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Articles by Melissa Suzuno
Audio Version ($) The product operating model is everywhere these days. Since Marty Cagan and the Silicon Valley Product Group released TRANSFORMED: Moving to the Product Operating Model in 2024, it’s become nearly impossible to attend a product conference, scroll through LinkedIn, or walk to the office water cooler without someone mentioning the product model.
Product in Practice: Evaluating If a New API is Needed
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. It’s one thing to iterate on an existing product. It’s a whole other challenge to identify brand-new products to offer. The same is true for API products.
Product in Practice: Transitioning Customers to a New API
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. Continuous discovery is for everyone. You don’t have to be building a consumer-facing app or website to enjoy the benefits of this way of working. But we understand there’s reluctance about adopting discovery outside of traditional business to consumer (B2C) digital products.
Ask the Community: Tracking Opportunities Not Related to Your Outcome
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. 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, that’s not always the case. It can be hard to know what to do when this happens.
Making Continuous Discovery Work for You: The SPICEY Approach
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. At the beginning of a new year, we’re often excited to make improvements and change our ways of working. “This is the year when I’m going to adopt continuous discovery,” you might be saying to yourself.
Tools of the Trade: Building Opportunity Solution Trees in Vistaly
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. If you’re committed to adopting continuous discovery habits, opportunity solution trees are one of the most important ways to track your learnings and progress. And there’s no shortage of tools out there that can be used to build your opportunity solution trees.
Product in Practice: How Passion.io Applies Continuous Discovery to the Employee Experience
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. If you’ve 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.
Ask the Community: What Do You Do When You Inherit a Giant Product Backlog?
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. 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?
Product in Practice: Mapping Business and Product Outcomes to Stand Out in the Job Search
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. 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.
12 Hurdles to Effective Product Trio Collaboration
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. 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.
Tools of the Trade: How HiveMQ Automates Customer Interview Recruiting with Orbital
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. 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.
Product in Practice: How Botify Broke Down Silos and Moved to Product Trios
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. 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.
Product in Practice: Why Ramsey Solutions Rotates Engineers in Their Product Trios
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. 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.
Product in Practice: Testing Assumptions Was Tricky But the Convo Team Didn’t Give Up
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. 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.
Product in Practice: Getting Value Out of In-App Surveys Takes Iteration
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. 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.
Product in Practice: Shifting from a Feature Factory to Continuous Discovery at Doodle
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. 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.
Ask the Community: How Do You Shift From Functional Teams to Value-Driven Teams?
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. 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.
Tools of the Trade: Using Pendo to Manage Customer Requests
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. When you’re building a product, you can easily get overwhelmed by ideas.
Product in Practice: Adopting the Discovery Habits is An Iterative Process
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. Continuous discovery is not a linear journey—as much as we might want it to be. Like a lot of learning, it often feels messy and chaotic. Continuous discovery is not a linear journey—as much as we might want it to be. Like a lot of learning, it often feels messy and chaotic.
Product in Practice: Introducing Opportunity Solution Trees at Texthelp
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. There are all kinds of ways to introduce continuous discovery habits. If you’ve been at your company for a while, you might get inspired after reading a book or attending a conference. If you’re joining a new company, you might want to try a new tactic out with your new team.
Product in Practice: Bringing the Discovery Habits to WebMD
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. The larger and more complex your company is, the more challenging it can be to introduce continuous discovery.
Ask the Community: What’s a Mistake You Made Early in Your Continuous Discovery Journey?
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. You’ll often hear Teresa say that there’s no single right way to do continuous discovery. Something she might not say as often (that’s just as true) is that there’s no single wrong way to do discovery, either.
Tools of the Trade: Finding People to Interview Before You Have Customers
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. The foundation of continuous discovery is weekly touchpoints with customers. These touchpoints will allow you to collect stories that help you identify opportunities and build out your opportunity solution tree. It sounds simple, but what happens if your product is so new that you don’t have any customers yet?
Product in Practice: Making Customer Interviewing a Habit in an Early-Stage Startup
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. Founders have all sorts of reasons for starting companies. Sometimes it’s because they’ve personally experienced a pain point and want to address it. Sometimes they’re dissatisfied with what’s available on the market and think they can do better.
Product in Practice: Continuous Discovery Fuels Innovation at Sauce Labs
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. Can a single course change your career trajectory? For Mike Donovan, Senior Vice President of Product at Sauce Labs, the answer to that question is a resounding yes. Can a single course change your career trajectory? For Mike Donovan, Senior Vice President of Product at Sauce Labs, the answer to that question is a resounding yes.
Product in Practice: Creating Opportunities for Deliberate Practice at BBC Maestro
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. How often have you read a book or article and been inspired to take action on it? And how often have you actually taken action on it? Chances are there’s a big gap between how inspired you feel and which concrete actions you end up taking. If that’s the case for you, you’re not alone. Reading a book is (relatively) easy.
Product in Practice: Iterating on Outcomes with Limited Data
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. We often hear from people that building an opportunity solution tree is hard work. And perhaps one of the most challenging parts of building opportunity solution trees is defining the outcome that you put at the top.
Product in Practice: Stepping Into Your First Product Leadership Role—What to Expect - Product Talk
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. Stepping into your first product leadership role is a major change. As an individual contributor, you’re focusing on your own projects and progress, but as a leader you are now responsible for the team (or teams) that report up to you.
AI in Hiring: Boosting Efficiency or Ethical Challenges?
There’s clearly a lot of hype — and a lot of confusion — when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI), especially in relation to talent acquisition and hiring decisions. Recent legislation in places like New York City is also getting a lot of press and causing HR professionals to worry about whether they’re at risk of breaking the law. The promise of this technology is that it promotes speed, efficiency, and a seamless hiring process.
Tools of the Trade: Visualizing Discovery with Opportunity Solution Trees
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. The opportunity solution tree helps visualize all the work that goes into continuous discovery.
Product in Practice: All It Took Was One Product Trio to Inspire Change—The Hemnet Story - Product Talk
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. You don’t necessarily need anyone’s permission to get started with continuous discovery. In fact, some steps—like story mapping and identifying your assumptions—don’t even require anyone else to participate. You can easily go through these activities on your own.
Product in Practice: Learning to Interview Continuously
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. It’s no secret that Product Talk is built on the foundation of continuous discovery. Yes, all of the content we create—whether it’s this blog, the Product Talk Academy courses, the community, or the Continuous Discovery Habits book—focuses on the various facets of continuous discovery.
Bringing Order to Chaos: Using Opportunity Solution Trees in Everyday Life
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. If you’re a product person, you’ve developed a set of skills that help you in your job. You know (or you’re in the process of learning) how to identify opportunities, consider different solutions, and identify and test your assumptions.
Product Talk is Growing: Meet New Instructor Ellen Brandenberger
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. Product Talk’s North Star metric is to increase the number of product trios who adopt a continuous discovery cadence to their work. This is what inspired Teresa to write the Continuous Discovery Habits book and shift Product Talk to a course-first business.
Product in Practice: One Product Manager’s Quest to Adopt Continuous Discovery at Her Company
Adopting continuous discovery can feel like a big, audacious goal. If you’ve never spoken with a customer, how will you be able to set up interviews every single week? If you don’t currently work in a product trio at all, how will you be able to work and make decisions cross-functionally on a regular basis? If you’ve never used an opportunity solution tree before, how will you incorporate this tool into your daily workflow?
Tools of the Trade: Using Personal Knowledge Management to Solve Problems and Boost Creativity
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. The world of digital products is evolving quickly.
Product in Practice: Getting Engineers Involved in Brainstorming
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. Getting a group together to generate ideas—an activity often referred to as “brainstorming”—doesn’t always go smoothly.
Tools of the Trade: Recruiting Customer Interview Participants
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. When it comes to continuous discovery, there’s no such thing as “the perfect tool.” Instead of seeking the best tool out there, it’s much more effective to look for the best tool for your team. Teresa often says, “The best tool is the one that your team will use.” That’s why we started the Tools of the Trade series.
Product in Practice: Building to Learn at Singularity Creations
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. Saying no is a huge part of excelling in your product practice. If you say yes to every request that comes your way—whether from customers, salespeople, or executives—you can quickly get overwhelmed and lose focus. But this isn’t always easy. Product people naturally want to solve any problems they’re presented with.
Product Talk Is Growing: Meet New Instructor Ellen Juhlin
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. Product Talk’s North Star metric is to increase the number of product trios who adopt a continuous cadence to their discovery work. Teresa shared this goal at the beginning of 2022 when describing her plans to scale the impact of Product Talk.
Product in Practice: Opportunity Mapping Led to a 20% Lift in LTV at Grailed
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. What do your customers care about? This seems like a simple enough question, but many product teams struggle to answer it honestly. Often the first instinct is to frame an answer in terms of what your business cares about. But remember: Your customers don’t care about your business outcomes.
Product in Practice: Mapping Opportunities at trivago
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. A lot of product teams claim to be focused on their users. They might even have regular steps in their processes that remind them to put their users’ needs first. But even if this is the case, there’s always more they can do to improve. This is why Teresa talks about continuous discovery in terms of forming new habits.
Product in Practice: Automating Customer Interview Recruiting at Zonar Systems
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. Not having enough time is one of the main reasons people say they can’t interview customers every week. And this is not just an empty excuse—most product people’s calendars are packed. So the idea of trying to carve out time to recruit and schedule interviews might feel like an impossible task. But it doesn’t have to.
Tools of the Trade: A Look at Pendo’s Discovery Tech Stack
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. The beauty of continuous discovery is that there’s no single right way to do it. This is why Teresa often talks about guiding principles and core concepts, but encourages everyone to find what works best for them.
Product in Practice: Assumption Testing with Engineers at Orion Labs
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. Engineers are often reluctant to participate in discovery. This is only natural: Through years of bad habits, many of us have shown engineers that we only value them for the code they can write.
Looking for a Product Job? Here’s How to Assess a Company’s Continuous Discovery Habits
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. No company is perfect, especially when it comes to continuous discovery. But some companies are decidedly better than others. No company is perfect, especially when it comes to continuous discovery. But some companies are decidedly better than others.
Tools of the Trade: A Look at the Discovery Tech Stack at 99designs
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. In case you missed it, Tools of the Trade is a new series on Product Talk. In each edition, we talk with a continuous discovery champion (or group of champions) from one organization.
Tools of the Trade: A Look at Optimal Workshop’s Discovery Tech Stack
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. Continuous discovery is about changing your behavior. That’s why Teresa named her book Continuous Discovery Habits. You don’t just think your way into continuous discovery. Sure, it’s important to understand the underlying concepts.
Product in Practice: Finding the Best Way to Communicate with Different Stakeholders
Have you heard? My new book Continuous Discovery Habits is now available. Get the product trio's guide to a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery. Continuous discovery is more of a journey than a destination. You can pick up the habits and fold them into your daily practice, but there will always be room for improvement. Plus, your work environment is always changing, so you’ll constantly need to adapt to your current settings and stakeholders.
3 Simple Ways to Be Social (Without Being Sleazy) on LinkedIn
January 7, 2021 6 min read Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. One of the best ways to grow your professional network (especially while in-person socializing is still off the table for so many of us) is by building out your LinkedIn presence. But it can be intimidating: Who do you connect with, what do you share, and how often should you post? People tend to go astray when they focus on the technology.
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