Who is Teresa Torres: Background, Book, Courses, and More
Teresa Torres is a trailblazer in product management, known for her practical wisdom and unique perspectives.
In this blog, we’ll explore her background and the journey that shaped her insights. We’ll highlight her influential book, which has inspired product teams worldwide.
We’ll also delve into her popular courses that have had a profound impact on product professionals.
Who is Teresa Torres?
Teresa Torres is a renowned author, speaker, and product discovery coach. She promotes a structured, sustainable approach to continuous discovery, enabling product teams to integrate customer feedback into their daily decision-making processes.
Teresa has coached hundreds of teams across various industries, from early-stage startups to large global enterprises. Some of the companies that have benefitted from Teresa’s coaching are CarMax, Snagajob, Spotify, and Tesco.
Through her Product Talk Academy, she has taught over 13,000 product professionals essential discovery skills. She is also the author of the influential book “Continuous Discovery Habits.”
How did Teresa Torres get started in product management?
Teresa Torres holds a Bachelor of Science in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University and a Master of Science in Learning and Organizational Change from Northwestern University.
Prior to her coaching career, she led product and design teams at several early-stage internet companies.
Her product career began with Become where she drove product discovery and led the development of key product features. She then moved to Affinity Circles, where she quickly climbed the ladder to become the President and CEO.
Most recently, Teresa served as VP of Products at AfterCollege, a startup dedicated to helping college students secure their first jobs.
She is now a product discovery coach where she supports digital product teams in implementing ongoing discovery practices that include conducting interviews, developing prototypes, and thoroughly testing assumptions.
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Teresa Torres’s book: Continuous Discovery Habits
Teresa Torres is the author of the bestselling book – Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value.
Rated 4.7 stars on Amazon, Continous Discovery Habits offers a structured and sustainable method for continuous discovery that creates valuable products customers love.
The book is divided into three main parts: what is continuous discovery, continuous discovery habits, and developing your continuous discovery habits.
It also provides a comprehensive, step-by-step framework for incorporating continuous discovery and learning into product development. Using practical techniques and real-world examples, Teresa demonstrates how to consistently collect customer insights, validate assumptions, and make informed decisions based on data.
You can buy the book here.
Top blog posts of Teresa Torres
If you don’t have the time to read Teresa’s book (even though we highly recommend you should), the following blog posts should give you some insight into the continuous discovery process.
- Product discovery basics: Everything you need to know – The title says it all; you’ll learn what product discovery is, why it is needed, what its structure looks like, and more.
- Customer interviews: How to recruit, what to ask, and how to synthesize what you learn – This article is a quick class on choosing the right customers to interview and how to collect insights from them.
- Story-based customer interviews uncover much-needed context – This blog explains how story-based customer interviews provide deeper insights into customer behaviors and needs compared to traditional methods.
- Defining product outcomes: The 8 most common mistakes you should avoid – This blog outlines common mistakes in setting outcomes for product teams and provides strategies to avoid these pitfalls, ensuring alignment with business goals.
Top podcasts/webinars of Teresa Torres
If you prefer listening (and watching) over reading, Teresa has appeared on several noteworthy podcasts and webinars. Here are our top recommendations:
- The what & why of continuous discovery with Teresa Torres – In Userpilot’s Product Drive, Teresa gives an overview of the continuous discovery process and opportunity solution tree.
- Build better products with continuous product discovery – In a podcast hosted by Lenny Rachitsky, Teresa discusses in detail about continuous product discovery and gives real-life examples to support her answers.
- Introduction to modern product discovery – Teresa explains recent changes in product management and discusses how to leverage trends to create a better product strategy.
Teresa Torres’s courses worth taking
In Product Talk, Teresa shares her valuable experience and learning through a series of courses that have been taken by 13,000+ product professionals and 3,300+ companies.
Here are all the courses she offers:
- Master class: Continuous discovery habits – Learn the habits of successful product teams, perfect for those new to continuous discovery with limited time for homework.
- Deep dive: Defining outcomes – Understand how to translate business outcomes into actionable product outcomes and advocate them within your company.
- Deep dive: Continuous interviewing – Learn how to extract actionable insights from customer interviews by asking them the right questions.
- Deep dive: Opportunity mapping – Uncover the optimal route to your goal with a customer-centric approach, ideal for prioritizing unmet needs and pain points.
- Deep dive: Identifying hidden assumptions – Explore potential pitfalls that can disrupt your product ideas and learn to evaluate and test assumptions effectively.
- Deep dive: Assumption testing – Efficiently assess the viability of ideas, learning to test multiple assumptions and align as a team on the next steps.
How Userpilot can help you implement the continuous product discovery process?
Without the right tool for the job, it is nearly impossible to execute Teresa’s continuous discovery process. Here’s how Userpilot can help you get the job done:
- Find the right customers to interview: With advanced customer segmentation capabilities, you can choose the right customers to speak with. This will ensure no resources are wasted, and you extract actionable insights.
- Collect customer feedback through surveys: Once you’ve selected the right segment, trigger surveys to collect feedback at scale. Customize predesigned templates or create them from scratch (without coding).
- Conduct product experiments: To validate feature ideas before building and launching them, conduct experiments in-app to test the engagement they receive.
- Analyze the performance of new features: Once launched, assess the performance of features by assessing key metrics. Userpilot’s dashboards visualize multiple reports in a single place, so you’re always on top of performance.
Conclusion
Teresa Torres’s continuous product discovery method has helped countless companies build valuable products that customers love. This article shares helpful resources to guide you toward approaching this method.
If you want to execute Teresa’s strategies, there’s no better tool than Userpilot. Book a demo to learn more.
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