More to marketing. Welcome to more to marketing. The podcast explores marketing, product and everything in between. I’m your host, Susan, and today we’re going to be talking about what is continuous discovery and how can this benefit product owners and other key stakeholders. Get ready to dive deep into the realm of innovation product thinking. We have tourist Torres, a very special guests here to bring decades of experience to us. She has been guiding organisations worldwide to unlock their potential. She is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker and coach. Their methodologies have helped thousands understand how to achieve effective project management through easy to follow tactical guidance. Welcome to Teresa. How are you?
Teresa
I’m great. Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Susan
I would love to know a bit more about you and how you got on the road to products because products really excite me. I was very fortunate. I fell into it through marketing, but how did you come to where you are now?
Teresa
Yeah, in college, I was trained as a designer. I studied human computer interaction, got into the design world. So I started out my career as both A and software developer and an interaction designer. And but my first several jobs, I always worked at really early stage startups in Silicon Valley. At those companies you tend to do whatever is needed and I ended up always sort of just spanning what I would today call the product trio roles. So product management, design, software engineering, just kind of whatever was needed. And I just I really just fell in love with it. It’s just so fun to I think. To make her at heart, it’s fun to create things and it’s just been a lot of.
Susan
Amazing. Do you have a special one that’s close to your heart that you made that you’re super proud of, either for the difficulty you overcome or how it’s been used by the end user?
Teresa
You know a. Lot of the products that I worked on, I’m when I say early stage startups, I mean really early like I was the 10th employee at won the 27th and another all these companies have a lot of high risk, right, a lot. Most of them don’t survive a number of the companies that I worked with.
Went through a period of time where they grew really fast. They had high impact. One of them in particular. We ran online communities for university alumni communities, which was really a lot of fun because it’s a way to help people stay connected. And then we kind of use that to help them find jobs, which is a pretty great. Place to be in as well. That company did not survive the 08 economic downturn. So unfortunately, those products actually. We sold that products to another company. So actually here in the US, A number of universities still use that product, but it’s no longer being developed. So that’s a little bit sad to me, but it was a lot of fun. I learned a tonne, that’s actually the company where I took on my first executive role and moved into management and really just learned a lot. About running a business and coaching teams and it was just a really great experience and then I would say that today, even though I work as a coach and I focus on training teams. I still think of myself as a product person. We have seven different programmes that are products and I think it’s really fun to work on them and to iterate on them and to always be improving and to kind of get into the make our mindset again.
Susan
I think one of the things I see missing a lot is companies go out and develop something. They build a product or build a service behind the scenes with the technology, but then they don’t think about the ongoing maintenance. And it I. I do strongly believe that you need to keep a portion of your ongoing budget aside just for that maintenance, cause you can’t just walk away. Unfortunately, I think so many people do do that, they just think ohh no, it’ll keep going. We’ve put the money in the IT might just be the the minimal product that we need out there, not necessarily in BP, but it works. It functions. We’re not going to bother about putting any of those. Mr Wells and Mrs, we thought we needed.
Teresa
Yeah, I’m. I’m in the mixed mind on this. So I I will often say a digital product is never done. The world is always evolving. There’s always more needs we can meet. We definitely can improve our products and we should over time the challenge is is this can lead to kind of a feature factory mindset. And I’ve seen a tonne of products.
Susan
Yeah.
Teresa
I think get ruined with bloat and.
Someone told me the term. I forget where it originated, but they get improved, right? So it’s like emerging of improved and ruined and I really like that’s a good thing to think about. Like are we making change to make change or are we making change because we see a clear need and we’re iterating on our product to have it.
Susan
I like that.
Teresa
Better fit that need, but yes, and especially even on just the maintenance side, even if we have a product and we’re just letting it run, there is certainly ongoing maintenance, whether that’s bug fixes, whether that. Just updating the match, new APIs or new regulations. This idea of a digital product has never done is really true. It’s not like when you build a physical thing and you shipped it to a store and you can shake wipe your hands of it and say I’m done. It really is a continuous process.
Susan
I think that falls in perfectly with the book that you’ve written as well, called continuous discovery habits. I think that is very pivotal for any business owner to read, not just product people, so they can really get an understanding behind it. But let’s go back and let’s do some basics. Here what defines continuous discovery in the realm of product development.
Teresa
Yeah. So let’s start with some simpler terms first. So in the product world, we tend to talk about product discovery versus product delivery. So product discovery is all the work we’re doing when we make decisions about what to build, right. So you can imagine in any business any kind of business, even service businesses, product businesses, we have to decide like what are we going to offer to customers. The work we’re doing to make that decision is typically called discovery. We contrast that with delivery, which is the work that we do to build something or to implement something or to offer something. And I think this is universal across businesses, right? If you’re a restaurant, you have to decide what goes on. Your menu? Yep. If you’re, if you’re a digital product company, you’re deciding what software are we building. But I think it’s the concepts are pretty universal. In the in the digital product world. Teams over the last 20 plus years have started to shift to a more continuous delivery mindset, so in the early days we used to stamp software on CD’s and we would maybe ship a new version every year or two. Now with the Internet, we can ship literally every week. Many companies ship every day. Some companies like the Amazons and the Googles of the world. They’re shipping multiple times a day. There’s this continuous deployment of software and what that’s led to is if we’re continuously deploying software. Here we need to be continuously deciding what changes are we making and that means that this discovery work that we’re doing of deciding what to build has now also become continuous. And so in the book in my book continuous discovery habits, I tried to look at. What are the habits we need to adopt to be able to make good, continuous decisions about what to build?
Susan
And that’s one of the the key things right now. I think with consumers, if you if we use Amazon as an example, they’re sending to an end user a customer, someone like me, they need to get into my mindset. To know what? I need in the future so they can do their planning around that so that they can. And do that continuous improvement, the continuous discovery of the continuous development depending on my needs, because I know they’re testing drone delivery, but I I don’t need it where I am. So who is that end user?
Teresa
Yeah. Yeah, that’s a great .1 of the things that I write about in the book is that I think there’s this underlying structure to good discovery work, and it starts with, we have to know what we’re trying to achieve. So we have to have an outcome in mind. And that usually is business driven, like what is the business need from us to stay in business, what value can we create for our business? How are we going to measure that? What does that look like? We don’t want to just be business driven though. We want to also focus on our customer, just like you said, we need to understand what our customers need. Do they have pain points? We can alleviate? What do they desire? Can we satisfy desires? I call those three things unmet. Customer needs pain points and desires opportunities and then ideally a good product team is discovering solutions that address those opportunities in a way that’s creating business value by driving that outcome. So for someone like Amazon, what this might look like in practise is Amazon might have an outcome. Of let’s increase the average order size, we want you to buy more on every visit to Amazon. OK, well, I can do that in a lot of nefarious ways by like. Adding things to your shopping cart that you’re not aware of, that’s not a good way to do it, so that that would help Amazon, but it doesn’t help the customer. So if I want to beat both, if I want to create both business value and customer value, I need to go talk to my customers and I need to understand what do they need, what are their pain points, what are their desires. That if I addressed them, would encourage them to spend more money on Amazon. And So what I want to do is I want to go interview them and I might learn things. Like, oh, whenever I buy electronics, I always forget to buy the batteries. Or I’m. I’m not really sure what size shoe to get and so I don’t want to buy them at all, you know, like. And so then this could lead to the discovery of solutions like, well, maybe when we add electronics to your shopping cart, we’re going to recommend that you. Add batteries. Or maybe when you add a pair of shoes to your cart. Where you’re viewing a shoe page, we’re gonna remind you that we do free returns and these are the types of things that are going to encourage you. To spend more on Amazon because we’re meeting your needs, not because we’re tricking you and it has the benefit of. I’ve met your needs, but I’ve also created value for Amazon, because now you’re spending more money on Amazon. And that sounds so, like logical, right? But that’s. But most, most companies we end up with this tension between business.
Susan
It does.
Teresa
Value and customer value. We focus on one or the other. We’re trading off against them. We’re really what we want to do is we want to make sure that they’re aligned.
Susan
And I do feel that a lot of companies, if they’ve separated the two areas from a marketing and sales, they have that tension between them about who has the right to make changes and who has the bigger voice almost in the room to then dictate what happens for, say, for example the website there.
Teresa
Yeah. And a lot of companies, their decisions about what to build are coming from the sales team. They talk to a customer and they say, hey, they want this feature, let’s build this feature. But there’s 22 primary challenges with that. The 1st is the customer requesting a feature is usually not an expert in technology, so they know what their need is. They know that like I have this pain point and they’re coming up with what they think is the best solution to that pain point. But because they’re not experts in technology, that solution is probably not the best solution. Right. So we don’t want to just take their feature request and build it because we need to take our expertise on technology. Understand the need and then come up with the right solution. So that’s the first challenge. The second challenge is not all customers are equal and we might have 10 customers requesting features and we might think let’s build those 10 features. But what if one of those customers is completely unique? They’re small, they don’t represent a lot of revenue. And nobody else has that need. Should we build that if we have scarce resources? Which who doesn’t? Especially these days we want to focus on what are the things that we the the smallest number of things that we can build that creates the most value not for a customer for the whole market. Hmm. Umm. And so what’s missing in those sales requests is the market view and that’s usually hopefully our marketing team is giving us the market view where our product team is doing the work to understand the market view sales. It’s not their job to understand the market view, their job is close the deal that’s in front of you and we want them, yeah. And we want them focused on that.
Susan
Get the revenue? Yep.
Teresa
That’s a good thing. That’s how we get money in the bank account, right? But we do need somebody, whether that’s going through a marketing layer to do that synthesis where it’s going directly to the product team to do that synthesis or they’re working together, even better to do that synthesis. We need to be looking at a market view when we make decisions about what to build.
Susan
I I cannot agree with you. More on that. It’s one of the the biggest downfalls I’ve seen out there, but how does continuous discovery differ from traditional development approaches? We’ve we’ve just talked a bit about how sales team can come in, but what? What other areas? And really adopt this type of methodology.
Teresa
Yeah. So let’s talk about how companies have historically worked. When we started building software and businesses, this dates back to software on a CD. In a box. We treated software like we treated other kind of cost centres in our organisation. We looked at it as business stakeholders, whoever they were, whether it’s sales or marketing or our business development folks or just other business stakeholders. Looked at it as we see a need, we’re going to gather our requirements. We’re going to create a requirements document or think about it almost as like order tickets for our engineering team and they’re going to deliver exactly what we asked. And this is very much we often call this waterfall. It’s this idea of like the business knows best. We can sit in a room and imagine software in our head and we’ll just give it to the engineers and they’ll deliver it and it will. All work. Hmm. Well, it turned out in practise it hasn’t really turned out that well. What ends up happening is that like all those business stakeholders have other full time jobs. Sure, they see needs here and there, but they’re not digging in to like. Really understand what are those needs? What context do they come up? Who do they come up for? It’s a little bit like we’re reacting. It’s anytime anybody does something part time in their job, you don’t really have the time to do it. Well, and So what happened is we started to create this role of a product manager to say, OK, you are going to dig into this and understand these needs and it makes sure that we’re building the right stuff. And the first evolution of that was. Talk to the business. Talk to people in the business and understand the needs that are coming up and This is why we have terms like gathering requirements.
Teresa
Right product managers were gathering requirements from the organisation.
Susan
But were they talking to the right people?
Teresa
Yeah. That was a little better because the product manager could think through like all the nitty gritty details like error handling, acceptance criteria, that like our business stakeholders didn’t even know to think about, right. So we got a little bit better. But what we found was that like the business still didn’t really understand what the customer. Needed. And So what we’ve seen is now product teams, product managers, designers, engineers are directly engaging with customers so that they get a really deep understanding of what are those needs, what are the contexts in which they occur. How often are they occurring? Who is it occurring for so that the product team themselves are equipped to make these market decisions equipped to say we should build this and not build that and this some people hear this and they think, oh, it excludes marketing. It definitely does not exclude marketing. I think where marketing plays a role is. How do we provide like that that product team is now continuously delivering value, so they’re working on this week over week cadence and they’re talking to customers on what what they need right now like it’s like just in time listening, I think what our marketing teams do really well is they do that sort of longer horizon. And what are the market trends? Where are we going? What’s changing? And this is where we get into more of that, like traditional market research. And I think that provides a foundation for these product teams in those week over week, OK. But I have this question right now that I need to answer right now. And I think when those are really well balanced. We have both market researchers going out and doing that longer horizon research and we have product teams engaging directly with customers. It increases our success rate. We’re more likely to build the right stuff.
Susan
I I think one of the the key things in there you’re talking about was testing for, for me one of the.
Teresa
Hmm.
Susan
Things I’ve seen. Looking after some products in the recent past is time frames get shorter and shorter because people are rushing to get to market, cause whatever the sales team has said or whatever it happens to to be the purpose behind it. Date you cannot move that date tough. Just make it happen. I feel that with. Developing the product, the thing that suffers the most is testing. In a lot of cases, instead of giving it the two weeks, 3 weeks that it needs to do the proper testing and to make sure whatever changes have been made or whatever the new product is supposed to look like, they don’t do proper. User acceptance testing to see if it is even fit for purpose. Is that something that you’ve seen continue to happen from the traditional moving into more continuous that that is still falling off?
Teresa
Yeah. So one of the things that’s happening is that it’s a little bit what we talked about in the very opening of like a a product is always. Changing. There’s the difference between change that is making it better and change for the sake of change, and we still see a lot of companies operating in what I call a like people in the industry generally call a feature factory model. Like we’re just building to build. And I think in that model we build a lot of software. We build too much and then we end up with this challenge of like complex products with interdependencies and lots of use cases that need to be tested and we get bugs and we get low quality software and we’re shipping too fast and that’s not good. We’re then in a continuous like a truly continuous improvement. Mindset where we’re both continuous discovering and continuous delivering. It’s not about adding more and more to the product, it’s about refining the product. It’s about making sure the product better fits the need and so it might involve taking things away. It might involve simplifying a workflow. It might involve speeding something up. Whereas I think in this feature factory world we’re checking the box, we have this feature and this feature and this feature in this feature. Whereas I think in the more continuous world, we’re really looking at value, are we delivering value? How do we improve that value? And of course testing is going to matter. But I think in the continuous world, we tend to work in smaller chunks. We work on smaller things. It’s a lot easier to see where there’s dependencies the testing. Happens well in the building process. This we can iteratively deploy to customers so we can deliver to smaller batches and then grow from there and see what happens and measure the impact and make sure we really did deliver the value that we thought. So I think a lot of what we see when we see. Challenges with QA or buggy software going out the door. I don’t think the answer is we need more weeks of testing. I think the answer is we need to work in smaller batch sizes. And and focus more on value and less on features.
Susan
I think one of the points that’s really called out for me there is when you are evaluating the product, you have don’t be afraid to remove things that aren’t necessarily aren’t being used because they’re not longer value. Absolutely. Absolutely would be cool out for me just in what you’ve just shared with us. But what specific advantages have you seen continuous discovery offer to product owners? How? How does it benefit the stakeholders apart from doing in smaller chunks like smaller pieces? What are the benefits? And advantages of Usain.
Teresa
It should if you do it well, increase your success rate so there’s sort of a dirty little secret of digital products that now that we can measure impact. So again, in the past in business, our measurements were pretty crude. We built a product, we put it in a store, really what we measured was did people buy it?
Susan
The sales here.
Teresa
We were not very good at measuring, OK, they bought it, but did they get value from it now?
Susan
Or did they even put the CD in?
Teresa
Yeah, exactly. Now, with Internet software, we can measure everything we know how often you use it. We know if you get to the success points in the product, we know if you recommend it, right? Like we know a lot and now that we know that we’re learning that even the best teams. And their ideas fall short of expectations like 80%. Of the time. Oh, wow. An absurdly high miss rate, and this is not because they’re making bad decisions like it’s easy to think, oh, everybody’s bad at what they’re. No, it’s because this is genuinely hard. Like all it takes is to mislabel something or to make something the wrong colour, or to get one little thing in the workflow wrong. And it’s not going to work for the customer. We’ve all had this experience, right? Like there was a mobile app we were excited about. We downloaded it conceptually. It was spot on. And then we opened it and we tried to use it. Something didn’t quite work right for us. Yep, right. Or it worked great for us and then they changed something and it stopped working for us. Like that’s something.
Susan
And then we get frustrated as well.
Teresa
That’s the heartbreaking one, right? So we we forget there’s a lot of complexity in software and so if we do good discovery, meaning we’re always talking to our customers about their needs and we’re always testing our assumptions as we build. We should increase our hit rate, our success rate, so that 80% should start to creep down. It’s never going to get to 0, right? We’re never going to have all of our products are wildly successful. We’re never going to be perfect, but it should. It should increase the chance that what we build the first time is more successful.
Susan
No one’s gonna be 100% perfect, no.
Teresa
And as we iterate, our product should get more and more successful. The sort of this belief that like good ideas just to merge. Whereas I think people that have been doing this for a long time know that most ideas that we think are good are pretty mediocre. And then we have to iterate and iterate and iterate and iterate and eventually they become good. And I think that’s what this continuous mindset does is it unlocks turning mediocre ideas into good ideas.
Susan
And it sounds like it’s also part of the process of bringing in because you’re not the smartest person in the room, you’re just, you’re great at what you do in your space, you’re bringing everyone else who’s great in their space. So you can actually share those ideas to improve it together. Well, because not one person’s going to have all the answers necessarily.
Teresa
This is a really big part of the current continuous discovery movement. It’s this idea that discovery is a team sport, so remember in that old world our business stakeholders were defining what to build for. Our product manager was gathering requirements. It didn’t work very well. Because. The stakeholders certainly don’t know all the technology. The product manager might be a little bit better because it’s their job to know more about technology, but they’re still not engineers. They don’t know the latest and greatest and what just came out. And if we look at right now with generative AI, the technology landscape is changing every day. Like what’s possible is changing every single day.
Teresa
We want our engineers involved in those decisions because they have the best understanding of what is just now possible, Marty Kagan wrote a blog post about just now possible. And I love that phrase. This is why we want our engineers involved, because they can tell us what is just now possible. And that’s really where innovation comes from.
Susan
100% and there’s a lot of things that people don’t even think about as well is with the product planning for continuous. There’s probably a a lot of people that still don’t think about this future proof this to a point as well that see what other changes will probably need soon. And we know we’re going to need them soon and develop it all together.
Teresa
Mm-hmm.
Susan
So that we can iterate quicker in the future with these changes we make in one a bigger batch I suppose would be my language for it. I think that’s that’s a lot of places are missing. Doing that as well.
Teresa
Yeah, definitely. I think there’s one of the biggest mistakes teams make when they’re kind of shifting to this mindset is they take their old project mindset and they just try to chunk it up right. Whereas I think what’s core to this, you’re working in a smaller sort of batch size or a smaller chunk. Because you want to learn from it, right? So you’re putting it out in the world and you’re seeing how people engage with it, and that learning is going to inform the next chunk. So it’s not just that we’re going to take that old project and break it down into steps, it’s that we’re looking at what’s the first piece that gets us the most learning. So that we learn it before we build the whole thing, not after we build the whole thing.
Susan
A key one for there is the learning. I find that a lot of businesses don’t sit down to actually do either retrospective or any kind of sit down workshop discovery to see what have they done, what’s the product done really well? Whatever competitive products doing really well for them us to think how can we? Utilise some of these thoughts to do something better ourselves in next smaller chunks. Have you seen those type of pitfalls as well happen?
Teresa
Yeah, this is a fairly significant mindset shift. And I’ll tell you one of the things that drives it and especially because I know a lot of your audience is marketing folks. We. In business, this is not just marketers like our CEO’s asked for this, our executive teams asked for this. We tend to market code releases. Our marketing is all geared around we built this thing.
Teresa
OK. Well, we always need something to talk about. This is what drives the feature factory. If we always need something to talk about, we always need to be building new things. OK, here’s the problem with this. This is what leads to feature bloat. This is what leads to complexity in our products. So I think one of the key pieces that we need to have in place to make continuous discovery work really well is our marketers. Have to stop relying on we built this thing as their message and instead focus on our customers. Got this value from our thing. Yes. And what I love to see is when we write about, let me tell you a story about a customer and how our product helped. Right now we’re talking about the value we’re creating and not the event of we released code. That’s a big shift, right? This is a huge mindset shift, but it’s so much more powerful and marketers know this. They know when they share customer stories, it’s wildly successful.
Susan
Yes And would have. 100%.
Teresa
But we tend to have one foot in both worlds. We’re still marketing the launches and the releases and we’re doing a little bit of customer value, whereas I think we need to hop entirely in the customer value bucket.
Susan
There, there is so much missing there from just telling the story. Some of those stories can be so powerful about how customers use the existing product to do X to do Y, whatever it is. So you could really build a lot of different stories from all the different users that are using it. So it definitely is a missed opportunity.
Teresa
Yeah. And I think people really relate to those stories because they, if you do a good job of telling stories of people across your segments, people start to see themselves in those stories. Right. And that’s now we’re resonating and this here’s the thing. If your product teams are doing good discovery and they’re uncovering unmet needs, pain points and desires and they’re building solutions that actually address those needs. Now your marketing can be I’m going to interview a customer who had this need and let them tell their story about how. The needle is met. Mm-
That’s why.
Teresa
Notice how there’s no solution in there? Yeah, we’re talking to a customer about a need and how a need was met.
Susan
And that’s why Amatoria’s were so popular in magazines and everything. Because they did get. They usually included a actual story of that product and weren’t necessarily saying this is new new. It was like, this is a customer, this is what they used it. And this is what the product looks like. Go get it now because you’re feeling that same story because it was targeted to whoever that magazine. For example.
Teresa
Absolutely, absolutely.
Susan
With teams integrating continuous discovery into their existing workflows. How could they do this without disruptions? Because you’ve spoken about how waterfall can get in the way. Sometimes old mindsets can get in the way. How can they integrate that without having so much disruption?
Teresa
Yeah, really good question. So in the book, I talk about this, this structure of we’re going to start with an outcome we’re going to discover opportunities through customer interviews. We’re going to discover solutions through assumption testing and it can feel really overwhelming like this doesn’t look anything like how I work, how do I get from here from point A to point B. This is why I put habits in the title of the book. I think the easiest way to move in this direction is to think about these activities as a collection of habits. And I really want people to you can start anywhere. You can pick any of the habits you can look at. What’s the easiest habit for you to adopt given your unique organisational context and just work on that habit. And then when that habit just becomes part of the way that you work, it’s not hard anymore. It’s not disruptive. It’s just part of the way that. You do your job. Nick, the next habit. Yep. And it’s it really is taking this continuous improvement mindset to the way that we work. How do we get there iteratively over time? Because this wholesale change of like I have to stop everything I’m doing and start working in this new fangled way. It’s just not gonna work. It’s like setting a New Year’s resolution you’re all excited on January 1st and by February 7th it’s long gone you’ve forgotten about.
Susan
It February, I would have said. By January. I think making it a habit really does make it natural so that everyone should be learning anyway all the time, because nothing stays the same. So having this mindset of I’m going to make this a habit makes it part of you, and then you can continue to learn on the next section that you need to learn about to make that a habit. And then. Natural as well.
Teresa
MHM.
Susan
With learning, I think that’s that’s something that everyone could get tip out of. I’ve actually, I think the books arriving today for me, to be honest, it’s taking a little while with Amazon, but I’ll be reading. I’ll be reading that over the break.
Teresa
Myself. Nice. Nice. Yeah, I think habit thinking is really important. And I think also just recognising. Change is hard and to be nice to yourself as you build habits. And This is why, like people always ask me, what habit should I start with? I can’t prescribe that I want you to start with the habit that’s easiest for you to adopt, because it’s this idea of small wins. That’s what keeps us motivated, right? I I think I forget who the author of the progress principle is. It might be Theresa. I’m. A mob? Oh, I don’t know how to say her last name. Anyway, the book is called the progress principle, and it’s just this idea of, like, any time that we can build in small wins. The small wins motivate us to keep going, and then we do that iteratively. Over time, we look back and are amazed by how much progress we made. And I think that’s especially true. When moving from most of us in business are on a project world, big projects that start and stop. And we’re trying to move to a more continuous mindset. It’s a big change and you’re going to feel like you’re swimming upstream against all the project symptoms that are in your organisation. And so I think it’s really important that we identify what’s the teeniest, tiniest, easiest place to start.
Susan
One of the things that I’ve brought in with my team is we celebrate every small. So if even if it’s just a small thing that they’ve developed a pack that is in a great format to send to a client that is user friendly to understand, makes sense. Everything they’ve put so much time and effort into it, even to something as small as that going great job because they’ve put so much time into that.
Teresa
Yeah, great.
Susan
Discovery, part of it to make it make sense for for the audience.
Susan
I I truly believe in small win. Congratulations when you’re going through products and everything else as well. I’ve found that management in the past I’ve worked with haven’t done that very well and it’s something that I would love to see more happen out there is. Little things can be hard, particularly if you’re doing a change with it. So developing a product and trying to get all these stakeholders happy as well, even if it’s a small iterative change, celebrate it.
Teresa
Yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. And I will say don’t be afraid to make the first step teeny tiny. Like teeny tiny, because that’s really what starts to get that snowball rolling and it’s gonna grow week over week. So one of the things when I work with teams, I tell them I go, our goal is to make next week just a little bit teeny tiny or better than last week. That’s it. And you’re going to get frustrated. You’re going to with the. Change happened sooner, but if you just really hyper focus on how do I make next week a little tiny year better than last? Week. But at the end of the year, you’re going to look back and. You’re gonna be blown away by how much progress you’ve made.
Susan
I I can honestly say when I did the performance appraisals recently, they had forgotten how many of those small little pieces they had done to to make the big wins. Yeah, I was adding in all this other all this other detail in there going you, you did this, you did that and then just like yeah, I I forgot because we. Celebrated it. I didn’t. I didn’t actually think it was so big. I’m like, no. It is, yeah. You’ve gone towards progressing, which is fantastic. Keep it up. Because you want to keep that momentum. And I think if you do too much, too soon, you’re likely to go back to old habits as well.
Teresa
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We get change fatigue, change. Fatigue is a real thing and change is hard, right? So if we chew off too much, we are going to give up and. People read the book and they get so eager and they want to try and do it all at once, and I really want to encourage people look at the third word in the title. It’s a collection of habits. Do one at a.
Susan
Time and generally the one that makes the most sense for.
Teresa
You, yes, absolutely, absolutely.
Susan
What excites you the most about product management? You’ve been working in this space for ages. You’ve been sharing your knowledge very kindly as well, but what excites you the most?
Teresa
I think I really just like making things and I really like enabling other people to make things and. I think because my full time employee experience was at early stage startups and so many startups are on the wrong track. They’re just building things that people don’t want. It’s a little bit heartbreaking to me, like I really want to help people spend the hours of their lives on things that are going to make. Right. It’s really about we all are eager. We all want to contribute. I’ve never met a product person where there was a product manager, a designer or a software engineer that didn’t deeply care about their customer and creating some value for that customer. And so I just really want to increase our success rate and it’s turning out. It doesn’t look like it’s that. Hard it really is. Can we just build better habits? Can we just get there a little bit faster? It’s never going to be perfect. But I think if we put in the work and we stay focused on the goal, it’s very doable and that’s what excites me. I just, I still on a daily basis catch myself wishing the same things were better that I wished 20 years ago and they’re things that are totally solvable. High technology and we’re just not doing them. Yet. And I think a lot of that is because we’re still distracted. By all the wrong stuff, we’re still distracted by a lot of this is the demographics of the tech industry. We get a lot of, especially here in the United States, we get a lot of like 20 somethings tend to be male and they’re building to solve their own needs. And that means if you’re 40 something male or female or 60 something. Your needs aren’t being met by technology, and I really want to make it easier for anybody to build stuff, and I think we’re getting to the point where technology is enabling this. You can build software without writing code. I think generative AI is going to accelerate this. I think anybody is going to be able to have a vision for a product and bring it into the world. And I think what’s going to happen is we’re going to. Get better software. For the rest of us, and I think, but only if we’re equipped to make sure we’re not building for an audience of one and that we can expand our circle a little bit and learn about others and learn how to make that. Software worked. More people, and I’m really excited about this idea of mom and pop technology. Right. So we have mom and pop stores that serve their local communities. I would love to see more mom and pop digital apps that serve very specific need that may not be an interesting market for a venture capitalist, but could be a totally feasible business for somebody who just saw a need in their community. We wanted to solve it and I think we’re on the cusp of that. I think building digital products is getting easy enough that that’s around the corner and I’m pretty excited about that.
Susan
I 100% agree with you about everyday people just developing things. One of my pen friends who’s in Florida. Ohh, she knows who she is. Hi. She’s actually teaching an AI to to do things, and that is so far from her everyday skill set and she is absolutely loving it and there’s so many more examples of that happening out there. Even the younger kids getting right into technology and developing things for other kids as well.
Teresa
Yeah. Yeah, it’s so cool there. There’s.
Susan
Just so much fun.
Teresa
Think what? I think we’re all makers at heart. It’s just some of us have skills that allow us to make things that other people don’t have. But I think what we’re seeing is the playing field is getting levelled and it’s getting levelled really quickly and I’m so like just. I’m inspired by everybody. I want to see what people make right, so I just that’s really what excites me.
Teresa
About this and if I can help even a little tiny bit by helping you build some stronger habits. Awesome.
Susan
Well, I’m quite sure you’ve already achieved that for thousands of people out there already, and for everyone else, make sure you get a copy of continuous discovery habits today so you can learn these fantastic habits and start developing them one by one and putting them into practise. I have my final question I ask everyone. What brand? Any brand in the world best represents you and why?
Teresa
Yeah, this is a tough one cause like my reaction is like I wanted to say my brand because I built it to represent me. But I have a feeling that’s cheating. I think what’s hard. I I think I am drawn to value based brands so I live in a mountain resort town. It’s oriented around outdoor play. So when I first saw this question on your list I was like oh, I got to go with like Patagonia. But that’s just one dimension, right? That doesn’t represent all of me. That just represents this one.
Susan
Oh yeah.
Teresa
Mentioned to me. So then I was. Like ohh but I also like really love to learn and love books and maybe like the brand is the great courses because they’re all about bringing the best courses from around the world to everybody. And then I just like spun out of control and came up with 20. Other brands so. Going to just leave you with those ones?
Susan
Don’t worry, some of my guests have been very much the same as well. Some are very much like one and some are multi and there is no right or wrong answer.
Teresa
Yeah. Yeah, I love it. It it really did make me. It made me think, and I’m going to tell you it stresses me. Out a little bit too.
Susan
Which is a good question.
Teresa
That’s the sign of a good question.
Susan
Ohh thank you so much and thank you for sharing that as well. I think you’re. Right it does. Yeah, you have so many facets that you share with people and also keep to yourself too, and where you live, all of that combines into all these different parameters that you can make yourself fit into all these little boxes, which is awesome.
Teresa
That’s what makes humans so interesting, right? Ohh definitely. You know, you got me thinking. It’d be kind of fun to do.
Susan
Yeah.
Teresa
Like a brand board. Like your own personal brand board of like these, these things resonate with me and like actually I saw. I was watching videos from the B2B Forum, which is by marketing profs. And one of the talks was about how marketers are starting to, like, espouse their brand values in their marketing. And the guy played a like 2 minute video from The North Face and it was not like even really promoting The North Face. It was kind of more in line with apples in a vaders ad do you remember apples like the weird?
Teresa
Add them in. This was like this for North Face it. Was like they just they like, showed video clips of extreme rock climbers like everybody doing extreme sports. And it was just promoting the community of people, right? It was so cool. And I think this is where, like, we tend to think it’s easy to vilify companies. It’s easy to think, like, corporate greed and. Capitalism is bad, but I also think we have some really cool examples of brands that are value driven and community driven. So it’d be kind of fun to like, create your brand board of the of like, these are the brands that speak to me.
Susan
Ohh that may be an idea to get swung out. We’ll have to. That product might come out very soon. Stay tuned everyone.
Teresa
No.
Susan
Are there any final tips or any suggestions that you’d like to share with? The audience.
Teresa
I would say if you heard this conversation for the first time and you weren’t familiar with my work, there’s a couple of things that you can do. Obviously you can pick up the book. It is available worldwide in paperback, audible, epub. Kindle. You can also go to my blog at producttalk.org. I have hundreds of articles on these topics.
Susan
And they’re amazing everyone.
Teresa
So you don’t. Even. You don’t even have to wait for the book to arrive. I think if you are, if this does inspire you and you want to work this way, the book adds some structure to help you think about it. One habit at a time, but there’s also plenty of free resources at product. Dot org.
Susan
Absolutely fantastic and that blog is so amazing. Even LinkedIn. Make sure you follow because so many things pop up there as well so that you can learn even more and probably even more timely as well, because if you’re in your commute, you can quickly just have a look at it too. Definitely for me, I have learnt so much about product Discovery, product development and actually putting the word continuous into both. Them because it’s always, umm, continuously reevaluating re looking at and also having to look at how to deploy these small iterative changes in small chunks that make sense for the end user and create value not just for the customer but for the business. It all makes sense as one big topic. When you’re doing product continuously and you’re discovering it, make sure that you’re thinking about the decisions what we’re going to deliver, but leave it to the product development on the build, the implement and what and how it happens. Make sure you understand those two different distinctions within your organisation, and that will help to have a more streamlined process. Going forward. Value is the key, so make sure that you’re measuring it and nowadays with so many different ways to measure technology, you have no excuse. So make sure you’re using this data to make smart decisions, but don’t bite off more than you can chew. Bring it back down to those small chunks so you can learn and test. Along the way to make sure it makes sense. Therefore you’re not wasting time, money, or effort in any of this. You need to ensure that you test the assumptions as well quite vigorously before you go live, because you want to make. Sure it makes. Sense without testing these assumptions, you’re not going to increase your hit rate. You’re just going to be almost creating a feature factory that’s just going to continually turn into something not necessarily usable. For your end users and that will just make them very unhappy. They will be disgruntled. They’ll probably be a bit confused as well about what’s going on with all these changes. Keep it simple there and also make sure the user experience is what it needs to be as well. Best thing of all though, grab a copy of the book and Start learning about these habits. Bring in some small ones at time. There’s outcomes, opportunities and solutions slash assumptions, so make sure that you’re actually going in and seeing what piece makes sense for you to learn and then start making it a habit and move on to the next one. Because that’s how you become a fantastic product manager, is understanding all of these pieces and how it can work for you, your product and your business better. Have I missed anything out?
Teresa
I am floored that Susan just did that summary live real time and it was amazing. So that was correct. You have not missed anything.
Susan
Thank you so much. You have been amazing. Thank you so much for sharing all of these amazing tips with me and tips with my audience as well. I’m absolutely flawed. I think you’re doing an amazing job sharing this around with everyone too. From all your free content and also you. The book you have definitely changed thousands of product people’s lives, and they’ve so many businesses better for it. So I just wanted to say thank.
Teresa
You for that. Oh, thank you. Those are very nice words.
Susan
And for everyone else, don’t forget to grab your copy of continuous discovery habits today to learn more about this topic and for everyone else. Please add more to marketing to your playlist so you don’t miss out on more future fabulous guests. More to marketing.
