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.