everything in our backlog is a bet everything whether we do Discovery or not everything is a bet Discovery is helping us make a better bet now sometimes in our organizations we need to do a lot of Discovery and make as good of a bet as we can but there's other times we can make a risky bet like there's times in business where it makes sense to make a risky bet if you work somewhere where all of your
bets have been risky because you're doing zero Discovery the best way to kill any appetite for Discovery is to say let's stop making bets until we discover no don't do that keep making bets in parallel start doing some Discovery so that eventually those bets get better and I think the reason why people make this mistake is they think about it as phases first I discover and then I deliver no you're always delivering and
you're always discovering and the more you build this discovery habit the better those bets are going to get with time so it's not that you do one first and then the other it's you're always doing both and the benefit of always doing both is with time you make better bets Teresa Torres is a speaker teacher a consultant product coach and also the author of continuous Discovery habits
which is the number one most recommended book in my newsletter slack community I'm also pretty sure Teresa is in the top five people in the world when it comes to the number of product managers that she's worked with taught and impacted in our chat we get deep into two topics the opportunity solution tree framework which is a really simple but incredibly powerful framework once you know it and two we go deep into how to
create a system within your team where you're talking to customers regularly we talk about ways to make a case for spending more time talking to customers and doing user research the most common mistakes people make with interviewing and generally how to interview customers better how to automate this process so that you don't spend a bunch of time and so many other ways to bring you and your organization closer to your
customers Teresa is amazing and I can't wait for you to learn from her this episode is brought to you by persona persona helps Founders product managers and Engineers easily solve any identity related problem including handling kyc AML and basically all manner of identity fraud you can integrate Persona in an afternoon and personalize your flows using their SDK to meet your users on any device
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and or their selfie and automatically verify that those two pieces of data are legitimate you can also enrich that information to automatically see if the person exists on various watch lists just go to with persona.com Lenny to get started so many product managers are basically treated like project managers they get a higher thinking they'll be deep in product strategy vision and getting to know their customers only to wind up
organizing other people's work and refining backlogs and organizing tiny tiny features that sounds familiar you need dovetail because dovetail gets that the True Heart of product management is understanding what customers want why they want it and how to give it to them that's why dovetail built a suite of user research products that help you get to the core of what your customers really want and why they want it
dovetail offers powerful analysis tools to help you identify themes patterns and insights in your customer interviews allowing you to make better data informed decisions about what Solutions you should build next organizations the world over like atlassian canva data.getlab Nielsen Norman group sketch Deloitte all use dovetail to get a better understanding of their customers and build better products tried
dovetails products for free for as long as you need you can sign up and dive straight in at dovetailapp.com Lenny [Music] Teresa thank you so much for being here I don't know if you know this but your book is consistently the number one most recommended book in my slack community and also I've personally learned so much from you from your writing and just your tweets and all the ways that you share
your lessons and so I'm really excited to delve into continuous Discovery and all the things that you teach and so again thank you for being here and welcome thanks Lenny I'm excited to be here how many PMS would you say that you've worked with through your Consulting and through your courses just to give us a ballpark that's a good question I know through product Tech Academy were just at about 11 000
students I'm not very good at updating the number on our homepage I think it still says something like 8 500 but officially I think we're just about to cross the 11 000 Mark which is a little bit mind-blowing to me and a ton of fun and then on the coaching side it's in the hundreds not in the thousands obviously coaching is a little bit of a different Beast so yeah I'd probably say
maybe twelve thousand that's incredible would you say that maybe puts you in the top five PM teacher influencer types that have worked with maybe the most PMS just roughly just to give people a little context I don't even know how to evaluate that like I still think about like some of the really early people that had an influence on me and they'll see that some of them now recommend my book or it's just mind-boggling it's
pretty cool yeah I feel the same way sometimes with my newsletter I'm like okay this person that I always looked up to as a legend is now sharing my stuff that's crazy before we get into the meat of the chat just real quick to plug yours site and kind of where to discover all the things that you do what's the site people can check out while we chat yeah so my site is productalk.org and then there's a few things like I blog at
product.org blog we put out two articles a month and then we have a whole bunch of courses related to Discovery at learn.projecttalk.org awesome and we'll we'll chat a bit more about that at the end so in our chat I was hoping we'd cover kind of two main topics things that that I've maybe learned most from you over the years one is the opportunity solution tree framework and then two is just the general idea of
continuous Discovery in all the ways to approach that does that sound good yeah that sounds great okay sweet so starting with the opportunity solution tree framework it's such a simple but such a powerful way to visualize your strategy your levers how to prioritize get buy-in from people get everyone on the same page and it's probably the thing I share most of what you've put out with people
so I'd love to maybe start with just like what is this framework what problem does it solve for people and how can people apply it to their product problems yeah really good question first of all it's just a really simple visual it's funny how simple it looks uh because using it in practice is really complex but I definitely have a new appreciation for that trying to teach it over and over again and seeing where
people struggle so it's a tree visual so it's just like a decision tree it starts with an outcome at the root of the tree and then it branches into the opportunity space and then it branches into Solutions and maybe even assumption tests from there and the purpose of it is um I recognized that while as an industry some companies are moving from this output Focus to outcome Focus most product teams don't really know how
to manage this really complex problem of how do I start from an outcome and figure out what to build like it's a really unstructured wide open hard problem and a lot of teams they learn how to do their jobs building products by being told build these features that's a really structured uh okay I just churn up some work kind of problem and so we're asking teams to fundamentally do a really different type
of job and I think teams needed some scaffolding for how do you make that shift and so that was the purpose of the opportunity solution tree is how do I add some structure to this wide open Messy problem now the reason why it looks simple but is really hard in practice is what's an opportunity and how do I structure the opportunity space and I can tell you that opportunity is an unmet need pain point or desire and
that's great but I can tell you that 98 of people that write opportunities write to miss Solutions so we tend to just really struggle with this distinction between the problem space and the solution space and I think that the heart of good product is really getting comfortable in the problem space of the opportunity space really taking the time to frame a problem will help and to really get into what's needed
before we jump to Solutions but it's like the opposite of how our brains are wired and so teaching people to be like comfortable with that discomfort of staying there is hard and I think a lot of people I mean I see blog posts written about how they're using the opportunity solution tree and I cry a little bit because their opportunity space is all solutions and I don't want to knock down somebody's blog
post but I also don't want this like bad example out there in the world what I'm trying to teach like how do we do this well unless I haven't found the right line there yet other than I'm going to blog about good examples is there an example of a tree that just to make it even more concrete like for a company or product that you've worked with or that you think about as a good example I like to use streaming entertainment as my
examples because like literally everybody in the world is familiar with Netflix and if I think about like their opportunity space I recommend teams structure the opportunity space using an experience map if we start with Netflix if you think about the experience of like you're trying to get me to engage with Netflix more I want to understand what's the experience of somebody using streaming entertainment to entertain
themselves maybe even broader than Netflix if you watch YouTube TV that's probably still relevant for me to learn about and understand and so the way that I'm going to structure my opportunity space is I'm going to look at what's the overall experience of trying to entertain yourself as streaming entertainment and that might look like first there's this trigger of I needed to decide to watch
something and then there's this experience of like how am I deciding what to watch and usually wrapped up in that is what platform am I watching it on those are sometimes inter mixed because maybe you're deciding I want to watch Game of Thrones and that's right away sending you to HBO Max or maybe you're like I want to watch a movie and I could be on any platform and then there's the evaluation process so is
this movie good or not does it look like something I want to watch and then I want to get into okay I'm ready to watch is it a good viewing experience and then for a lot of these platforms there's also this sort of post viewing experience how am I going to encourage you to keep watching things like that that's like that's how I would structure that opportunity space is just there's these distinct moments in time and then
what I'm capturing is below each of those what are the needs and pain points and desires that arise so if we just focus on that one around like how do I decide what to watch there's all sorts of needs that come up some are really tactical like I have a movie title in mind and I just don't know how to find it right at the pain point or hey I was watching a show how do I get back to it
it's also a pain point but then there's also these big media opportunities like I can't tell if this show is good or what right and so like everything that I just said there was no Solutions in there in fact whether I work at Netflix or I work at Hulu our opportunity spaces probably look pretty similar now the ones we choose to go after how we solve them might look really different but like the core human needs
of what's your experience as we go about our lives entertaining ourselves is pretty similar and I think the companies that build really good products they either intuitively or explicitly take the time to really understand what does that Journey look like and what are those needs and pain points and how do we create a really seamless experience we're gonna link to the blog post and a few examples in the show notes so people
can look at this kind of visually because I know we're trying to describe it through words a quick follow-up question so you have this kind of tree with the outcome say get people to watch more Netflix I imagine you recommend Max like three to five levers below that is that right and then the rest just kind of sits somewhere else yeah that's a really good question so at the top level I tend to map those
opportunities to like Steps in that experience map so in that Netflix example would be like the trigger of I want to watch something deciding what to watch the viewing experience and I do find that like oh is it like Miller's magic number the plus or minus seven rule is pretty good I would say nine is probably a lot so I would say maybe in that three to seven range and that's just because it's
you could cognitively process your tree so like the other thing that I get into is like as you move vertically down the tree your opportunities are getting smaller and smaller this is like a really key to helping us unlock a continuous Cadence so if I start with that example that I can't decide when to watch it's a really big hard Evergreen problem like as long as Netflix is in business they're probably going to have
people focus on that problem but we can deconstruct it like maybe I can't find something to watch because I don't know if this Show's any good and then we can learn about how do people evaluate shows and maybe there's a small opportunity in there of who's the cast it's one of the ways I evaluate the show now we're getting into an opportunity that we can actually solve so that's one of the other benefits of as we work our
way down the tree we get to smaller and smaller opportunities we get to things that we can actually address we're still contributing to that bigger harder problem and so what it's allowing us to do is get this big picture view of like where we could play and then we can make more strategic decisions about where do we actually want to play and then it's very customer focused because it's really all
about what you're needing this moment how can I help satisfy that for PMS and just maybe Founders that are listening and they're like this sounds really useful I want to create my own little opportunity solution tree I know that's a big question but how do you go about figuring out what kind of goes into each of these steps however briefly you can give people some guidance there yeah so
the reason why this is so hard is that it sounds really simple right but here's why it's hard opportunities emerge from our customers stories I don't think most people when they're interviewing they collect stories so if Lenny I was going to interview you about your Netflix experience the vast majority of product teams are saying things like hey Lenny what do you like to watch on Netflix how do you decide what to watch we're
asking these direct questions out of context and the challenge with that is we know from like human psychology and cognitive psychology that we're not very good at answering those questions out of context actually that sounds weird we're very good at answering them your brain will come up with a fast answer but that answer doesn't necessarily reflect your behavior and it misses context and
Nuance like you can tell me like oh I like I just like action movies I always look for action movies I can't visualize your experience I don't know what your experience is watching action movies I just collected a fact about you but if I ask you like tell me about the last time you watched a movie now I can collect things like where were you and who were you with and set the scene for me and what happened first and
how did you choose that and I'm going to get answers to all those direct questions but it's grounded in this specific instance it's going to be a lot more reliable and I'm going to start to hear unmet needs pain points and desires and the really powerful thing is I might hear needs that you're not even aware of right we're so used to like everything's being mediocre we're not even aware of a
lot of these needs that we have but when we tell our stories especially if you start to train your ear for this you start to hear those needs so the first thing that makes this hard is you have to interview well and I think interviewing is a grossly underestimated skill grossly underestimated skill that's the first thing is that if you're not collecting Rich stories in your interviews it's going to be really hard
to identify opportunities then the second thing is that you have to be able to hear those opportunities and if you're still stuck with what's an opportunity versus what's a solution is tough and then the third thing is this opportunity framing like I believe opportunity should be really specific like a really great opportunity in the streaming spaces it's hard to enter my password select specific letters on the
screen with the Apple TV remote if anybody has that Apple TV especially the old remote it's like not a very Precision device selecting those letters on the stupid on-screen keyboard is a horrible pain point right it comes up when we're entering our passwords it comes up to more searching for movie titles that's a really specific opportunity and the value of that is we can solve it whereas teams tend to want to frame
opportunities as I wish this was easier to use okay well what like we can spend our lives making this product easier to use what are you solving for who and so we're skill stacking and then you got an interview we got to hear opportunities we got to be able to frame them well and then in order to structure the opportunity space you have to be able to come pull out this common experience map
structure across seemingly unique stories there's a lot of skill involved like I'm not I wish I could just say hey Lenny it's super easy everybody should do it I think it's really powerful and I've seen it be a game changer for teams it's hard I tell my teams like when I teach in class I say look we're going to focus on structuring the opportunity space and I'm probably going to make you think harder than you've ever had to
think in your job because like we don't think that much it work we go from meeting to meeting we stay surface level a lot and here I am coming in with this like really hard critical thinking exercise but I've just seen from teams that are willing to put in that work it really is a game changer you have a deeper understanding of what your customers need and you build better products man thinking deeply no fun but
so important I want to chat about interviewing and all the advice you have about just how to interview but before we get to that one last question around the opportunity solution kind of work so the whole idea is to think outcome oriented and to your point a lot of companies have product teams that are just like build these things for us don't worry about why we're doing these if your company is of that ladder sort more of
like a feature Factory can you use this framework to kind of push the team and the company in a direction of thinking oriented or is there like a more direct approach to address that problem yeah okay let's talk about this based on the rule like if you're an individual contributor and you're not at a 10 person company I would say don't try to force the organizational change organizational change is such a hard and
messy problem I feel like what I would do in that situation is I would just change the way that I individually worked and this is what I always did in every job I made a lot of mistakes trying to change the organization but I also just carved out a way for me to work this way and I think we underestimate how much ability we have to do that so even if you're being prescribed a fixed roadmap you still can
find customers to talk to and I hear from people all the time say I'm not allowed to talk to customers I go okay your company doesn't own you when you're not at work and I bet you know people like your customers why don't you just start there somebody overthink it we think we have to go through these proper channels and we have to get permission from sales and a lot of us especially if
we work on a consumer product like just go find somebody that's like your user but I've also seen instances in B2B environments where like I worked with that team that worked on badges for healthcare like the badges that nurses and doctors use to like unlock lock a workstation that they chart in this team left for weeks ran into problems finding a customer to talk to and I just said hey do any of you know doctors or nurses
in your personal Network and the product manager was like yeah I have two uncles that are doctors huh maybe we could just start there go talk to somebody hey I think that even if you aren't being tasked with an outcome if you do the work to understand these are the outcomes that matter to your business to your product it's probably going to start with your business model and then work to understand how the work that
you're doing contributes to that all those little teeny tiny decisions we make every day even if you're being prescribed Solutions you'll make better decisions right because you have a fuller context of what your business needs you have a fuller context of what your customer needs so I think for most of us if you're an individual contributor role just focus on developing the habits yourself and I'm always amazed like I
was always amazed at how much I could do but just kind of ignoring everybody around me and how they were working and finding a way to do it I love that because it lets you Empower yourself and not wait for permission for excuses and that is always such a recipe for success for any role especially PMS that are annoyed by how maybe their company works yeah you want to reduce friction in your
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integration process is super fast and super smooth to get one thousand dollars in free credits just go to stitch com and Stitch with a Y and sign up and just mention that I sent you this is a really good segue too our second topic around continuous Discovery and we've been touching on a lot of the elements I've been interviewing and understanding pain points and all that and so maybe just to
set a little bit of foundation what is continuous Discovery your book is named after it you have courses on this which kind of like the general idea of continuous Discovery yeah let's just start at the beginning so we often talk about Discovery in contrast with delivery Discovery is just used to describe the work we're doing to decide what to build right so everybody every company is doing Discovery everybody is
making decisions about what to build we have a few trends that have been evolving very slowly over the last 20 years one of which is we're recognizing that if we want to make good decisions about what to build we probably should include the customer somewhere in that process right so I teach a customer-centric view of Discovery let's build in some feedback loops of are we making the right decisions or are we
making good decisions because there probably aren't right decisions here then there's a second Trend that we're seeing across the board which is we're recognizing that digital products are never done not like the Netflix team is going to show up to work one day and be like hey our products good enough we're always iterating we're always improving customer needs are always evolving there's always more we could do and so
we're seeing a shift from like this project mindset that worked in a world where we were just trying to get products on a store shelf right like we designed them we built them we manufactured them we put them on the store shelf we were done we moved on to the next thing but with digital products there's no done so we're seeing this shift to more of a continuous mindset we're continuously evolving our products which
means we're continuously making decisions about what to build and therefore I think we need to continuously include the customer in that process so for me I Define continuous Discovery is building in those continuous feedback loops awesome that's such a simple clear way of thinking about this because yeah broadly it's like a new term people have to get used to yeah and I think you saw I made a call on Twitter for people to ask you
questions to ask me to ask you questions about continuous Discovery and so I'm going to try to get as many of those in there in this chat as I can cool and one actually was around what do you do when your leaders tell you there's no time for discovery yeah this is a tough one I think this comes from old project-based research methods so we don't most of the time have time to stop what we're doing
and go do some research and I'm not preparing research I have been I've worked as a user researcher like I research is critical and if we had the luxury of doing like long longitudinal studies we would probably build better products that's not our business environment right our businesses are expecting us to deliver continuous value so we need to look at how do we match that Cadence what I think is really nice
about continuous Discovery you can do it in as little as an interview a week and on the interviewing side on the discovering opportunity side assumption testing people always ask me like how much time should I be spending on assumption testing I don't know how to answer that question because for me assumption testing and delivery are the same work right like assumption testing is the start of your delivery I don't
know where one starts and one ends which is a little bit hard to conceptually work through but maybe we can talk through an example so when somebody says I don't have time for Discovery I think what they're really saying is I don't have time for project-based research and I agree with that we don't have time for project piece of research so if I'm getting that pushback I want to look for okay I definitely don't like
people make this mistake of we shouldn't put something in our backlog that hasn't been properly discovered it's not true right everything in our backlog is a bet everything whether we do Discovery or not everything is a bet Discovery is helping us make a better bet now sometimes in our organizations we need to do a lot of Discovery and make as good of a bet as we can but there's other times we can make a risky
bet like there's times in business where it makes sense to make a risky bet if you work somewhere where all of your bets have been risky because you're doing zero Discovery the best way to kill any appetite for Discovery is to say let's stop making bets until we discover no don't do that keep making bets in parallel start doing some Discovery so that eventually those bets get better and I think the reason why people make
this mistake is they think about it as phases first I discover and then I deliver no you're always delivering and you're always discovering and the more you build this discovery habit the better those bets are going to get with time so it's not that you do one first and then the other it's you're always doing both and the benefit of always doing both is with time you make better bets you said
that you could do this with one meeting like an hour a week and I know you have a system that you recommend for people to make this kind of automated so you're not just constantly pinging your customers hey can I chat with you this week can you just share that yeah so my book continuous Discovery habits I do share some of the most common ways to automate the recruiting process so this
idea came from I had just read Nudge by failure and sunstein when it came out a few years ago and I they have this idea of like when you're designing a choice architecture how do you make it easier to adopt the behavior you want to see than to not adopt the behavior so I started thinking about this in the context of interviewing I want to see product teams interview every week so how do I make it easier for them to do
that than to not do that okay well a lot of us have recurring meetings that we go to every week because they're on our calendar so I just started to think about how do I make an interview a recurring meeting can I make it so that when you wake up on Monday morning there's an interview on your calendar and you literally did nothing to get it there and so there's a few ways to think about
this the most common strategy is to allow your customers to opt in while they're using your product or service so just like almost everybody's seen an NPS survey embedded in a product right that's pretty prevalent now same idea but instead of saying would you recommend our product or service to a friend or colleague it says do you have 20 minutes to talk to us if they say yes you send them some scheduling software
they pick a time on your calendar and voila you've got an interview scheduled you obviously can get more advanced where do you show it who do you show it to how much do you tailor it how do you position it but the core idea is to let people opt in while you already have their attention that works really well for consumers and B2B end users if you're trying to get in touch with like buyers and decision makers same
idea but use your internal teams that are already on the phone with those folks that's sales people account managers maybe support folks right they're literally on the phone with those people all day every day so instead of using your product to recruit you can use those teams to recruit and what I do is I just have teams Define a trigger every week like hey this week we're looking to talk to somebody who's
experiencing this neater pain point if you happen to be on the phone with someone who's experiencing that again just go ahead and use scheduling software put it on our calendar the goals for the product team to not be involved at all they literally just have to show up and conduct to interview that's amazing are there tools that you recommend that are just like Plug and Play that make this easy I know calendly
is probably a part of this oh many right so even on the on the um scheduling side I think calendly innovated in that space but there's so many fast followers getting Outlook does this now I think Google has a tool that does this now I think even Salesforce has a tool tool that does this now so if you're doing your schedule if your sales team is scheduling through Salesforce and then on the like intercept side like how are
you asking those because we have survey tools and like qualaru I think innovated in this space and then I think ethnio was a fast follower but intercom does this usabilla does this chameleon does this hot jar might even do this we have so many like user research tools that they're all now enabling this type of thing awesome for when you're actually doing the interviewing we had a couple questions
from some Teresa fans one is when you kind of know what the solution should be how do you stay disciplined and keep an open mind and keep searching for maybe something even better first of all you don't always have to do that right not all solutions need a lot of Discovery that's like a common a misunderstanding I think I I think we need to do really robust good discovery on the things that are part of our core product experience
or going to be differentiators we don't really have to do really amazing core discovery on like the forgot password flow if it's working fine and you're not hearing about it as a painful right now to be fair slack with their magic link to the cool thing with the forgot password flow and there was a nice Innovative thing that I think moved the industry forward so if you want to do discovery on that great but you probably
don't have to right so I think the first thing to assess is we're making a bet how much risk is involved in this bet and how much of that risk do we need to mitigate now most companies think there's no risk in any bets and they do zero Discovery and if you're not instrumenting your product and actually measuring the impact of those Solutions you may not be catching that there actually was a lot
of risk so I think you do need to instrument your product you do need to measure the impact of everything that you release so you can start honing your judgment on where is their risk and ideas and when you're new to Discovery I recommend you over index on doing a little too much Discovery so that you start honing your judgment of that risk but if you're working on an opportunity that's really core to your product
functionality it is a differentiator it's where you want to make sure you have a really robust good solution I think the best way to guard against what you think is the obvious solution is to work with multiple solutions for the same opportunity compare and contrast right we already know this intuitively like when you're looking for a place to live you don't look at one apartment or house you look at multiple you compare
and contrast when you're looking for a job you don't talk to one company we know if we want to make good decisions we need options and we need to evaluate the pros and cons of each and the same is true in the product world so if you're feeling like this needs to be a really good solution and we're over committing to one that's when you need to increase your options I'd love your Insight on as a PM
in theory it should be a little bit unbiased and giving people a chance to change your mind and come up with ideas that maybe you disagree with on the other hand as a PM you always have opinions about what the right answer is in the PM function do you have a perspective on how much more say a PM should have maybe over what ends up being decided yeah this is a tough question there's such strong opinions
about this and I see apologies of the product manager is the decider and they're the CEO of the product I think this is coming from toxic business culture personally I business has taught us we all play a role we have our functional silence I have territory you of territory and we're going to play the internal office politics game and I need to defend my territory and you need to defend your territory
and that outcome is that we don't really collaborate and when we don't collaborate I don't think we build very good products so if we just go back to like real life and when you're hanging out with friends and you're trying to accomplish something whether it's some you know like the example I gave is like when you're a little kid and you're playing you know like first stop and say What's My Rule material I guess it's not how humans
interact right we all collaborate and we all do it intuitively and business has taught us otherwise and there's um I'm gonna forget the researcher but there's a really cool the marshmallow test experiment are you familiar with this we're like teams are given spaghetti sticks and some tape and I some string and a marshmallow and they're told to build a structure to get the marshmallow as high as possible and
the study's been done so many times it's been replicated a million times with lots of different groups and it's a really cool story because kindergartners outperform almost every adult group including like MBA students and it's really telling and why is this kindergartners just start doing they don't worry about their rules they don't worry about who's in charge they just Brute Force trial and error what do MBA
students do there's posturing like who has power and who's the decision maker and who's right and we need to plan and we need to have a strategy and they spend the whole time like negotiating this political social space instead of just doing and I really think we gotta get we got to learn how to get back to just doing people think that I'm like Pollyanna naive about this but I've worked on teams that work this way and
I've coached teams that work this way where the trio really does decide so the trio is the product manager the designer and the software engineer and if you've never worked on a well-functioning trio this breaks people's brains because they say what are we going to do when we disagree you're going to find an option where you don't disagree right and the thing is if you only worked on a silo
dysfunctional team that sounds like a nightmare but if you've worked on a well-functioning team that's doing Discovery well together you're working from a shared understanding so for your disagreements right away are going to go down because you're working from a shared understanding and when you disagree you recognize okay we don't agree we don't have the best option yet and you keep looking for that better
option and what's hard about talking about this is I fully understand probably 98 of the industry has never worked on a well-functioning product Trio and this idea sounds crazy but I've also seen it in practice over and over again on really good teams and there's something magical about it so I'm going to keep promoting it and I'm going to hope that eventually we get from two percent to three percent and that'll be
my little dent I put in the universe yeah and I was just gonna say that you're helping make that change and I'm excited for that to be the way that people operate and so maybe one takeaway is if that's something that you're spending a lot of time on and it's causing you a lot of stress probably means you're working at a company around a team that maybe isn't optimal it's not I don't mean not to say there's
something wrong with you or your teammates right like this is a symptom of business culture it's how we've been taught to work so we have to unlearn we have to learn new ways of working and we do this in our courses we force people to work in teams in our courses and some people really hate it but I think learning to work well in a team especially when there's different perspectives and you disagree and how do
you reconcile that is a really important part of product work awesome going back to Discovery and interviewing I definitely wanted to ask you what are like I don't know two or three tips and best practices for interviewing slash what are like two or three things people usually do wrong that they should try to avoid yeah the first one is the questions they're asking so many people write these who what why how 50 question
long like interview protocols and it leads to a Cadence of the interview that is not a natural conversation so I think like the first thing to remember is that you're just talking to a human I actually tell people like if your interview feels like you're having a beer with a buddy that's a good sign like it should be that casual in that conversational but we're not going to get there if I pepper you with 50
questions right we're gonna get there by I'm gonna collect your story I'm gonna be really curious I might still have to Pepper you with 50 questions to get your story right because it's just conversational Norm of I say something you say something so I gotta teach you that I want your whole story and help you open up so that's one piece of it it's just the Cadence of the conversation really
should feel like a natural conversation and then the second piece of it is how do we do that what's the skill how do we elicit that story and I I teach in our interviewing class you really don't have to think about what to ask you could run an entire interview by asking them one question in fact let's role play this a little bit Lenny tell me about the last time you watched something on a streaming entertainment service just
last night I was watching Obi-Wan Kenobi on Disney plus oh okay yeah great okay so it was last night set the scene for me where were you I was at home on my couch just lounging okay and tell me about the moment where you decided you wanted to watch something it was like eight o'clock and I'm like it's time to watch something okay just is that part of your normal routine yeah in the evenings it's a good way to unwind and
let my brain relax a little bit okay so you're sitting on the couch you decided it's time to watch something what did you do next turn on the TV went to Netflix didn't find anything went to Prime didn't find anything and I'm like oh yeah Obi-Wan let's check that out okay so I literally could continue this entire interview by just saying oh you opened Netflix what happened next oh he didn't find anything
how come all I had to do is just be curious about your experience and what I'm doing with my questions is just helping you tell the timeline right like we're set the scene I'm situating you back in that moment let's remember what you actually did it was after dinner you're sitting on the couch what happened next I can do that over and over again and so one of the reasons why we get bad at interviewing we're so
worried about asking the next question we stop listening to the interviewee we just missed everything we were told so then had we miss those moments of oh there was some friction you couldn't find something to watch tell me about that what did you consider on Netflix let's dig into that and if I work on a team that's trying to help you find something to watch that's a gold mine right like you just told me you went on
Netflix you went on Prime what were you looking at and what didn't resonate and is it because you'd watched everything is it because it just did it match your profile it was so much to explore there but what I see most teams do is they stay really shallow oh okay so you watched Obi-Wan on Prime great tell me another story right have we just lost all the value and so some of it is just slowing down and almost being like
a five-year-old right like you really if they're saying why you can say what happened next what happened next now there's this technique of summarize what you heard show that you're listening to them bring them back to the moment where you want a little more detail but yeah that's it's a game changer what happens when you collect stories is you hear about things you would have never thought to ask
about and it's also really fun to share because I'm like oh this is fun just talking about what I did I love that you just said that because people worry like how many times have you heard somebody say like you asked the sales rep hey can I talk to your customer and they're like I don't want to ask them a favor okay it turns out if you collect stories in your interviews customers love it
most of the time in fact the sign that you ran a good interview is your customer is going to say wow when can we do this again wow I love that the other piece of this that you haven't mentioned is there's a lot of focus on what you've done not on what you would do or you could do yeah I imagine that's an important part of this we're product people are in the business of changing Behavior understanding and changing
behavior and I think that's a really big mistake that teams make is they both in their prototype tests and in their interviews they focus on what people would do on what people think on why they think they do something and it's all really unreliable it's a garbage in garbage out kind of situation the real measure is tell me about your behavior what did you actually do then we have to help people do that something else
someone asked that I really wanted to cover is how does this process change as your company grows from like early stage to later stage in an Ideal World it doesn't change because here's why like if I have a tree and they have an outcome and they're empowered to reach that outcome and they're interviewing every week and they're at function testing to evaluate Solutions and they're finding things to
build and they're driving their outcome that's a really successful team and they could do that in a three-person company or they could do that in a hundred thousand person company the primary difference is in a three-person company there's no adjacent teams right in a 100 000 person company there's a lot of adjacent teams and so you probably have some dependencies to manage but you still should start with
an outcome be empowered to go after it be and power to come up with your own Solutions what's going to be different in the hundred thousand percent company is you probably have like design patterns and libraries you got to rely on for coherent user experience and you probably have another team that's working adjacent to you that you need to share your Discovery work and be aware of what they're working on because you
do need to build a coherent product and so as our companies get bigger we have a lot of that like a lateral collaboration we have to do to make sure we're still building a coherent product but I think the fundamental like base unit stays the same something that I've seen happen with larger companies especially as companies grow is a little bit of cynicism of user research specifically
how few people you talk to and how that leads to you making a decision how do you respond to those kinds of concerns I love this I don't know why product teams suddenly are held to it standard that nobody else has held to why is it relaxed to make a decision based on one interview I just flip the question around tell me about the decisions you made last week how many customers did you talk to what data did you use like every
human in business is making decisions with zero data so I'm gonna go with one is better than zero that's a little bit of a flippant answer but it's true right here's what's happening when that question comes up I have an opinion that's different than yours I don't like your conclusion so I'm going to nitpick it and in the product World unfortunately everybody in business has an opinion about what we
should be building and so that's why we face that and we get held to the standard I have a real reason why we can make decisions based on small data we're in the business of changing Behavior not seeking new knowledge and we have really good feedback loops and so we can make decisions based on small experiments because we're going to continue to get bigger feedback loops and more reliable data over time and especially as we
deliver and we do live production prototyping we actually can get large scale data I don't want to start there because we're never going to ship anything so there is like legitimately a valid reason why we can work on small data but it's unfair question because we're not holding anybody else in business to that standard along those lines when does it make sense to run an experiment versus rely on user research
you have kind of a mental model for how you think about that yeah okay so I'm gonna our language around this is terrible it's so ambiguous what's an experiment what's user research I would say experiments or user research I'm trying to just dramatically simplify this I think from a discovery standpoint we have two core activities qualitative interviewing and assumption testing and
so with qualitative interviewing we're trying to learn about the opportunity space where do we see unmet needs pain points and desires interviewing is not the only way to identify opportunities observations are actually a better way I focus on interviewing because it's something we can do sustainably week over week most teams don't have the ability to observe their customers every week and the Assumption testing side
this is what we're anything for me anything that helps us evaluate a solution where we're starting with a very specific assumption is an assumption test so we have experiments that I actually don't even think we should be running because they're testing the whole idea before we have any idea if that idea is a strong Foundation they're taking too long they cost too much money they're taking too much time
so how do I break this down like the first thing is we have to learn how to take an idea and break it into its underlying assumptions we have to learn how to prioritize those assumptions and then we have to learn how to run tests that are small enough that they're just testing that assumption and this is all critical because it's what makes continuous Discovery sustainable right I tell people to work with three ideas at
once and teams are struggling to test even a single idea so how's that sustainable that team that's struggling to test a single idea is still stuck in project-based research world they're running experiments that take weeks to get results whereas when I talk about assumption testing I'm working with a team that's running half a dozen to a dozen assumption tests in one week and those
assumptions span three ideas at the end of the week they can start to compare and contrast those Solutions so we we gotta shift our methods right like continuous Discovery is sustainable if we change our Behavior if we change our habits this is a good segue to the end of our chat we've been chatting for about an hour I know you have to run for folks that want to learn more about assumption testing continuous Discovery
all the things that you've been chatting about where can they find you online and find these courses online yeah so first I'll mention the book continuous Discovery habits it's available bookstores around the world it's in Kindle paperback and audible Kindle ePub paperback and Audible and then I do blog about all of this at producttalk.org and our courses are at learned at hotdog.org awesome I also love to ask guests how
can listeners be useful to you since the book has come out the reaction has been unbelievably amazing and a lot of fun and I'm a little bit overwhelmed by people in the industry who have never been exposed to this way of working having a lot of skepticism that it's possible so here's how listeners can be helpful I didn't make up this way of working right it's way of working evolved from
teams figuring this out like I see it as I'm looking at how do I collect sustainable practices and making it as easy as possible for other teams to work this way so I think the way listeners can help me is if you've never been exposed to this and you have healthy skepticism that's awesome and just ask yourself imagine if this worked imagine if this was possible because I get really tired like having to explain to people there
really are teams that work this way I'm sorry that you've never been exposed to it but there really are teams that have worked this way and if that's if you've never been exposed to that go look for it there's lots of evidence of it on the internet amazing I'm hoping our chat helps fight the fight for that changing of Minds Teresa thank you so much for being here I had a blast I learned a lot
um thank you Lenny thanks so much for having me this has been fun thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode