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

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career

Lenny Rachitsky

Technology, Business, Entrepreneurship

5 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 30 June 2022

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Teresa Torres is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and coach. She teaches a structured and sustainable system for continuous discovery that helps product teams infuse their daily product decisions with customer input. She’s coached hundreds of teams at companies of all sizes, from early-stage startups to global enterprises, in a variety of industries. She has taught over 11,000 product people discovery skills through the Product Talk Academy and hundreds through her coaching practice, and is the author of Continuous Discovery Habits.

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Thank you to our sponsors for making this episode possible:

• Persona: https://withpersona.com/lenny

• Dovetail: https://dovetailapp.com/lenny

• Stytch: https://stytch.com/

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In this episode, we cover:

[3:37] How Teresa is in the top 5 people in the world who’s helped the most PMs.

[5:25] What is the “opportunity solution tree framework”?

[8:19] What’s an example of an opportunity solution tree, for Netflix?

[14:17] Why do we usually approach opportunity finding wrong?

[18:10] What should you do if your company is a feature factory?

[21:00] What is continuous discovery, and why is it so important?

[23:13] What do you do if your leaders tell you there’s no time for user research?

[25:55] How can you automate weekly conversations with customers?

[29:04] How do you stay unbiased as a PM about a potential solution?

[31:23] Should a PM have more say over other functions?

[35:33] What are Teresa’s best tips for how to interview customers?

[39:57] What’s the most common mistake people make while interviewing customers?

[40:25] How does discovery change as your company grows?

[43:27] When should you do user research and when should you run an experiment?

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Where to find Teresa:

• Product Talk: https://www.producttalk.org/

• Opportunity solution tree: https://www.producttalk.org/opportunity-solution-tree/

• Continuous Discovery Habits: https://www.amazon.com/Continuous-Discovery-Habits-Discover-Products/dp/1736633309

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/teresatorres/

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/ttorres

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Theresa Torres is a speaker, teacher, a consultant, a product coach, and also the author of
0:07.5	Continuous Discovery Habits, which is the number one most recommended book in my newsletter slack community. I'm also pretty sure Theresa
0:14.2	is in the top five people in the world when it comes to the number of product
0:17.7	managers that she's worked with, caught, and impacted. In our chat we get
0:21.6	deep into two topics. the opportunity solution tree framework
0:24.9	which is a really simple but incredibly powerful framework once you know it.
0:28.5	And two, we go deep into how to create a system within your team where you're talking to customers regularly.
0:34.0	We talk about ways to make a case for spending more time talking to customers and doing user research.
0:39.0	The most common mistakes people make with interviewing and generally how to interview customers better, how to automate this
0:44.2	process so that you don't spend a bunch of time, and so many other ways to bring you and your organization
0:48.9	closer to your customers. Teresa is amazing and I can't wait for you to learn from her.
0:54.0	This episode is brought to you by persona.
0:58.0	persona helps founders, product managers, and engineers easily solve any identity related problem, including handling
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1:09.4	You can integrate persona in an afternoon and personalize your flows using their
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1:25.1	persona is trusted by both startups and the world's largest companies including Square,
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	...

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