Product Talk

MARCH 12, 2025

When you conduct story-based interviews every week, you quickly begin to collect a range of opportunities. And while some of these opportunities might be related to your current outcome , thats not always the case. It can be hard to know what to do when this happens. You might be tempted to try to guide your customer back to talking about your current outcome, but that doesnt necessarily work.

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Product Talk

MARCH 5, 2025

Im hosting a lineup of free events this March! Id love for you to join one. March 10th & 26th: Product Discovery Discussion Sessions for Senior Leaders Ive been hosting monthly product discovery discussion sessions for senior leaders (think executives, VPs, CPOs) about the challenges they face managing continuous discovery teams. Theyve been a ton of fun.

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Product Talk

FEBRUARY 19, 2025

I was scrolling through my LinkedIn feed and a post caught my eye. It read: Marketing owns defining the ideal customer profile. And then went into details on why. A quick scan through the comments showed that not everyone agreed with this statement. Some people argued a different role owned defining the ideal customer profile (ICP) there were votes for product, sales, customer success, and even finance.

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Product Talk

FEBRUARY 12, 2025

Many companies are either starting on or in the midst of an organizational transformation. Their goal is to adopt the product operating model (as described in Marty Cagans book Transformed ) or something akin to it. Much of this is being fueled by the success of the FAANG companies ( Facebook , Amazon, Apple , Netflix , and Google ) who, now along with Microsoft and NVIDIA , boast some of the largest market caps in the world.

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Product Talk

FEBRUARY 5, 2025

At the beginning of a new year, were often excited to make improvements and change our ways of working. This is the year when Im going to adopt continuous discovery , you might be saying to yourself. Im going to transform my product team and our entire approach to making product decisions! And while all that enthusiasm can be a good thing, trying to take on too much at once is rarely a recipe for success.

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Product Talk

JANUARY 15, 2025

Welcome to 2025! As we kick off a new year, its time for my annual letter. For the past several years, Ive used my annual letters to reflect on the past year, share where I intend to focus during the upcoming year, and provide a guide for folks who might be interested in working with us. 2024: A Quick Look Back I started the year feeling burnt out. I had spent the previous three years writing and promoting my book.

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Product Talk

JANUARY 8, 2025

If youre committed to adopting continuous discovery habits, opportunity solution trees are one of the most important ways to track your learnings and progress. And theres no shortage of tools out there that can be used to build your opportunity solution trees. If youre committed to adopting continuous discovery habits, opportunity solution trees are one of the most important ways to track your learnings and progress.

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Product Talk

JANUARY 1, 2025

Im hosting a lineup of free events throughout January and February! Id love for you to join one. January 7th & 22nd: Product Discovery Discussion Sessions for Senior Leaders Ive been hosting monthly product discovery discussion sessions for senior leaders (think executives, VPs, CPOs) about the challenges they face managing continuous discovery teams.

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Product Talk

DECEMBER 18, 2024

I recently spoke at the Y Oslo conference in Oslo, Norway. I was asked to give a ten-minute overview of my continuous discovery framework and then participated in a fireside chat where the host, Cecilie Smedstad , asked me to go deeper in a few areas. We covered how to manage messy opportunity solution trees , the most common challenges teams face when getting started with the discovery habits, what Im working on next, and so much more.

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Product Talk

DECEMBER 11, 2024

If youve been reading Product Talk for a while, you probably already know that the majority of the stories we share in the Product in Practice series focus on how product teams are adopting continuous discovery habits in their work. The details vary, but we generally speak with members of the product trio to learn how theyre putting these concepts into practice.

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Product Talk

DECEMBER 4, 2024

Old product backlogs can be the place where ideas go to die. But they can also be a treasure trove of feedback from your customers. And in some cases, they might be a mix of both. The trouble is, you might not know until you spend some time reviewing your specific backlog. And is it even worth taking time to go through this process? Old product backlogs can be the place where ideas go to die.

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Product Talk

NOVEMBER 20, 2024

We are starting to pull together our list of 2025 product conferences. This list is by no means exhaustive. If you know of product conferences that are not on the list and you think they should be, please send an email to conferences@producttalk.org. We’ll also keep updating this list as we hear about more events. Are you looking for the 2024 Product Conferences list?

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Product Talk

NOVEMBER 13, 2024

I’m hosting a lineup of free events this December! I’d love for you to join one. December 4th: Continuous Interviewing: Unlock the Power of Story-Based Customer Interviews This webinar is designed to help you better understand what a good customer interview looks like. We’ll cover: Why most of the advice you read online about customer interviews isn’t adequate The cognitive biases that make it hard to get reliable feedback from everyday customer conversations A simple (but not always easy) techn

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Product Talk

NOVEMBER 6, 2024

The job search process is often unpredictable. How long will it take to hear back from a company? What questions will they ask you during your interview? Will you even enjoy working there? While it’s not possible to remove all the uncertainty and ambiguity from the job search, Teeba Alkhudairi found a few ways to manage it. A big part of Teeba’s process involved putting her product skills to use throughout the job search, both in terms of identifying product-led companies and in terms of mapping

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Product Talk

OCTOBER 23, 2024

Working as a product trio is the foundation for discovery. Without input from a product manager, a designer, and an engineer, it’s difficult for us to account for the cross-functional perspectives we need to build successful products. However, most companies tend to have more engineers than product managers or designers. This creates some confusion when it comes to forming product trios.

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Product Talk

OCTOBER 16, 2024

In all of our Product Talk Academy courses , we ask students, “What’s your biggest hurdle to adopting continuous discovery?” Overwhelmingly, the #1 response is: access to customers. This doesn’t surprise me. In Continuous Discovery Habits , I wrote that the only way to make continuous discovery sustainable is to automate your customer recruiting process.

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Product Talk

OCTOBER 9, 2024

If you’ve ever felt like working as part of a product trio was hard, you’re not alone. We often field questions or comments from people who are skeptical about how this type of collaborative decision-making can work, so we’ve known anecdotally for quite a while that this is a challenge. But now we also have data to back this up. Back in the fall of 2022, Teresa ran the inaugural CDH Benchmarks survey , which asked roughly 2,000 people about their discovery habits.

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Product Talk

OCTOBER 2, 2024

If you want to make continuous interviewing part of your discovery , you have to automate the recruiting process. It sounds simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. If you want to make continuous interviewing part of your discovery, you have to automate the recruiting process. It sounds simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. – Tweet This While many product teams want to talk to customers every week, they struggle to make this a reality.

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Product Talk

SEPTEMBER 18, 2024

For years, I’ve shared that Product Talk’s primary outcome is to increase the number of product teams who adopt a continuous cadence to their discovery work. This has been our North Star metric. It has guided our work. It inspired me to write my book. It’s what motivates me to launch new courses and refine our existing lineup. It’s what encouraged me to create a gathering place for our community of CDH practitioners.

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Product Talk

SEPTEMBER 11, 2024

I’m hosting a lineup of free events throughout September and October! I’d love for you to join one. September 23rd: Opportunity Solution Trees: Overcoming the Most Common Mistakes In this one-hour webinar, I’ll introduce the most common mistakes teams make when getting started with opportunity solution trees and how to overcome them. We’ll cover: What an opportunity solution tree is Where people go wrong when setting their outcome at the top of the tree Where opportunities should (and should not

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Product Talk

SEPTEMBER 4, 2024

Working as a product trio can be a major transformation. If you’re not used to working this way, it involves changing everything from the coworkers you collaborate with most closely and your communication style to the mindset you bring to work every day. Making the shift to product trios involves changing everything from the coworkers you collaborate with most closely and your communication style to the mindset you bring to work every day. – Tweet This The product team at Botify knows this all

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Product Talk

AUGUST 21, 2024

Whenever I introduce the topic of customer interviews (the foundational element of continuous discovery ), I get a lot of questions about who counts as a customer. Everyone thinks their company context is unique—whether they’re B2B or B2B2C or some other combination of letters and numbers. And while yes, there are countless variations across different teams and companies, there are some guiding principles that can help you figure out who to interview.

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Product Talk

AUGUST 14, 2024

It’s no secret that engineers can be hesitant to participate in product trios. They might feel anxious about taking on tasks that are new to them and outside their regular routine at work, like speaking directly with customers. They might fear that any time not spent coding is time when their technical skills are falling behind. Or they might question how doing discovery is going to serve their short and long-term career ambitions.

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Product Talk

AUGUST 7, 2024

I recently sat down with the Consider and Contact team at Hemnet to discuss why they switched from Miro to Jira Product Discovery for building their opportunity solution trees. This was a detailed conversation where the team walked through: Why they started building opportunity solution trees in Miro and why that worked for quite some time. The limitations they eventually encountered as their trees grew bigger and their outcomes evolved.

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Product Talk

JULY 17, 2024

A clear outcome sets the scope for discovery. It defines how much latitude a team has to explore. It sets a clear measure of success. But many teams struggle to set the right outcome. Whether they have a hard time negotiating with stakeholders , feel pressure to commit to multiple outcomes, or unintentionally assign themselves an output instead, this is a critical aspect of continuous discovery where it’s all too easy to be led astray.

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Product Talk

JULY 10, 2024

I’m hosting a lineup of free events throughout August! I’d love for you to join one. August 6th: The What & Why of Continuous Discovery In this webinar, I’ll introduce participants to the continuous discovery framework I outlined in my book Continuous Discovery Habits. We’ll cover: The difference between discovery and delivery My definition of continuous discovery Why continuous discovery matters What a good continuous discovery team does week over week How you can develop your own discovery

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Product Talk

JULY 3, 2024

When we interview customers , our goal is to learn as much as we can about their context. This will help us understand their specific needs, pain points, and desires (otherwise known as opportunities) which will inform our product decisions. But what happens when you hear a story that stands out from the rest? Maybe the customer tells you explicitly that this is not their usual way of doing things.

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Product Talk

JUNE 19, 2024

I’m disappointed to see the rise of generative AI tools that are designed to replace discovery with real humans. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of generative AI. I use it daily in both my personal life and at work. But when we use generative AI to replace customer interviews , to generate opportunity solution trees , or to do our thinking for us, we fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of discovery.

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Product Talk

JUNE 12, 2024

Identifying and testing assumptions is a critical part of continuous discovery. But what happens when your assumption tests don’t go as planned? Whether you encounter technical difficulties, have a hard time finding customers to connect with, or run up against any other number of problems, it can be tempting to give up. Whether you encounter technical difficulties, have a hard time finding customers to connect with, or run up against any other problems, it can be tempting to give up when assumpt

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Product Talk

JUNE 5, 2024

Product trios are cross-functional product teams who are responsible for both deciding what to build and then building it. The goal is for a product trio to represent balanced perspectives while still remaining as small as possible to facilitate and expedite collaborative decision-making. The goal is for a product trio to represent balanced perspectives while still remaining as small as possible to facilitate and expedite collaborative decision-making. – Tweet This In this article, we’ll cover w

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Product Talk

MAY 15, 2024

Committing to continuous discovery means changing the way your product team operates. It’s no longer about making decisions purely based on your intuitions or stakeholder requests, but finding ways to integrate touch points with customers into your work every week—if not every day. Continuous discovery means not making decisions purely based on your intuitions or stakeholder requests, but finding ways to integrate touch points with customers into your work every week. – Tweet This This can sound

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Product Talk

MAY 1, 2024

In May, I’ll be hosting three webinars. If you are working on your discovery habits, check out the lineup and come join one. May 6 – Opportunity Solution Trees: Overcoming the Most Common Mistakes In this one-hour webinar, I’ll cover the most common mistakes teams make when getting started with opportunity solution trees and how to overcome them.

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Product Talk

APRIL 17, 2024

Leading a product team (or several teams) comes with its own set of challenges that’s often similar to but distinct from the hurdles individual product contributors face. There’s pressure coming from all directions—your company leaders expect you to deliver business results while your product teams may be working in silos, misaligned with their peers, or unclear on core product skills and concepts.

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Product Talk

APRIL 3, 2024

Customer interviews are one of the most impactful activities a product team can do. But only if we use the right methods. Customer interviews are one of the most impactful activities a product team can do. But only if we use the right methods. – Tweet This An early customer interviewing mistake is to spend your interview time exploring your solution ideas.

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Product Talk

MARCH 20, 2024

I’m hosting several free events over the next two weeks. I’d love for you to join one of them. March 25th: The What & Why of Continuous Discovery In this webinar, I’ll introduce participants to the continuous discovery framework I introduced in my book Continuous Discovery Habits. We’ll cover: The difference between discovery and delivery My definition of continuous discovery Why continuous discovery matters What a good continuous discovery team does week over week How you can develop your o

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Product Talk

MARCH 13, 2024

When an organization shifts from delivery or feature teams to product teams , the first step is often a change to team structure. Delivery and feature teams are often structured by function—front-end teams, back-end teams, mobile teams, etc. These teams can rarely deliver value on their own. Instead, they hand off work from team to team—the back-end engineers design the data model and system architecture, the front-end engineers build the interface elements, the mobile engineers work toward feat

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Product Talk

MARCH 6, 2024

When you’re building a product, you can easily get overwhelmed by ideas. There are the ideas your product trio comes up with based on your discovery work, the ideas that come from your customers in the form of specific requests, and the ideas that come from stakeholders within your company like your customer-facing teams or CEO, to name a few. While some of these ideas are unsolicited and may not relate to your current outcome or the opportunities you’re pursuing, that doesn’t mean you want to i

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