Andy Polaine: Hi welcome power of 10, a podcast about design
operating at many levels zooming out from thoughtful detail
through to organisational transformation, then on to
changes in society and the world. My name is Andy Polaine.
I'm a service design and innovation consultant,
leadership coach, trainer and writer. My guest today is Teresa
Torres, an internationally acclaimed author, speaker and
coach, she teaches a structured and sustainable approach to
continuous discovery that helps product teams infuse their daily
product decisions with customer input. She has 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 7000 product people discovery skills through the
products talk Academy. She's the author of the book, continuous
discovery habits and blogs at the product. talk.org. Teresa,
welcome to power of 10
Teresa Torres: Andy, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be
here.
Andy Polaine: So a lot of people know you, I get the 7000 people,
at least your name at least comes up quite often in my work
and my coaching people talk about, you know, this book, I'm
interested in know people's journeys from where they started
to where they are now. Because partly, it's you know, it's
always interesting. I think it's also useful when people sort of
see an author or they see someone who's kind of well known
speaker and so forth. It kind of feels unattainable. So I think
it's also useful to hear from people, you know, how did you
get to where you are now?
Teresa Torres: Yeah, I'm going to start all the way back to
college, because that's really where this journey started. As
an undergraduate at Stanford, I was a symbolic systems major,
which is a cognitive science programme that draws from
philosophy, psychology, linguistics, computer science.
And so it's this amazing interdisciplinary programme,
ride to pick a concentration, my concentration was human centred
design. And that was sort of where I got introduced to the
design world. And this idea of include the customer in the
design process, design with people, not just for people. And
I, as a 22 year old entered the workforce thinking that's how
business worked. And then I spent the next 14 years is a
full time employee severely disappointed. That wasn't how
business worked. And I'm pretty stubborn. So I just stubbornly
tried to make business work that way. And so in my full time
employee career, I worked as a front end software developer in
my earliest days, because very few people were hiring designers
at that point, I also did design work in those roles, eventually.
So I kind of started as a front end software engineer, slash
designer, and then eventually became a designer slash product
manager, and then eventually moved into leadership roles. And
I ran product and design teams, I was a CEO of a, somebody
else's startup, which I don't really recommend, and then
eventually decided that I just saw the same problem everywhere.
And that's that most product people, whether your product
managers, designers, or software engineers, just weren't spending
enough time with our customers. And as a result, they're
building the wrong things. And so after I think my fourth
really early stage startup, I just kind of got burnt out and
started to look at, how can I be more effective than trying to
change one little company at a time? And then that's what led
to my coaching business, which evolved over time into a course
business, and eventually the book. So coming out,
Andy Polaine: you know, how long ago was it that you had that
kind of moment of feeling? Disappointed?
Teresa Torres: I you know, it started as a 22 year old, I
remember my very first job. The first company that I worked at
was called highwire. Press, we put we were one of the earliest
providers of STEM journals online. So today, the big dog in
that space is Elsevier, and Elsevier owns their own
journals. So there's all these other journals that like
science, nature, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, all
these really big name journals. They didn't have an internal
organisation to bring their content online. So they
partnered with highwire press. And so that was my very first
job out of school. It was a classic client vendor shop,
right there kind of a professional services shop.
There was no product managers there, there were no designers.
There's one graphic designer there when I started. And there
was a bunch of software engineers that were just like,
we partnered with the American Association for the Advancement
of Science, and our remit was put science online. And I was
blown away, because what I saw over and over again, was we just
said yes, to whatever the society is asked for. And there
wasn't a lot of product thinking. And I didn't even know
product thinking was a thing at the time. I just knew that we
should care about their end users. And that wasn't showing
up anywhere in the process. It really was a classic. We still
see this right? A company's customers hire the company to
basically do professional services for them, rather than
this product mindset of we're building a platform that allows
us to bring journals online. And to be fair to highwire press.
They did build a platform to bring journals online. They
ended up publishing over I think 3000 journals, and they did
build a really good product, but it was very client driven rather
than sort market product driven. And I was blown away by that. I
was like, wow, should we be talking to our end users? Isn't
that that's what I just learned in school? Isn't that how the
world works? And then I saw that everywhere I went and was just
kind of disappointed by it.
Andy Polaine: So the reason why I asked about the, you know,
when was that was kind of looking to work out sort of the
era, I know, out to you sort of age wise. So when are we talking
here? date wise?
Teresa Torres: late 90s, early 2000s? Yeah, sorry about that.
So now that's
Andy Polaine: okay. Because the whole sort of product thing
that's not that old, really thinking of sort of products,
thinking, and we're gonna have conversation probably about this
in a minute. Because you know, from me, I kind of rant on about
the services versus product thing. But, you know, it's more
recent, I would say, What would you say 1015 years can be mined?
The product has been going since when? I would say it depends,
Teresa Torres: right. So I would say broadly, it's become a topic
that most people are talking about only in the last five
years. Yeah. I would say some of the best companies, we can push
back 15 years. Yeah. Okay. I mean, arguably, I would say this
started beginning with the Agile Manifesto, which really was
looking backwards, right, when, by the time the Agile Manifesto
was written, it was looking at problems from the 90s. And maybe
even before that, yeah. But the Agile Manifesto was like step
zero, I'm not even sure that got us to product thinking, it just
got us to talk to your customer a little more often.
Andy Polaine: You know, I think from a design perspective, I
always had this kind of thing with the Agile Manifesto, which
was, this is developers thinking in the way designers have always
thought, you know, in terms of that kind of iterative approach,
and all those kinds of things and rather having, you know, and
actually so discovering what the problem is, before I even
started building something that felt to me every kind of design
approach. So it's always kind of weird for me to see sort of
agile, then be sort of pushed on to design because I felt like,
oh, hang on, we're already here. Yeah, the reason why I was
asking you about the date thing is because I was thinking about
this question, I think I can't ask this is really offensive,
which was kind of along the lines of what, you know, why
does this book need to exist? And then I realised that the
actual question is, because it's really good your book. And I
didn't want to say that this offensive version is wider, the
problems that you tackle in this book still exist, because as
we've just talked about these problems, been around for a
while. And there's bit of me that kind of feels like, you
know, we know this right, we know that you should go and
speak to your customers and understand what their needs are.
And then that should flow into how you're deciding what you
should be building. Why is this still a problem?
Teresa Torres: Because humans are involved, I think is the
short of it. I mean, some of us know this, right? Like, I think
people with a design background and trained in not, I can't even
say a design background, because I meet a lot of designers that
don't talk to customers, right? I think people with a human
centred design background, where they were taught to include the
customer, as part of the design process, get this. But if we
widen our lens, and we look at companies, and we look at the
history of business, and the evolution of business over the
last 100 years, I don't think this is obvious, right? If we go
all the way back to the beginning of the 1900s, how we
won at business was being more efficient, right? It was about
building things faster. That has nothing to do with the customer
that has to do with manufacturing and production,
and sort of industrial age, winning at this sort of
productivity piece. Yeah. By the time we get to the mid 1900s, we
start to see a conversation around strategy and markets and
your position in the in the market. Like it's a little
closer to being customer centric, but it's not customer
centric, like there's nothing customer centric about Porter
and his strategy framework Mintzberg. But another big
strategy and gets a little bit closer when he talks about
emergent strategy and listening to your market. But we're still
not really customer centric, even by the mid 1900s. And I
think it really took the internet and the rapid pace of
evolution, and the dramatic increase a competition for
business to start, I don't even think we fully recognised it to
start recognising that really the biggest competitive
differentiator is a better understanding of your customer.
And I think we're swimming upstream against 100 years of
history, we still a lot, see a lot of companies stuck in
Taylorism. And that sort of efficiency and productivity
suck. I mean, a lot of companies still struggle with Porter, like
a lot of companies still struggle with what in the world
of strategy, let alone this next evolution of like, okay, we're
actually designing for somebody,
Andy Polaine: it seems like such a no brainer, though, doesn't it
to you go and speak to your customers and understand what
they want, and then try and design products and services
that meet those needs. I've had this conversation many, many
times when you know, there's a there's a lot of frameworks out
there. Some of them are kind of super complex. And what actually
what I really liked about your books is very clear. And I
particularly like the at the anti patterns, which I think was
a very smart way of so for those of you haven't read it, you
should, but Well, maybe you want to describe what that the anti
patterns are and sort of how you came to the anti patent. And
we'll start there.
Teresa Torres: Yeah, so fortunately, when I wrote this
book, I had already been coaching using all of the
material in the book for years. In fact, I tried to write the
book in 2016 and I realised how do I know this content is going
to work very well, I'm kind of developing it as I write the
book, that felt very uncomfortable to me, I'm a very
test and iterate kind of person. And so what I did was I started
putting more of a formal curriculum behind my coaching so
that I could test the content. And so where the antipatterns
came from, basically, each chapter is about a habit that I
want to see teams develop to help them build the strong
feedback loop between the decisions they're making and
their customers. And then because I had worked with a lot
of teams trying to put those habits into practice, I saw
where they went off the rails. And so every chapter ends with
some anti patterns, here's some common things that people get
wrong. And here's why you should avoid them. I think that's
really important because it sounds really simple, like, oh,
just go talk to your customers. And I really wish it was as
simple as like, seriously, just go talk to your customers. But
what we see in practice is that people ask the wrong questions,
okay. They, they frame things in a way that they want their
customers say great things about them, they don't want their
customer to criticise their babies, which is their
beautiful, perfect ideas, right. And so there's a little bit more
nuance to this. And so one of my goals in the book was to help
people overcome some of those mistakes so that hopefully, we
get to a world where we just make better products.
Andy Polaine: Yeah, it's interesting. There's a piece I
wrote about organisational amnesia and my sort of thesis in
it was this idea that what it came from me being asked to have
two to four years later to do exactly the same work with a
client, different stakeholders, but the same business all over
again. And I was thinking, you know, what's going on here,
there's some kind of amnesia, and of course, what happens is
that people get frustrated by the organisation they're in, and
the organisation doesn't, you know, wants to change and tread
digital transformation, whatever it is, but then they, the entire
sort of infrastructure of the organisation structurally gets
in the way of that and people leave, or people or senior
stakeholders move on. And then this has come back around again.
And one of the kind of things I've talked about was this idea
of subcultures of doing, and actually about habits, which
was, you know, like, like languages or craft skills, if
they're not valued, and people stop doing them, they just kind
of die out. And that's how I felt that you sort of get this
amnesia in organisations. So for me, the anti patterns were
really good sort of canaries in the coal mine in some respects
and say, you know, if you're seeing these things going on,
then you're starting to kind of slip back into the kind of bad
old habits, but they're also I thought, were really good
examples of what not to do, because I think most of you
know, many books you read, tell you the kind of utopian ideal,
and it's not really like that.
Teresa Torres: Yeah, I think for me, it was really important that
the book be grounded in practice. Yeah, right. So I
think we have plenty of books that talk about why we should be
human centred, and why we should be customer centric, like we've
had those books, like you said, Why is this still a problem in
business? We've had those books for decades. I don't think
people know how to translate that into action. So one of my
goals with the book was to help people literally translated into
action. And one of the things I'm most proud of is I do hear
from teams all the time that say it's literally sitting on their
desk as a reference, which is great, because that's that was
the vision I started with, is how do I create a handbook that
can act as a reference for product teams?
Andy Polaine: Yeah, it's very good on that front. And I've
been interesting, I've been reading your book, and Melissa's
the bill trap. I mean, this appears to be a trap, sort of in
in tandem, and then sort of recommending it to kind of
everyone at the moment, you know, and I think it's because
they're both very practical. And there's a comedy in some
respects from from different ends, or I guess Melissa's is
looking at the CPO are the kind of product manager and you're
looking at kind of what could teams be doing? More or less? Is
that fair to say? Or do you? Yeah, yeah,
Teresa Torres: I think Melissa does a phenomenal job of sort of
getting into the day to day nuts and bolts of the messiness of
being a product manager. It's like one of the most undefined
roles ever. And I almost look at it as like, that's your, for a
product manager, that's your foundation. But a giant chunk of
your job is to learn how to cross functionally collaborate
with your team, so that you're making better decisions about
what to build. And that's where I see my book fits in.
Andy Polaine: Yeah, absolutely. So when I said we'd sort of
maybe returned to the product service thing. on Slack, you see
me kind of bang on about this, it's my kind of hobbyhorse, one
of the things that I kind of feel is, you know, we're talking
about the industrial age thing, we're talking about how that's
kind of flown into business, even today, even in the kind of
world we're in was all about kind of treating their business
as a machine and being this kind of ever more efficient. And then
once you've kind of hit there, and then sort of parity across
competitors, it's then, you know, went to all about
marketing. And now we're in this different stage. You know, one
of the arguments I often make, and I guess I'm saying it too,
because I want I want you to kind of poke holes in it really,
is that from a perspective of services or thinking of, you
know, the shift that we've made from products to services that
almost every digital product is actually really a service,
right? It's more it's got multiple touch points. It's an
ecosystem. And that one of the dangers I find in using the
language around products, it harks back to that kind of
industrial era, kind of mental model, which is, you know, an
assembly line where you're building products. And so you
see that thing where you have, you know, feature teams working
on different parts of the same touch point, which itself is one
touch point in a kind of larger ecosystem. And then There seems
to be an awful lot of, because it's kind of thought of that
way, there's an awful lot of work going on to try and kind of
connect that all back up again. And yet you could have kind of
started with that connected view in the first place, which is
these are services. You talked about platforms before, I wonder
what your kind of view is, is of that, and whether I'm just kind
of saying, you know, get off my lawn, or whether there's, you
know, I just be interested in your kind of opinion on on that
kind of perspective,
Teresa Torres: I think the idea of like product thinking versus
service thinking, I think, in a lot of ways, like I get the
argument for why services gets you to think, broader than just
the product, which I think is really good. I think the
challenge is most companies don't think they're creating
services. And there's some baggage with that, right? Yeah,
talk about professional services, companies that don't
scale in the same way that product companies do. So I think
conceptually, the idea of service design is looking at all
the touch points with the customer, the whole ecosystem, I
think all of that is spot on. To me, it feels a little bit like
the same way I feel about the jobs to be done language, it's
really hard language for people to adopt. People understand
they're building products, I actually like that product
thinking is now becoming a part of the vernacular. Because I
think we can grow product thinking to mean all of that. I
think one of the challenges with the product thinking language is
that we tend to think it's what product managers do. Whereas I
think product managers, designers, software engineers,
anybody involved in building a digital product is part of
product thinking. I'm not convinced service design is the
right words, I think it brings up too much of this professional
services. It's a little too foreign for a lot of companies.
Yeah, but think about it as we make products. That's
Andy Polaine: fair enough. I've lost count and amount of times
to try and explain it. And in fact, we you know, the way the
best way to explain it is either by an example or to work
backwards and talk about the outcomes, you know, and then go
back to that ecosystem view.
Teresa Torres: I think it's really important that we not get
caught up in the language. I'm not suggesting language doesn't
matter. I have a linguistics, background language definitely
matters. But it's really easy to get into these, like pedantic
arguments about is it like I remember late 90s, early 2000s,
it was about little D design in Big D design and information
market. Like it's nobody cares for us. Right. And I feel like
this distinction a little bit falls there. Like I saw today,
somebody pushed back on how I was defining discovery, because
they defined discovery as starting with an idea. And I
defined discovery as starting with a customer. And maybe
historically discovery started with an idea. But I don't think
that's true. I think Marty Kagan popularised discovery. And he
defined it the term itself, and he defined it as how we make
decisions about what we build. And I think we should include
the the customer, and the problem space, in how we make
decisions about what to build. But here's the deal, I kind of
wanted to respond. And I didn't, because I don't want to have
those pedantic arguments like language evolves, right. Like, I
think what's really important is that we match our language to
what our customers are using. This is part of that customer
centric thing. Like why are we teaching them all new language?
Andy Polaine: Well, sorry, who are the customers in this? Are
you talking about our clients? as consultants? Are you talking
about their end customers?
Teresa Torres: Well, if like, as an industry people are, are
starting to adopt this product language, and that's what's
organically happening. I don't think that we should be swimming
upstream against that big saying, No, this is the proper
language for it. Right? Yeah, it's,
Andy Polaine: it's not so much for me, it's not so much the
word, I've just written a piece about this, I'm gonna kind of
send out in a day or two, as for part of my newsletter, it's,
it's more about, you know, there's this famous phrase by
Rabbi who said, you know, words create worlds. Yeah. And this,
this idea of kind of, you know, the language you use, really
does make a difference. And it includes an exclusion, if you
think of, you know, illegally immigrant versus asylum seeker,
right, or, you know, all of those kinds of things, you know,
boy or girl, and what if, what if I'm neither, right, and all
of those kinds of things, you know, it's, it's, it's
important. And we see, you know, right now, we see how there's a
real push to kind of shift language, because language does
set kind of mindsets. And hence, sort of my thinking about this
is, you know, how much are we you creating a problem through
the language that you then actually try to undo through the
process lens, and, you know, like, the some of the stuff
you're working on, you know, whereas if we'd started from a
different kind of place, and I don't really mean in terms of
disciplines and stuff, I'm the same with you. I think, you
know, everyone is designing, if you're designing products that
are part of an ecosystem for me, you're in the business of
designing services, right? Yeah. And the same goes in the other
direction.
Teresa Torres: So I think this is part of that argument of
language evolves. Like I think language should evolve, and we
should introduce new terms to help people grasp new concepts.
I think the key is that the new terms have to be close to what
is under like, in order for people to adopt them, and for it
to expand thinking they have to be close to what they know
today. Right. So that I think discovery and delivery is a
really great example of this. Yeah, it was not a big reach for
people to go from product to this product is Every product
delivery, like that was adjacent to what they were already
familiar with. And I think it's right, why they're taking hold.
Yeah. Whereas I think some people take it too far. And they
try to introduce this whole new term. But in fact, I feel like
I'm responsible for popularising opportunities. I didn't create
that word, it was already out there and existing. And I kind
of wish I hadn't popularised it, because I think it is a little
too different. I think I could have used customer needs, right?
I was trying to get away from problem because we do more than
solve problems. But that's fine. It's out there. People are
becoming more comfortable with it. But I recognise it's jargon
that creates a barrier. And I don't, I don't want to be a part
of that. I want to stay as close to the vernacular people are
already using, and then try to introduce language that expands
that thinking
Andy Polaine: not yet around. So Well, let's talk about
opportunities, actually, because, you know, I think this
is one of the your opportunity tree is probably the one of the
things you're, you know, well known for. But the idea of not
just kind of going off on all, you know, in all directions, and
actually evaluating opportunities, rather than just
kind of need. I think there is a bit of a difference between
those two. And what do you think it is?
Teresa Torres: Yeah, so I do like the term opportunity, I
will say that I do think it's a good term, I like that it's
slowly getting traction. So I didn't make up this word. I feel
like it was already being used in the industry, but it was
being used by designers. And I think the reason why it was
introduced was that we used to talk about the problem space in
the solution space, we see lots of products that don't solve
problems. The examples that I always give is I really like ice
cream, it probably creates more problems than it solves for me.
But it is a viable product. Right. So how do we represent
that in this concept of the problem space? So I started to
think about like, oh, across a wide variety of products, what
are they doing, they're addressing needs, they're
reducing pain points, they're addressing desires. So ice cream
kind of falls into that desire category, like I want something
that tastes delicious, some things that tastes delicious,
solve problems. For me, they provide nutrients, other things
that salt that address that desire, create problems, so I
can't really put them in the problem category. People really
understand this problem, space solution space distinction. I
mean, it's a little challenging, but they can wrap their head
around it, thinking about the opportunity space versus the
solution, space is a little bit of a harder jump. But I think
it's an important one. So this is one where I'm happy that
people are starting to embrace it. Because I think what I see
is most people jump straight to a solution. And we even see this
like the Lean Startup, fantastic book, but it really starts with
an idea. Yeah. Whereas I think good teams don't start with an
idea. They start with a customer. And they start with an
understanding of the opportunity space.
Andy Polaine: I agree. I think that's kind of idea. I, you
know, I think maybe it's partly designer training, actually, I
think, which is, oh, here's a problem, I've got an idea how to
solve that, you know, literally if you if you are one or you
live with a designer, you will know that's kind of the really
irritating people to walk around with, because it constantly kind
of like that could be like that. And once I've done this, and
whereas Yeah, I agree opportunity space kind of makes
it broader in your sort of framing of it. And it I think
it's sort of slows down the the jump to, you know, solution
talking, which, you know, talking of slowing down, you
know, part of what you're doing on another part of what you talk
about a few times in the book is that, you know, I want to slow
you down in this bit. Even if it's just for a little Tell me a
little bit about why you think that's necessary,
Teresa Torres: mostly because of cognitive biases. So a lot of
what I like to do in the book is design frameworks or tools or
activities, to help you see your own thinking. A big theme
throughout the book is to externalise your thinking so
that you can then see and examine it. This is really at
the heart of critical thinking, right? So a good critical
thinker, takes the time to evaluate. So I have this belief,
what led to that belief. So what were the precedents that led to
that belief, and equally important, what are the
consequences of this belief? Right? That's what a good
critical thinker does is they understand all the inferences
that led to that belief and the following inferences that result
in consequences. We don't get trained in this, right? Like, I
never took a class that taught me, hey, to be a good critical
thinker. You need to examine what led to your beliefs and
then examine the consequences. I learned this from reading John
Dewey's really hard book, how we think, but it's phenomenal. Like
when you think about it, like that makes sense. Okay, so then
if you have a basic understanding of cognitive
biases, our brains make really fast inferences. And sometimes
those fast inferences are wrong because of cognitive biases. So
what I like to see teams do is if you can externalise your
thinking and start to externalise, those precepts, and
then those subsequent consequences, you can catch
those mistakes. And I think this is particularly true for product
people, because it's easy to fall in love with an idea. And
our brain is making a fast inference from either an outcome
or a customer problem, all the way to a solution. And we're not
really examining does that actually solve that problem?
More importantly, was that the right problem to be solving? Is
it going to impact our outcome and create value for our
business? So a lot of it is just how do we get people to slow
down externalise that Thinking. And then I really want to do it
in a way without you having to know that that's critical
thinking, or that the cognitive biases, right? Because most
people don't really want to geek out on critical thinking or
cognitive biases, like maybe at a surface level,
Andy Polaine: unfortunately, yeah, the world would be a bit
better. So if we did, I tried
Teresa Torres: to ground it into the work that we have to do,
right. Like, just if just follow these methods, it'll help you
overcome biases.
Andy Polaine: You know, it's one of the biggest challenges. I
think that teams face right? Which is this this pressure for
velocity. And quite often, I'll ask, you know, why does it have
to be done so fast? And why can't you take another week? And
there is no real answer. It's just that they're taught to me
and and some of it ripples up to being a VC funded startup. But
some of these aren't startups. But sometimes it's just defacto
faster is better. And it does feel like there's this real need
to at least slow down in the beginning. So you're running in
the right direction later, you know, because if you run in, if
you sprint in the wrong direction you set and you
quickly enough in the wrong place.
Teresa Torres: Yeah, I think some of this harkens back to
this, these ideas of the industrial age, faster is
better, right? And we see that show up in feature factories, we
have teams that are just this is the whole idea of Melissa's book
is avoiding this build trap. Yeah, teams think about more
output is better. That's a manufacturing mindset. And
that's true if you already have a widget that you know, people
want to buy, and more widgets mean more revenue. But in a
digital product world more features does not mean more
revenue. And so that's, it's a little bit of we got to break
this culture of more is better.
Andy Polaine: Yeah, yeah. I mean, you end up with word from
kind of like 1999, or whenever it was, where there was just so
many palettes and features, you know, when I think of kind of
physical products that I think some of the best products that
we know of, and the products, the physical products that
people kind of love they've had, like so much stripped away, and
actually sort of taking stuff away, seems to be something that
is very hard for product teams to kind of get their heads
around and where we've been talking so far about kind of
what should we do be doing and in some respects, what you
should be adding? What about taking stuff away? What should
we remove?
Teresa Torres: Yeah, I actually like to describe this in the
context of the opportunity space. So like, let's take the
alarm clock. This is a classic example. Yeah, where a call arm
clocks just got so complicated over time, because we added more
and more features. If we think about this, in the opportunity
space, we have a lot of needs, like really, the primary need of
an alarm clock is I need to wake up on time, right. But we added
additional needs, like I would like to wake up to something
more pleasant than a beep. And I would like to know what time it
is. And I would like to have a white noise machine to help me
fall asleep. And I would like to. And so we've identified
there's all these sorts of needs, that sort of grew around
alarm clocks. And as alarm clock started addressing all those
adjacent needs, the core need of I need to wake up on time got
diluted. And so what happens is, we partially solved a lot of
opportunities, but we didn't fully solve any of them. And I
think the best products limit the number of opportunities they
solve, and they fully address them. And this is partly why I
want to see teams map out the opportunity space, and not move
on to the next opportunity until they fully addressed a small
opportunity. Because I I personally believe you'll build
a way better product if you fully address a smaller set of
opportunities than if you partially address a big set of
opportunities. The problem with that mindset is that how people
buy things is different from how people use things. And in the
purchase decision, they want to see all those features. But when
they're actually using it, all of those features actually
interfere. And so until we start to figure out how to bridge that
sort of marketing versus using gap, this is gonna be a problem.
Andy Polaine: I was gonna say that's kind of a byproduct of
marketing. And I think that's how I mentioned Microsoft Word,
you know, but quite a lot of things. Equally, I could point
at Adobe as well was ematic, which is, you know, slightly
marketing team, like, what new stuff have we got this year that
we can market, then that's what they get caught in that cycle.
And you can't say we've taken this thing away, the only
company that I are the only thing I can think of where a
company did that and it wasn't painless, was when Apple kind of
rebuilt the iWork suite. And they can have stripped it kind
of right back and then kind of gradually started adding stuff
in. But there was a lot that kind of went away. I mean,
Teresa Torres: I would love to see marketing teams also become
customer centric. Right now. They're very, they're very
product centric, right? They talk about what we built, I
would love to see them shift to here's the success our customers
had with this product. Right? That I think is the is when
marketing will shift away from this feature factory mindset.
Andy Polaine: But let's talk about outcomes over outputs.
Sure. What's the difference?
Teresa Torres: Yeah, so again, this is really grounded in that
feature factory Industrial Age mindset, right? Where we've
historically as teams, produce all these outputs build these
things. And what we're starting to recognise us mostly because
of the pace of change in the world, is that we can't predict
right now what we should build three months from now six months
from now, nine months from now, and actually I think this is the
silver lining of, of going through a global pandemic, is if
you started January 2020, with a fixed roadmap, it probably
changed by March of 2020. Right? So we're recognising is okay, if
we can't predict the future because everything changes. So
quickly. Let's take a step back and say, Why are we building
these outputs? What's the impact we expect these outputs to have?
How are we measuring that impact, and that gets us to an
outcome. And then that allows us to say, it's not about building
these outputs. It's about having this impact measured by this
outcome. So let's just start with the outcome and iterate our
way through to figuring out how to reach that outcome that
allows us to react and be adaptable to change, it allows
us to test an experiment, it gets us away from building too
much and more about how do we build the least amount of stuff
that has the impact we need,
Andy Polaine: which is also an advantage of starting with that
idea of opportunities, right? Because needs to features seem
to be a kind of seemed like a kind of one to one, quite often,
I think, whereas opportunities kind of force you to focus
somewhat as well. So you've been coaching for a very long time.
And the book has grown out of the coaching. But you know,
coaching itself is a voyage of continuous discovery. So now
having published the book, and we've probably had quite a
feedback on it by now as well. What are the bits that you you
know, after the the print deadline you wish on now? I'd
like to put that in? Yeah, because things change fast,
right?
Teresa Torres: Yeah. So there's some little things like I, one
of the things I tried to do in the book was there's a million
ways to test assumptions. And I see teams really rapidly get
overwhelmed by that. So I've tried to distil it to like,
here's some easy tactics, there's three in the book, I've
already added a fourth. So I actually probably will put out a
revision to that chapter. And what's great about self
publishing is I can release that revision whenever I want. And it
doesn't have to be a full on second edition. Yeah. Um, so
that's like a really short term tweak that I probably will make
in the next month or two longer term, the big gap that I see in
the book is that I really wish that I had dive deeper into
ethical assumptions. So there's a whole chapter on how do you
identify the assumptions that your ideas are based upon? Yeah,
I did introduce ethical assumptions as a category. And I
framed it as you know, what data are you collecting? How are you
using it? Who are you selling it to? How are you storing it? We
see this show up a lot in data breaches and companies asking
for way more information than they actually need. And then I
also framed it as sort of social equity and inclusivity issues.
And that second category has blown up, we see a lot of teams
talking about, again, thanks to 2020. How do we do that? Like,
how do we be more inclusive in the way that we build products,
and I wrote the book throughout 2020. And that's been a topic
I've been thinking about for a long time. But I really want to
dive deeper. I think teams are hungry and eager to do that.
They just don't know how that probably won't be a revision on
the book. That will probably be it's, I don't know if it'll be a
whole second book. Or if it'll be a workbook that complements
this book. It's too early for me to tell. But I'm definitely
diving deeper on how can teams surface ethical assumptions that
will help their products be more inclusive and help us not
replicate? The inequities we see in our societies and the
products that we're building?
Andy Polaine: Yeah, I don't know if you know Sara Sara
Wachter-Boettcher's [Note: I got Sara's surname the wrong way
around in the recording] book, Technically Wrong. And she sort
of goes
Andy Polaine: tech industry has been unravelling in that respect
in that regard, quite a lot. And I would argue, it's very, very
hard to think about because ethics difficult, right? Ethics
is tangly and messy, and there are no right answers. And I
think designers sometimes come at it as a bit of normal, we're
doing the wrong or the right thing. But often, it's
incredibly contextual, as the you know, as the age or trolley
car kind of problem demonstrates. And it takes some
thinking through it. And not only that, it takes a dedicated
team of people to try and kind of nefariously break, you know,
to read team, something's really kind of nefariously kind of try
and bend and break and think, how would someone abused this
product? How would someone use it completely differently to how
we think and you know, and it's my favourite thing to do to my
poor students is to kind of do that with IT service concepts,
but it's really, really valuable. It sort of runs
counter in a way I think it has, up until now been connected to
this problem of philosophy, because you're going really
fast, you sort of don't realise it's cognitive biases, where you
don't give enough time to think about these things, you know,
and with data is perhaps also equivalent to the speed thing
that you know, more speed or faster is good and more data is
is always better was generally the kind of mantra now we're
seeing that kind of unravels. It's very hard to undo it after
the fact once you've captured a load of data. And you've kind of
positioned in some cases, your business model around that. It's
very, very hard to walk that backwards and expecting that
some organisations will probably fall over as a result.
Teresa Torres: Yeah, I don't. Okay. So I don't think it's
possible that a product team can foresee all of the unintended
consequences of how their product will be used. I just
don't think that's possible.
Andy Polaine: No, but there are unintended for a reason, right?
Teresa Torres: We can do more than we're doing now.
Andy Polaine: Yeah.
Teresa Torres: Right. So like you said, we can have red teams
that sort of try to beat this up. I think more importantly, we
are making implicit decisions about who we're going to serve,
no product can serve everybody equally well. And I think the
challenge right now is a lot of those decisions are implicit
instead of explicit. And so we get things like medical devices
that work for people that have fair skin and not for people
with darker skin. I don't think that was an intended racist
consequence. But the outcome is racist. Right? And so how do we
ask better questions, so we just reduce the times that happens? I
don't know that we can get it to zero. But I do think it's our
responsibility to ask better questions so that we catch more
of those instances.
Andy Polaine: I completely agree. I think that unintended
consequences are, by definition, unintended, but I think you can
have some sense of least thinking through how might this,
how might this be used wrongly, you can never catch every case,
but the effort to at least do so it feels to me like it should be
a fundamental part. Because to go that sort of, sort of square
this around the square the circle to kind of round back to
the beginning, if you were talking about physical products,
there are things that you know, you did some of these things,
you wouldn't be allowed on market, because you'd know,
they're kind of dangerous, you know, there's got some bear
wiring in it, or it's got sharp corners that people cut
themselves into, it feels to me, it's like at that level of kind
of basic duty of care, that kind of doesn't happen, partly
because I think in the digital world, it's, it's so ephemeral,
if you're an IF slide, or as you're saying about your book,
well, we can kind of fix it afterwards. But you know, then
it mounts up and you get, like, maybe it's ethical debt that
kind of builds up over time, you know, because you It's one small
thing you think it doesn't really matter doesn't really
matter. And then they, you know, aggregate to something that
really does matter.
Unknown: I think this is a really important piece. So we
can't always foresee all the unintended consequences. But
when we start to get evidence of the unintended consequences, we
can be a lot quicker to act on them. So you brought up
Cambridge analytics. That was, what, five years ago?
Andy Polaine: Yeah, something like that yep.
Unknown: Right. So it's five years later, what is Facebook
done, okay, they did a couple things they shut they, they,
they limited how much data goes to third parties, but they're
still letting companies abuse that data through their
advertising programme on their platform. And I actually like
Facebook advertising, I think they've built a really unique
advertising product that has a lot of power that helps empower
small businesses and gives them a platform to compete with big
businesses. So I don't think that all of Facebook is evil.
But I do think that they have more responsibility than they're
acting on right now. And that they didn't learn the lessons of
Cambridge analytics not fully, and that they do have more
responsibility to curb some of this unintended consequences
that is clearly emerging on their platform. Yeah, and
they've been really slow to act. And we see this across the
industry, Amazon has a lot of the same problems, we see that
they have unintended consequences of counterfeit
products, and they've been aware of it for years. And it's still
a problem, and it's still there. But I don't think there's easy
answers here. Right? Like, I don't know what the solutions
are. But we certainly can be doing more.
Andy Polaine: But this is what I mean by this ethical debt idea,
you know, which is, it's very, very hard. Once you got to that
scale, it's very, very hard to kind of then unpick it, you
know, and that there was a thing recently where I can't remember
it was but someone from Facebook said, you know, we've got the
largest amount of the other content moderators or something
like that in the world working at organisation to take away
take off this information. But you know, they've got an even
larger, aka the rest of the company group of people who's
where the business model is really predicated on on the
opposite direction, and then it's impossible for that group
of moderators to really do anything about it. And it's it
comes back to this idea that, you know, everyone is designing
this can't just have kind of have one group of people in the
corner trying to kind of fix the ethics whilst the rest of the
companies is doing the opposite. And you just see it over and
over and over in, in different industries. You know, we're
coming up to time, I feel like this is something we can talk
about, for a very long time. The very least I think there's
something there that is important a message which is to
take the time to study your thinking and actually do some
critical thinking before you touch any kind of design work at
all. Seems like a good kind of place to end that. Listen,
people can be coached by you. People can obviously read your
stuff. They can also do your classes and courses online.
Where do people find you online?
Unknown: Yeah, so the first thing is the book is called
Continuous Discovery Habits. A lot of designers in particular
because I know you have a big designer audience, ask me how is
discovery different from design? Discovery obviously draws a
tonne from the design world. Here's the key difference.
Discovery is a team sport. And a designer should not be going off
on their own being Voice of the Customer and bring it back to
the team. And the reason for that is it's hard to truly cross
functionally collaborate. When one person is the voice of the
customer. That's a trump card. Right? So we really want it to
be a team activity. So for designers listening, I really
encourage you to read the book, I'm sure there's things that you
can take from it. And really help be an advocate for the team
mindset in your organisation. There's a couple other resources
I'll share. Along with the book, we did launch a membership
community, where people can connect with like minded peers,
ask questions, get feedback, we do mini coaching sessions, we do
community calls, it's super fun. You can learn about that at
members product talk.org. And then we do have a variety of
online courses that help you develop skill in each of the
habits. So we have a course on interviewing, we have a course
on defining outcomes, we have a course on opportunity mapping,
you can learn about those at Learn dot product talk.org. And
if that's too many URLs, you can just go to producttalk.org and
you'll find all of it there.
Andy Polaine: I'll put them all in the show notes anyway. And
one of the things I always ask every guest at the end, because
the podcast is named after the round Charles Eames film called
Powers of Ten, which is all about the sort of relative size
of things in the universe. And I'm always interested to hear
what one small thing people think, either has already kind
of changed the world, and people don't know about it, or would
change the world and have a huge impact if only we did something
about it.
Teresa Torres: Oh, that's a big question. You know, I really
think that we are just at the beginning of understanding what
it means to be a customer centric business. I think in our
business culture, we're still hyper focused on shareholder
value on profit. I do personally believe a business needs to have
a profit, that's what's going to earn you the right to serve your
customer over time. But we need to elevate serving a customer at
the same level. And it's not a new idea. Peter Drucker talked
about this, but we're not living it today. And it's such a simple
idea. But I do think it would radically change the world we
live in. And I think it would dramatically decrease things
like income inequality, I think work would be a much more civil
place. I think people would be excited to show up and go to
work every day instead of experiencing burnout. So even
though it's seems obvious to you and I, I do think it's a it's a
small idea that has a huge impact.
Andy Polaine: That's a fantastic way to end. Teresa thanks so
much for being my guest on Power of Ten.
Teresa Torres: Thanks so much for having me.
Andy Polaine: As I'm sure you're aware, you've been listening to
power of 10. My name is Andy Polaine. You can find me at a
Polaine on Twitter, or polaine.com, where you can find
more episodes and sign up for my newsletter doctor's note. If you
like the show, please take a moment to give it a rating on
iTunes. It really helps others find us. And as always get in
touch. If you have any comments, feedback or suggestions for
guests, all the links are in the show notes. Thanks for
listening, and see you next time.