Start with curiosity and talk to a customer - continuous discovery with Teresa Torres

Kent introduces Teresa Torres as a product discovery coach, emphasizing her focus on helping teams make better build decisions to avoid building the wrong product. Teresa explains her role as a coach dedicated to ensuring engineers and teams understand the importance of involvement in discovery to create useful products. She highlights her goal of preventing products that show no response from customers, underlining her passion for making useful things for users.

Teresa discusses how involvement of engineers in product discovery is not a recent change but a longstanding necessity. She shares a story about a Google Maps API feature—pinning locations—that an engineer suggested after seeing a new API, which a product manager wouldn't have devised alone. She emphasizes how engineers’ understanding of 'what is just now possible' brings innovation and aligns with their expertise. The conversation shifts to how AI accelerates this dynamic, enabling rapid experimentation, but reaffirms the importance of engineering judgment in scaling, security, and design.

The conversation moves to how engineers should be part of designing data models that underpin new features to avoid misalignment between engineering and product teams. Teresa advocates for collaboration between product managers and engineers, especially for defining 'eVals' in AI products—how to measure correctness—arguing that defining business rules and validation should be a joint effort. She underscores that understanding customer needs and business context is a shared responsibility that enhances the quality of the product.

Teresa predicts roles of product managers and engineers will blur further as AI makes it easier for solo developers to build complex products. She emphasizes that as products grow in complexity, human capacity becomes the limiting factor, and specialization will still be needed. The discussion explores how AI tools democratize product creation but also highlight the importance of cross-functional collaboration and deep expertise in specific domains.

Teresa stresses the importance of integrating customer feedback into daily workflows, advocating for weekly contact with users to avoid confirmation bias and escalation bias. She advocates starting with hypotheses and assumptions, which should be tested through reliable, iterative experiments. She highlights the importance of externalizing team understanding via tools like opportunity solution trees, which align teams around the actual customer problem rather than jumping to solutions prematurely.

Teresa cautions against directly pitching solutions during customer interviews, as it leads to polite but unreliable feedback. She recommends focusing on learning about customers’ experiences and problems without revealing your solution—building trust through genuine curiosity. She discusses the importance of talking to the right target customers, emphasizing that feedback from non-target users is irrelevant, and suggests starting with casual conversations or observing ongoing interviews conducted by product teams.

Teresa introduces the opportunity solution tree as a visual aid to keep teams aligned on the primary customer outcome and the specific needs they aim to address. She explains how mapping out unmet needs helps prioritize which problems to solve before jumping to solutions. The conversation touches on how this reduces solution scattering and fosters strategic decision-making, helping teams focus on solving the most valuable and well-understood customer problems.

The discussion explores how building solutions can lead to a 'problem tree'—new problems emerging from initial features—that can grow so complex that it alters the original scope. Teresa advocates for stepping back to reconsider broader problem framing if the scope becomes unwieldy. She warns against being overly committed to a particular solution or problem, and emphasizes that visual mapping can reveal different directions to take, potentially leading to more effective, holistic solutions.

Teresa discusses cognitive biases like confirmation bias and escalation of commitment that hinder good decision-making. She promotes comparing and contrasting multiple problems and solutions as a method to counteract these biases. By externalizing assumptions and focusing on unmet needs, teams can iteratively test and learn, gradually converging on the most effective product approach.

In closing, Teresa urges engineers to recalibrate their role from mere ticket-takers to active participants in discovery. She stresses that engineering opinions do matter, especially when informed by customer insights, but warns against conflating technical expertise with personal preferences. Her main advice: cultivate genuine curiosity, ask open-ended questions, and avoid defensiveness. She encourages taking proactive steps like talking with actual or potential customers, or observing existing customer interviews, to build a better understanding of user needs.