to branch out the customer opportunities that you're hearing. So, opportunity is just a customer need, a pain point or desire. As you interview, you're discovering opportunities. Most opportunity spaces are pretty complex. So, taking the time to really map out and understand the opportunity space is a really critical activity. It's going to give you both the big picture of how you might reach that outcome. So, you can make a more strategic decision. Also, as you work your way down the tree structure, you're breaking really hard opportunities into more solvable, incremental iterations, which really unlocks that agile mindset. And then once you choose a target opportunity, that's when you can then branch down into the different solutions that you're exploring.
Ash Oliver:
So, when you're thinking about stakeholders and their involvement in this part of the process, or within Opportunity Solution Trees, what does that look like from the stakeholders point of view?
Teresa Torres:
So, I'll start with within the team. It really does keep the team aligned on, "What are we trying to learn? Where are we right now?" So, if you've ever had the experience where you run an experiment, you get a surprising result, and somebody on the team wants to throw the whole idea away, and you're like, "Hold on, you're throwing the baby out with the bath water." It's because we don't have a shared context of how do we put this experiment into context of what were we testing, what were we trying to learn?
Teresa Torres:
So, it helps with that. So that, when you learn something that surprises you, you have a lever of here's how we're going to iterate. We don't have to throw the whole solution away. We don't have to throw the whole opportunity away. We just need to iterate in this specific way. It also helps with what have we tried in the past? Where are we now? What should we be doing next? So I think within the team, it does a lot with alignment.
Teresa Torres:
And then, externally, with stakeholders, it's a way to really quickly communicate the large volume of messiness that you're learning in your week over week interviews and your assumption tests. So, it's a visual that allows you to quickly synthesize, "Here's what's going on in discovery." So, by the time you get to a conclusion of, "Hey, we should build this thing." Your stakeholders went on that journey with you.
Teresa Torres:
I'll say there's another benefit too, which is right now a lot of product teams do work to further their product work. And then they do a separate set of work to manage stakeholders. Whereas in the book, I try to align those activities. So, whether you're creating experience maps or opportunity solution trees or story maps, or any of the other visuals in the book, it's the work you're doing to synthesize what you're learning in discovery, and those exact same visuals can be used to help manage stakeholders. So, you're not doing all this extra work anymore to keep stakeholders up to date on what you're doing.
Ash Oliver:
I wonder if you could go one layer deeper on that, because as you mentioned in the book, it's not just lobbing it over the fence, even to stakeholders or other teams. But really being able to have that information absorbed in a meaningful way. So, what is it like to strike that balance between providing some level of synthesis and making it more actionable and palatable for that person's point of view versus inundating with information?
Teresa Torres:
I think there's a little bit of a push and a pull with stakeholders. From their perspective, you want to make it easy for them to pull whatever information they want. And so, there's this concept of working out loud. How do you make your work visible as you're doing it? And so, a lot of these visuals in the book that you're going to do to synthesize what you're learning are a way of working out loud. So, if I'm a team, I want to make sure that all of those documents are available to all of my stakeholders whenever they want to pull them.
Teresa Torres:
So, I could do that in a lot of different ways. Like maybe I have a Slack channel that's public across my company, where I'm publishing interview snapshots, where I'm posting links to my OST as I'm building it, where I'm posting links to my experience map.
Teresa Torres:
And I'm just making that visible for whoever wants to pull it. That's not enough though, because everybody else has their own jobs and they're busy and they're not going to just follow every move you make. So, then you got to also think about what's the right context where you're going to then push to those people, and it's going to be different for different stakeholders. And I think the key is, in that push, to not create new documents, but to actually use that exact same repository. So, if I'm in a meeting with somebody, I'm going to pull up that Slack channel so that they can start to see this information is always available to you, so you're reinforcing both.
Ash Oliver:
So, you talk about experience maps and snapshots. Can you describe what those two things are and how you use them in practice?
Teresa Torres:
There's three visuals that work in concert with each other. It starts with the experience map. So, one of the first activities I recommend a team do is just take some time to individually, so, if we have a trio, all three of them are individually drawing what they currently believe is the experience of their customer. And the key here is about the opportunity space. So, it's not just how are they using your product? So, if we use Netflix, as an example, it's not just their opening Netflix, browsing, picking a show. But the broader context of what role does streaming entertainment play in their lives? How are they deciding what to watch? Who are they watching with? So each individual is going to draw what they think is happening today. And if you've never done any research in the past, that might be a wild guess, right?
Teresa Torres:
And then the team needs to take the time to then share their individual maps. This is how we're going to surface individual knowledge on the team. And then they're going to co-create a shared map that's a synthesis of all their individual perspectives. For some people, this makes them uncomfortable, because they just feel like, "I'm guessing. I don't know." But what this does is it exposes what you think you know, and more importantly, exposes where you have gaps in what you know. And it's going to guide your interviews. So, think about it as your pencil sketch, like your backbone. You're going to now go collect a story and test whether that experience map is really true.
Teresa Torres:
And so, then, for every interview that you do, you're going to create a one page interview snapshot, and that's just going to capture what are the opportunities you heard in that interview? What are the notes or insights you heard? You're also going to create an experience map that's specific to that interview. And then once you've collected three or four interviews, you can start to look across those experience maps and use them to evolve your generic experience map. So, you're always iterating on your understanding of what's the common experience across your customers.
Teresa Torres:
And then the third document that goes with those two is the Opportunity Solution Tree. So, you're taking all the opportunities you heard in your individual interviews and you're pulling the ones that you think have the potential to drive your outcome. And then you're structuring that opportunity space.
Ash Oliver:
Let's talk about some of the things that teams can do to avoid the anti patterns of continuous interviewing. So, thinking about the product trio, what are some of the patterns or traps that teams can avoid?
Teresa Torres:
The biggest mistake I see with interviewing is people just ask the wrong questions or they're talking to the wrong person for what they're trying to learn. Let's say that you're working on a target opportunity and you're talking to somebody who hasn't experienced that target opportunity. You can't really learn anything from them. We hear people say this all the time. They'll say something like, "Oh, well I don't need that, but I could imagine other people do." And then they start speculating on what they think other people do. We got to just throw that out. So, that's the first thing is to make sure you're talking to somebody who's experiencing the need you're trying to address.
Teresa Torres:
Then it's about asking the right questions. And so, we're not academic researchers, but we do need to know the basics of how the human brain works and how to avoid asking unreliable questions. And the easiest way I know to teach this is just to keep your interview grounded in specific stories in the past. So, if we stick with the Netflix example, I don't want to ask you, what do you like to watch? Because cognitive biases are going to interfere. I'm going to hear about, most likely, your most optimistic answer. So, maybe you'll tell me all about the documentaries you watched, but you're going to leave out the reality TV that you watch.
Teresa Torres:
Or you're going to tell me you watch an order of magnitude factor less than you actually do. And it's not because you're trying to be deceptive. It's just that all humans, we tend to think we have better habits and behaviors than we do. And so we don't want to build our products based on people's ideal selves. We want to build them based on their actual selves. So, we can get around this by just grounding our participant in an actual instance. So, I can just say, "Tell me about the last time you watched Netflix," and get a specific story.
Ash Oliver:
And what happens if you're in a circumstance where the interview that you're in, within the first few moments, you're starting to be able to tell that this is not going to be a very fruitful interview, based on the target opportunity that you're researching? What would you do in that scenario?
Teresa Torres:
So, the first thing is you can use screeners to help prevent that situation. Even so, someone might have misunderstood the screener. So, the key is don't explore that opportunity. Focus on the needs that that customer does have. I always encourage people in an interview to start with the broad experience map story. So, with Netflix, that might be, "Tell me about your last experience on Netflix."
Teresa Torres:
Maybe my target opportunity is around how you're deciding what to watch, and so if I ask the broad story, I can listen for, "How did you decide what to watch?" The odds are, I might get a story where you're on episode 12 of a series, and you did make a decision on what to watch 12 episodes ago. So, in that instance, I might ask about, "Do you remember how you decided to watch this show?" And as long as you can remember, I can ask for that story. But I got to use my best judgment. Like do you really remember, or are you digging and you can't remember a lot of the details? So, in my screener, I want to recruit people who maybe recently started watching a new show. So that that decision making process is a lot more recent.
Ash Oliver:
What do you hear about engineers being involved in this process? Especially in proposing continuous discovery being on a minimum of that weekly basis. Do you ever have instances where teams are finding a challenge enabling their engineers to dedicate that time towards this type of endeavor?
Teresa Torres:
A lot of companies still work on an IT model where they think of their engineers as a cost center. They want their engineers writing code. What's counterintuitive about this is, if we have our engineers involved in discovery, we actually get better solutions and they actually build those solutions faster. The key is that we have to recognize this is a giant culture change for organizations. So, we got to start small.
Teresa Torres:
I talk a lot about how we have to onboard our engineers to discovery, just like we onboard our customers to our product. You're not going to just, tomorrow, start doing continuous discovery. So, you have to take a continuous improvement mindset to your own team's practices and start to look at how can I get my engineers involved more? Most engineers care a lot about who they're building for and they have opinions about what they should build. We've just trained them to keep those opinions to themselves because we're not going to listen to them.
Teresa Torres:
And so, part of the work of onboarding engineers to discovery is helping them see we're going to make decisions about what to build based on what we learn from our customers. Your opinion matters, but it needs to be informed by what we're learning from our customers. So, if you want us to hear your opinion about what to build, you need to come be part of our discovery activities.
Ash Oliver:
So what a great way to be able to bring them into that part of the process. There's a big challenge that the book uncovers in regards to identifying and testing assumptions. I'm wondering if you can expound on that. How would you identify and test assumptions rather than ideas?
Teresa Torres:
This is really the heart of shifting from a project mindset to a continuous mindset. So, typically, when we start with a solution, most teams work with one idea at a time. The way they test an idea is the designer does all the design work up front, maybe builds a working interactive prototype. We schedule a dozen prototype test sessions. We do it over weeks. And at the end, we say it's good. Or even worse, we just build the solution, and then we AB test it and hope we built the right thing. Both of those methods are validation research, and we should do that, but there's plenty of discovery research we should be doing long before we get to those steps.
Teresa Torres:
We don't want to do all the design work before we know it's the right solution. We definitely don't want to do all the delivery work before we know it's the right solution. So, this is not a new idea. Eric Reese wrote about testing assumptions back in 2011 in "The Lean Startup." The key to really understanding will a solution work is to understand what are the assumptions it's based upon. And we make desirability assumptions. Why do we think customers will want this? We make viability assumptions. Why do we think it will be good for the business? We make feasibility assumptions. Is it technically possible? We make usability assumptions. Can we make it easy enough and findable enough and accessible enough? And we make ethical assumptions about the data that we're collecting and about the people that we're including and who we're choosing to serve.
Teresa Torres:
And so, if we take the time to surface those underlying assumptions, assumption tests are a lot faster than idea tests. So, it often takes weeks to test a whole idea. We can test assumptions in a few hours to a day or two. And so, if we can run assumption tests that quickly, we can now work with a set of ideas, which allows us to set up what I call a compare and contrast decision. It helps us see the pros and cons of each of our ideas. It's going to help overcome a lot of the cognitive biases we see show up in decision-making.
Teresa Torres:
And so, this to me is a really critical piece of good discovery. It's really shifting from this idea mindset to this assumption mindset. The other benefit we get from this is that if you test an idea and it fails, we're just back at the drawing board. Whereas if we test assumptions, it's like we're collecting building blocks that work and don't work. And then that's helping us generate the next round of solutions that are going to be even better. Because we're taking into account what we learned.
Ash Oliver:
So, in addition to the book, you've also coached thousands of teams on how to be able to do this. I'm wondering what are the small, practical, implementable ways that teams can start to stand this up in their own practice?
Teresa Torres:
The first thing I'll say is just start small. So, I'll go all the way back to my days at HighWire Press, I was a 22 year old, straight out of college. I had barely had any idea how business worked. I had a really early experience that showed me the problem with not having access to the end user. Everything went through my boss, who then talked to the client, who then talked to an editor, who then talked to an end user.
Teresa Torres:
And so, I just started chipping away at that. I just started to ask my boss, "Can I sit in on the meetings with the client?" And then eventually I got access to the editor. And then eventually I started building in feedback loops directly into the product, which helps me get access to end users. It did not happen overnight. So, I think the key is to be patient, to start small.
Teresa Torres:
If you're at a company where you have sales teams and you're not allowed to talk to customers, go make friends with a salesperson. Don't wait for someone to give you permission. Don't wait for there to be a full blown program to be in place. Just go find a friend. If you work at a B2C company, you probably have somebody in your personal network who either is a customer or is like a customer. So, I think the key is just find any way to get some exposure to who your customer is.
Teresa Torres:
And I'll share my very first job. My customers, my end users, were researchers. I didn't have access to them, but I had avenues to get closer to them through the company that I worked at. And that's the key, is look at the avenues that you have available to you, and just make small step after you make small step.
Ash Oliver:
Such sound advice. I'm wondering if there's anything that you foresee happening in the future, when we actually do accomplish getting steps closer to our users.
Teresa Torres:
The first thing is you're going to feel a little bit overwhelmed. So, when you first start interviewing, you're going to be inundated with so many customer problems. That's just the reality in every space. So, I think the key is to remember the opportunity space is infinite. You cannot address every single opportunity that you hear. And this is where visualizing the opportunity space is really critical.
Teresa Torres:
Because the step that a lot of teams miss is what's the most important opportunity to focus on right now, and that decision's going to be different at different moments in time. So, the first step is just find a way to get close to your customers. Once you do that, make sure that you start visualizing the opportunity space. Otherwise, you're just going to get caught, like firefighting, jumping from problem to problem to problem. And it's not going to be very different from what you're doing today.
Ash Oliver:
To finish up our session, I wanted to ask you the hat trick questions, three questions that we ask of every interview guest. So, the first question I have for you is what is one thing that you've done in your career that has helped you succeed that you think very few other people do?
Teresa Torres:
I read a lot. So, I read probably one to two books a week, and I'm also really deliberate about how I put what I read into practice. So, I know a lot of people read for volume. They're trying to read 200 books a year, but they forget most of it. And I know other people that are on the other end of the spectrum, they read four books a year. I know audiobooks are making books a lot more accessible to people. I mean a book is the most cost effective way to learn from another human. And I really have been very deliberate about what I read and then how I take action from what I read, and it's had a huge impact.
Ash Oliver:
Okay. So, the next question is what is the industry related book that you've either given or recommended the most?
Teresa Torres:
Yeah, definitely "Decisive." Chip and Dan Heath are an interesting pair. So, one of them is an academic and then the other is an industry. And so, they write evidence based books that are really accessible and engaging for a business audience.
Ash Oliver:
Last question, what is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love?
Teresa Torres:
I don't know if it's absurd, but currently I go outside and play almost every day, which is pretty amazing. So, I live in Bend, Oregon, which is a mountain resort town in central Oregon, which means I'm 10 to 15 minutes away from world class mountain biking trails and 25 minutes from a ski resort. And even closer to back country skiing. And so, I try to get outside as many days of the week as possible.
Ash Oliver:
That's awesome. Thank you so much.
Teresa Torres:
Yeah. Excellent. Thanks for having me.
Ash Oliver:
The Optimal Path is hosted by myself, Ash Oliver, and brought to you by Maze, a rapid user testing platform designed for product teams. If you enjoyed this episode, you can find resources linked in the show notes. If you want to hear more, you can subscribe to The Optimal Path by visiting maze.co/podcast. Thanks for listening, and until next time.