YouSaid · the spoken record

Teresa Torres

lines on the record: 52
first: 2022-06-30
most recent: 2022-06-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Are teams that have worked this way. And if you've never been exposed to that, go look for it. There's lots of evidence of it on the internet.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Since the book has come out, the reaction has been unbelievably amazing and a lot of fun. And I'm a little bit overwhelmed by people in industry who have never been exposed to this way of working having a lot of skepticism that it's possible. So here's how listeners can be helpful. I didn't make up this way of working, right? This way of working evolved from teams figuring this out. Like I see it as I'm looking at how do I collect sustainable practices, making it as easy as possible for other teams to work this way. So I think the way listeners can help me is if you've never been exposed to this and you have healthy skepticism, that's awesome. And just ask yourself, imagine if this worked. Imagine if this was possible as I get really tired having to explain to people there really are teams that work this way. I'm sorry that you've never been exposed to it, but they're real.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so first I'll mention the book Continuous Discovery Habits. It's available at bookstores around the world. It's in EPUB, paperback, and Audible. And then I do blog about all of this at productalkalk.org. And our courses are at learn.productalk.org.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“End of the week they can start to compare and contrast those solutions. So we've got to shift our methods, right? Like continuous discovery is sustainable if we change our behavior, if we change our habits.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has a strong foundation. They're taking too long, they cost too much money, they're taking too much time. So how do I break this down? The first thing is we have to learn how to take an idea and break it into its underlying assumptions. We have to learn how to prioritize those assumptions. And then we have to learn how to run tests that are small enough that they're just testing that assumption. And this is all critical because it's what makes continuous discovery sustainable, right? I tell people to work with three ideas at once and teams are struggling to test even a single idea. So how is that sustainable? Well, that team that's struggling to test a single idea is still stuck in project-based research world. They're running experiments that take weeks to get results. Whereas when I talk about assumption testing, I'm working with a team that's running half a dozen to a dozen assumption tests in one week. And those assumptions span three ideas.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Language around this is terrible, like, it's so ambiguous. What's an experiment? What's user research? I would say experiments. Are user research? I'm trying to just dramatically simplify this. I think from a discovery standpoint, we have two core activities. Qualitative interviewing and assumption testing. And so if qualitative interviewing, we're trying to learn about the opportunity space. Where do we see unmet needs, pain points, and desires? Interviewing is not the only way to identify opportunities. Observations are actually a better way. I focus on interviewing because it's something we can do sustainably week over week. Most teams don't have the ability to observe their customers every week. On the assumption testing side, for me, anything that helps us evaluate a solution where we're starting with a very specific assumption is an assumption test. So we have experiments that I actually don't even think we should be running because they're testing the whole idea before we have any idea if that idea”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Changing behavior, not seeking new knowledge, and we have really good feedback loops. And so we can make decisions based on small experiments because we're going to continue to get bigger feedback loops and more reliable data over time. And especially as we deliver and we do live production prototyping, we actually can get large scale data. I don't want to start there because we're never going to ship anything. So there is legitimately a valid reason why we can work on small data. It's sort of unfair question because we're not holding anybody else in business to that standard.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love this. I don't know why product teams suddenly are held to a standard that nobody else is held to. Like when somebody says something like, why is it reliable to make a decision based on one interview? I just flipped the question around. Tell me about the decisions you made last week. How many customers did you talk to? What data did you use? Like every human in business is making decisions with zero data. So I'm going to go with one is better than zero. Like that's a little bit of a flippant answer, but it's true, right? Here's what's happening when that question comes up. I have an opinion that's different than yours. I don't like your conclusion. So I'm going to nitpick it, right? And in the product world, unfortunately, everybody in business has an opinion about what we should be building. And so that's why we face that and we get held to the standard. I have a real reason why we can make decisions based on small data. We're in the business.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Adjacent to you that you need to share your discovery work and be aware of what they're working on because you do need to build a coherent product. And so as our companies get bigger, we have a lot of that like lateral collaboration we have to do to make sure we're still building a coherent product. But I think the fundamental base unit stays the same.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know, in an ideal world, it doesn't change. Because here's why. Like if I have a trio and they have an outcome and they're empowered to reach that outcome and they're interviewing every week and their assumption testing to evaluate solutions and they're finding things to build and they're driving their outcome, that's a really successful team. And they could do that in a three-person company or they could do that in a hundred thousand person company. The primary difference is in a three-person company there's no adjacent teams, right? In a hundred thousand person company, there's a lot of adjacent teams. And so you probably have some dependencies to manage. But you still should start with an outcome, be empowered to go after it, be empowered to come up with your own solutions. What's going to be different in the 100,000 person company is you probably have like design patterns and libraries you got to rely on for a coherent user experience. And you probably have another team that's working.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People are in the business of changing behavior, understanding and changing behavior. And I think that's a really big mistake that teams make is they both in their prototype tests and in their interviews. They focus on what people would do, on what people think, on why they think they do something. And it's all really unreliable. It's a garbage in, garbage out kind of situation. The real measure is tell me about your behavior. What did you actually do? Then we have to help people do that.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talking about what I did. I love that you just said that because people worry, how many times have you heard somebody say you ask the sales reprisal to your customer? And they're like, I don't want to ask them a favor. Okay, it turns out if you collect stories in your interviews, customers love it. Most of the time, in fact, the sign that you ran a good interview is your customer is going to say, wow, when can we do this again”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To explore there, but what I see most teams do is they stay really shallow. Oh, okay, so you watched Obi-Wan on Prime? Great. Me another story, right? And we just lost all the value. And so some of it is just slowing down and almost being like a five-year-old, right? Like you really instead of saying, why? Why? Why? You can say, what happened next? What happened next? Now, there's this technique of like summarize what you heard, show that you're listening to them. Bring them back to the moment where you want a little more detail. But yeah, it's a game changer. What happens when you collect stories is you hear about things you would have never thought to ask about.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so I literally could continue this entire interview by just saying, oh, you opened Netflix, what happened next? Oh, you didn't find anything. How come? Right? Like all I have to do is just be curious about your experience. And what I'm doing with my questions is just helping you tell the timeline. Right? Like set the scene. I'm situating you back in that moment. Like let's remember what you actually did. It was after dinner. You're sitting on the couch. What happened next? Right. I can do that over and over again. And so one of the reasons why we get bad at interviewing, we're so worried about asking the next question. We stop listening to the interviewee. We just missed everything we were told. We missed those moments of like, oh, there is some friction. You couldn't find something to watch. Tell me about that. What did you consider on Netflix? Like, let's dig into that. And if I work on a team that's trying to help you find something to watch, that's a gold mine, right? Like you just told me you're on Netflix, you went on Prime. Like, what were you looking at and what didn't resonate? And is it because you'd watched everything? Is it because it just, did it match your profile, right? Like there's so much.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do we do that? Like, what's the skill? How do we elicit that story? And I teach in our interviewing class, you really don't have to think about what to ask. Like you could run an entire interview by asking them one question. In fact, let's role play this a little bit. Lenny, tell me about the last time you watched something on a streaming entertainment service.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the first one is the questions they're asking. So many people write these like who, what, why, how, fifty question long, like interview protocols. And it leads to a cadence of the interview that is not a natural conversation. So I think the first thing to remember is that you're just talking to a human. I actually tell people like, if your interview feels like you're having a beer with a buddy, that's a good sign. Like it should be that casual and that conversational. But we're not going to get there if I pepper you with 50 questions, right? We're going to get there by I'm going to collect your story. I'm going to be really curious. I might still have to pepper you with 50 questions to get your story, right? Because there's sort of this conversational norm of I say something, you say something. So I got to teach you that I want your whole story and help you open up. So that's one piece of it is just the cadence of the conversation really should feel like a natural conversation. And then the second piece of it.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't mean that to say there's something wrong with you or your teammates, right? Like, this is a symptom of business culture. It's how we've been taught to work. So we have to unlearn that. We have to learn new ways of working. And we do this in our courses. We force people to work in teams and our courses. And some people really hate it. But I think learning to work well in a team, especially when there's different perspectives and you disagree on how do you reconcile that, is a really important part of product work.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On a well functioning team that's doing discovery well together, you're working from a shared understanding. So your disagreements right away are going to go way down because you're working from a shared understanding. And when you disagree, you recognize, okay, we don't agree. We don't have the best option yet. And you keep looking for that better option. And what's hard about talking about this is I fully understand probably 98% of the industry has never worked on a well-functioning product trio and this idea sounds crazy. But I've also seen it in practice over and over again on really good teams. And there's something magical about it. So I'm going to keep promoting it. I'm going to hope that eventually we get from 2% to 3%. And that'll be my little dip I put in the universe.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kindergarteners just start doing. They don't worry about their rules, they don't worry about who's in charge, they just brute force trial and error. What do MBA students do? There's posturing, like who has the power and who's the decision maker, and who's right, and we need a plan, and we need to have a strategy, and they spend the whole time negotiating this political social space instead of just doing. And I really think we got to learn how to get back to just doing. And so people think that I'm like Pollyanna naive about this, but I've worked on teams that work this way and I've coached teams that work this way where the trio really does decide. So the trio is the product manager, the designer, and the software engineer. And if you've never worked on a well-functioning trio, this breaks people's brains because they say, well, what are we going to do when we disagree? You're going to find an option where you don't disagree, right? And the thing is, if you only worked on a siloed dysfunctional team, that sounds like a nightmare. But if you've worked”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To get the marshmallow as high as possible. And a study's been done so many times, it's been replicated a million times with lots of different groups, and it's a really cool story because kindergarteners outperform almost every adult group, including like MBA students. And it's really telling. And why is this?”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is a tough question. I mean, there's such strong opinions about this. I mean, I see analogies of like the product manager is the decider and they're the CEO of the product. I think this is coming from toxic business culture personally. Business has taught us we all play a role, we have our functional silos, I have territory, you of territory, and we're going to play the internal office politics game, and I need to defend my territory, and you need to defend your territory. And the outcome is that we don't really collaborate. And when we don't collaborate, I don't think we build very good products. So if we just go back to real life and when you're hanging out with friends and you're trying to accomplish something, the example I give is like when you're a little kid and you're playing, you know, like first stop and say, what's my role? What's your role? I guess it's just not how humans interact, right? We all collaborate and we all do it intuitively. And business has taught us otherwise. I'm going to forget the researcher, but there's a really cool, the marshmallow test experiment. Are you familiar with this? Where teams are given spaghetti sticks and some tape and some string and a marshmallow and they're told to build a structure.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We need options, and we need to evaluate the pros and cons of each. And the same is true in the product world. So if you're feeling like this needs to be a really good solution and we're having some challenges, we're overcommitting to one, that's when you need to increase your options.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Product and actually measuring the impact of those solutions, you may not be catching that there actually was a lot of risk. So I think you do need to instrument your product. You do need to measure the impact of everything that you release so you can start honing your judgment on where is their risk and ideas. And when you're new to Discovery, I recommend you over index on doing a little too much discovery so that you start honing your judgment of that risk. But if you're working on an opportunity that's really core to your product functionality, it is a differentiator. It's where you want to make sure you have a really robust, good solution. I think the best way to guard against what you think is the obvious solution is to work with multiple solutions for the same opportunity. Compare and contrast, right? We already know this intuitively. Like when you're looking for a place to live, you don't look at one apartment or house. You look at multiple, you compare and contrast. When you're looking for a job, you don't talk to one company. We know if we want to make good decisions.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, first of all, you don't always have to do that, right? Not all solutions need a lot of discovery. That's like a common misunderstanding, I think. I think we need to do really robust good discovery on the things that are part of our core product experience or going to be differentiators. We don't really have to do really amazing core discovery on like the forgot password flow if it's working fine and you're not hearing about it as a pain point, right? Now to be fair, Slack with their magic link did kind of a cool thing with the forgot password flow and that was a nice innovative thing that I think moved the industry forward. So like if you want to do discovery on that, great, but you probably don't have to, right? So I think the first thing to assess is we're making a bet how much risk is involved in this bet and how much of that risk do we need to mitigate, most companies think there's no risk in any bets and they do zero discovery. And if you're not instrumenting your”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's so many, right? So even on the scheduling side, I think Cali innovated in that space, but there's so many fast followers. I think Outlook does this now. I think Google has a tool that does this now. I think even Salesforce has a tool that does this now. So if you're doing your schedule, if your sales team is scheduling through Salesforce. And then on the like intercept side, like how are you asking those? We have survey tools and Kualaroo, I think, innovated in this space. And then I think Ethnio was a fast follower. But Intercom does this, usabila does this, Chameleon does this. Hot jar might even do this. We have so many user research tools that they're all now enabling this type of thing.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do is I just have teams define a trigger every week, like, hey, this week we're looking to talk to somebody who's experiencing this neater pain point. If you happen to be on the phone with someone who's experiencing that, again, just go ahead and use scheduling software, put it on our calendar. The goal is for the product team to not be involved at all. They literally just have to show up and conduct the interview.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everybody's seen an NPS survey embedded in a product, right? That's pretty prevalent now. Same idea, but instead of saying, would you recommend our product or service to a friend or colleague, it says you have 20 minutes to talk to us, right? If they say yes, you send them some scheduling software, they pick a time on your calendar, and voila, you've got an interview scheduled. You obviously can get more advanced where do you show it? Who do you show it to? How much do you tailor it? How do you position it? But the core idea is to let people opt in while you already have their attention. That works really well for consumers and B2B end users. If you're trying to get in touch with buyers and decision makers, same idea, but use your internal teams that are already on the phone with those folks. So that's salespeople, account managers, maybe support folks, right? They're literally on the phone with those people all day, every day. So instead of using your product to recruit, you can use those teams to recruit.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so my book, Continuous Discovery Habits. I do share some of the most common ways to automate the recruiting process. So this idea came from, I had just read Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein when it came out a few years ago. And they have this idea of like when you're designing a choice architecture, how do you make it easier to adopt the behavior you want to see than to not adopt the behavior? So I started thinking about this in the context of interviewing. Like I want to see product teams interview every week. So how do I make it easier for them to do that than to not do that? Okay, well, a lot of us have recurring meetings that we go to every week because they're on our calendar. So I just started to think about how do I make an interview a recurring meeting. Like, can I make it so that when you wake up on Monday morning, there's an interview on your calendar and you literally did nothing to get it there. And so there's a few ways to think about this. The most common strategy is to allow your customers to opt in while they're using your product or service. So just like almost”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where all of your bets have been risky because you're doing zero discovery, the best way to kill any appetite for discovery is to say, let's stop making bets until we discover. No, don't do that. Keep making bets. In parallel, start doing some discovery so that eventually those bets get better. And I think the reason why people make this mistake is they think about it as phases. First, I discover and then I deliver. No, you're always delivering and you're always discovering. And the more you build this discovery habit, the better those bets are going to get with time. So it's not that you do one first and then the other. It's you're always doing both and the benefit of always doing both is with time you make better bets.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't know where one starts and one ends, which is a little bit hard to conceptually work through, but maybe we can talk through an example. So when somebody says, I don't have time for discovery, I think what they're really saying is I don't have time for project-based research, and I agree with that. We don't have time for project-based research. So if I'm getting that pushback, I want to look for, okay, I definitely don't like people make this mistake of we shouldn't put something in our backlog that hasn't been properly discovered. It's not true. Right? Like everything in our backlog is a bet. Everything, whether we do discovery or not, everything is a bet. Discovery is helping us make a better bet. Now, sometimes in our organizations, we need to do a lot of discovery and make as good of a bet as we can. But there's other times we can make a risky bet. Like there's times in business where it makes sense to make a risky bet. And if you work somewhere”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the tough one. I think this comes from old project based research methods. So we don't most of the time have time to stop what we're doing and go do some research. And I'm not poo-pooing research. I mean, I've worked as a user researcher. Like, research is critical. And if we had the luxury of doing long, longitudinal studies, we would probably build better products. That's not our business environment, right? Our businesses are expecting us to deliver continuous value. So we need to look at how do we match that cadence. What I think is really nice about continuous discovery, you can do it in as little as an interview a week on the interviewing side, on the discovering opportunities side. Assumption testing, people always ask me, like, how much time should I be spending on an assumption testing? I don't know how to answer that question because for me, assumption testing and delivery are the same work, right? Like assumption testing is the start of your delivery.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we're seeing a shift from like this project mindset that worked in a world where we were just trying to get products on a store shelf, right? Like we designed them, we built them, we manufactured them, we put them on the store shelf, we were done, we moved on to the next thing. But with digital products, there's no done. So we're seeing this shift to more of a continuous mindset. We're continuously evolving our products, which means we're continuously making decisions about what to build. And therefore, I think we need to continuously include the customer in that process. So for me, I define continuous discovery as building in those continuous feedback loops.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, let's just start at the beginning. So, we often talk about discovery in contrast with delivery. Discovery is just used to describe the work we're doing to decide what to build, right? So everybody, every company is doing discovery. Everybody is making decisions about what to build. We have a few trends that have been evolving very slowly over the last 20 years, one of which is we're recognizing that if we want to make good decisions about what to build, we probably should include the customer somewhere in that process, right? So I teach a customer-centric view of discovery. Let's build in some feedback loops of are we making the right decisions or are we making good decisions? Because there probably aren't right decisions here. So then there's a second trend that we're seeing across the board, which is we're recognizing that digital products are never done. It's not like the Netflix team is going to show up to work one day and be like, hey, our product's good enough. We're always iterating. We're always improving customer needs are always evolving. There's always more we could do.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Solutions, you'll make better decisions, right? Because you have a fuller context of what your business needs, you have a fuller context of what your customer needs. So I think for most of us, like if you're in an individual contributor role, just focus on developing the habits yourself. And I'm always amazed, like I was always amazed at how much I could do by just kind of ignoring everybody around me and how they were working and finding a way to do it.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just go find somebody that's like your user. But I've also seen instances in B2B environments where I worked at that team that worked on badges for healthcare, like the badges that nurses and doctors use to unlock a workstation that they chart in. And this team for weeks ran into problems finding a customer to talk to. And I just said, hey, do any of you know doctors or nurses in your personal network? And the product manager was like, yeah, I have two uncles that are doctors. Huh? Maybe we could just start there. Like, go talk to somebody, right? And I think that even if you aren't being tasked with an outcome, if you do the work to understand, these are the outcomes that matter to your business, for your product. It's probably going to start with your business model and then work to understand how the work that you're doing contributes to that. All those little teeny tiny decisions we make every day, even if you're being prescribed.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, okay, let's talk about this based on the rule. Like, if you're an individual contributor and you're not at a 10 person company, I would say don't try to force the organizational change. Organizational change is such a hard and messy problem. I feel like what I would do in that situation is I would just change the way that I individually worked. And this is what I always did in every job. I mean, I made a lot of mistakes trying to change the organization, but I also just carved out away from me to work this way. And I think we underestimate how much ability we have to do that. So like even if you're being prescribed a fixed roadmap, you still can find customers to talk to. And I hear from people all the time that say, I'm not allowed to talk to customers. I go, okay, well, your company doesn't own you when you're not at work. And I bet you know people like your customers. Why don't you just start there? Right. So like we overthink it. We think we have to go through these proper channels and we have to get permission from sales. And a lot of us, especially if we work on a consumer product,”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's hard. And I tell my teams when I teach it in class, I say, look, we're going to focus on structuring of opportunity space. I'm probably going to make you think harder than you've ever had to think in your job. Because like we don't think that much at work. We go from meeting to meeting, we stay surface level a lot. And here I am coming in with this like really hard critical thinking exercise. But I've just seen from teams that are willing to put in that work. It really is a game changer. You have a deeper understanding of what your customers need and you build better products.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, if anybody has had an Apple TV, especially the old remote, it's like not a very precision device. Selecting those letters on the stupid on-screen keyboard is a horrible pain point, right? It comes up when we're entering our passwords. It comes up when we're searching for movie titles. That's a really specific opportunity. And the value of that is we can solve it. Whereas teams tend to want to frame opportunities as like, I wish this was easier to use. Okay, well, what? Like we could spend our lives making this product easier to use. What are you solving for who? And so we're skill stacking. And then, right, we got to interview well. We got to be able to hear opportunities. We got to be able to frame them well. And then in order to structure the opportunity space, we have to be able to come pull out this common experience map structure across seemingly unique stories. So there's a lot of skill involved. I wish I could just say, hey, Lenny, it's super easy. Everybody should do it. I think it's really powerful and I've seen it be a game changer for teams.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, we're so used to like everything being mediocre. We're not even aware of a lot of these needs that we have. But when we tell our stories, especially if you start to train your ear for this, you start to hear those needs. So the first thing that makes this hard is you have to interview well. And I think interviewing is a grossly underestimated skill. Grossly underestimated skill. So that's the first thing is that if you're not collecting rich stories in your interviews, it's going to be really hard to identify opportunities. Then the second thing is that you have to be able to hear those opportunities. And if you're still stuck with like, what's an opportunity versus what's a solution? It's kind of tough, right? And then the third thing is this opportunity framing. Like I believe opportunity should be really specific. Like a really great opportunity in the streaming spaces. It's hard to enter my password. We select specific letters on the screen with the Apple TV remote.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can't visualize your experience. Like, I don't know what your experience is watching action movies. I just collected a fact about you. But if I ask you, like, tell me about the last time you watched a movie, now I can collect things like, where were you and who were you with and set the scene for me and what happened first and how did you choose that? I'm going to get answers to all those direct questions, but it's grounded in a specific.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the reason why this is so hard is that, I mean, it sounds really simple, right? But here's why it's hard. Opportunities emerge from our customers' stories. I don't think most people when they're interviewing, they collect stories. So if Lenny, I was going to interview you about your Netflix experience, the vast majority of product teams are saying things like, hey, Lenny, what do you like to watch on Netflix? How do you decide what to watch? We're asking these direct questions out of context. And the challenge with that is we know from like human psychology and cognitive psychology that we're not very good at answering those questions out of context. Actually, that sounds weird. We're very good at answering them. Your brain will come up with a fast answer, but that answer doesn't necessarily reflect your behavior and it misses context and nuance. Like you can tell me like I just like action movies. I always look for action movies.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then we can learn about how people evaluate shows. And maybe there's a small opportunity in there of like, who's the cast? It's one of the ways I evaluate a show. Now we're getting into an opportunity that we can actually solve, right? So that's one of the other benefits as we work our way down the tree. We get to smaller and smaller opportunities. We get to things that we can actually address. We're still contributing to that bigger, harder problem. And so what it's allowing us to do is get this big picture view of like where we could play and then we can make more strategic decisions about where do we actually want to play. And then it's very customer focused because it's really all about, you know, what you're needing this moment. How can I help satisfy that?”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a really good question. So at the top level, I tend to map those opportunities to steps in that experience map. So in that Netflix example, it'd be like the trigger of I want to watch something, deciding what to watch, the viewing experience. And I do find that is it like Miller's magic number, the like plus or minus seven rule is pretty good, I would say nine is probably a lot. So I would say maybe in that like three to seven range. And that's just because you could cognitively like process your tree. So like the other thing that I didn't get into is like as you move vertically down the tree, your opportunities are getting smaller and smaller. This is like a really key to helping us unlock a continuous cadence. So like if I start with that example of I can't decide when to watch, it's a really big hard evergreen problem. Like as long as Netflix is in business, they're probably going to have people focused on that problem. But we can deconstruct it. Like maybe I can't find something to watch because I don't know if this shows it.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Point, or hey, I was watching a show. How do I get back to it? It's also a pain point. But then there's also these big media opportunities like I can't tell if this show is good or not. And so like everything that I just said, there was no solutions in there. In fact, whether I work at Netflix or I work at Hulu, our opportunity spaces probably look pretty similar. Now, the ones we choose to go after and how we solve them might look really different. But like the core human needs of what's your experience as we go about our lives entertaining ourselves is pretty similar. And I think the companies that build really good products, they either intuitively or explicitly take the time to really understand what does that journey look like and what are those needs and pain points and how do we create a really seamless experience.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Platform am I watching it on? Those are sometimes intermixed because maybe you're deciding I want to watch Game of Thrones and that's right away sending you to HBO Max. Or maybe you're like, well, I want to watch a movie and I could be on any platform, right? And then there's sort of the evaluation process of like, is this movie good or not? Does it look like something I want to watch? And then I want to get into, okay, I'm ready to watch. Is it a good viewing experience? And then for a lot of these platforms, there's also this sort of post viewing experience of like, am I going to encourage you to keep watching things like that? So that's how I would structure that opportunity space. It's just there's these distinct moments in time. And then what I'm capturing is below each of those, what are the needs and pain points and desires that arise. So if we just focus on that one around like, how do I decide what to watch? There's all sorts of needs that come up. Some are really tactical, like I have a movie title in mind and I just don't know how to find it. Right? That's a pain.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I like to use streaming entertainment as my examples because literally everybody in the world is familiar with Netflix. And if I think about their opportunity space, I recommend Teams structure the opportunity space using an experience map. Like if you take your outcome. So if we start with Netflix, if you think about the experience of you're trying to get me to engage with Netflix more, I want to understand what's the experience of somebody using streaming entertainment to entertain themselves. Maybe even broader than Netflix. Like if you watch YouTube TV, that's probably still relevant for me to learn about and understand. And so the way that I'm going to structure my opportunity space is I'm going to look at what's the overall experience of trying to entertain your self-estreaming entertainment. And that might look like, well, first there's this trigger of I need to decide to watch something. And then there's this experience of like, how am I deciding what to watch? And usually wrapped up in that is what”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, and to really get into what's needed before we jump to solutions. But it's like the opposite of how our brains are wired. And so teaching people to be comfortable with that discomfort of like staying there is hard. And I think, I mean, I see blog posts written about how they're using the Opportunity Solution Tree and I cry a little bit because their opportunity space is all solutions. And I don't want to knock down somebody's blog post. But I also don't want this bad example out there in the world when I'm trying to teach how do we do this well. So I haven't found the right line there yet other than I'm going to blog about good examples.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's a really structured okay. Just churn out some work kind of problem. And so we're asking teams to fundamentally do a really different type of job. And I think teams needed some scaffolding for how do you make that shift. And so that was the purpose of the Opportunity Solution Tree is how do I add some structure to this wide open, messy problem? Now the reason why it looks simple, but it's really hard in practice, is like, well, what's an opportunity? And how do I structure the opportunity space? And I can tell you that opportunity is an unmet need pain point or desire. And that's great. But I can tell you that 98% of people that write opportunities write them as solutions. So we tend to just really struggle with this distinction between the problem space and the solution space. And I think that the heart of good product is really getting comfortable in the problem space of the opportunity space, really taking the time to frame a problem.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, really good question. So, first of all, it's just a really simple visual, it's kind of funny how simple it looks because using it in practice is really complex. And then I definitely have a new appreciation for that, trying to teach it over and over again and sort of seeing where people struggle. So it's a tree visual, so it's just like a decision tree. It starts with an outcome at the root of the tree, and then it branches into the opportunity space, and then it branches into solutions and maybe even assumption tests from there. And the purpose of it is I recognized that while as an industry some companies are moving from this output focus to outcome focus, most product teams don't really know how to manage this really complex problem of how to start from an outcome and figure out what to build. I get a really unstructured, wide open, hard problem. And a lot of teams, they learn how to do their jobs building products by being told build these.”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, my site is product.org, and then there's a few things like my blog at producttalk.org slash blog. We put out two articles a month. And then we have a whole bunch of courses related to discovery at learn.productalk.org.org.org.org”
2022-06-30 · Lenny's Podcast · Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source