Leading Complexity Podcast episode 23 - Teresa Torres

in this episode we will learn about compare and contrast mindset and we will explore some key concepts around product discovery welcome to episode 23 of the leading complexity podcast this is where we explore the art of leading organizations in today's complex and hyper-competitive landscape we do this together with some of the world's foremost thinkers in leadership My name is Thomas Bjorkholm and with me I have Mikael Göte. In this episode we will listen to Teresa Torres. Teresa is the author of the book Continuous Discovery Habits. She is also a product discovery coach and maybe we should start by explaining what a product discovery coach is doing. Yes. product discovery coach and teresa helps product teams navigate the early stages of product development and as a coach then guides them through discovering customer needs and iteratively testing solutions to make informed decisions on what to build teresa was one of the speakers in our leading complexity program last year and We wanted to have an interview in connection with that, but unfortunately she didn't have time, but she was kind enough to record a video. And so let's start looking at that. Hi everyone, I'm Teresa Torres. I work as a product discovery coach. That means that I help digital product teams make better decisions about what to build. I do that by teaching them how to interview customers in a way that finds unmet customer needs, pain points, and desires, and by iteratively testing their solutions through experimentation and assumption testing. It's a mindset that's really critical when we're dealing with complexity. So let's talk about what do I think about complexity? Unfortunately, it's something we're facing every day in our businesses and in the environment of the world today. It's easy to think that when we face a customer problem or a business problem or an existential threat like COVID or maybe even artificial intelligence, that we want to oversimplify. We want to come up with a fast answer. We're often forced to do so by our organizational context, but we've learned over and over again that in complex situations, our first, our fastest answer is rarely the best one. With complex situations, what we find is that there's rarely a right or wrong answer. There's only better or worse answers. We find that our solutions have unintended consequences that are hard to predict up front. Essentially, it's messy. We find that we're engulfed in a lot of messiness. So for leaders that are facing complexity, the first thing that I would recommend, it's simple, but it's certainly not easy, and that's to slow down. What we know from problem-solving research is that when we're facing complexity, the best way to get better outcomes is to take the time to frame the problem or to frame the situation from multiple perspectives. So we want to look at multiple ways that we can frame the problem or frame the situation that we're facing. You can do this with other people on your team, so you can take time to individually frame the problem. and then look at how did other people do it. What this does is it allows us to explore potential solutions based on the different framings. So each framing opens up more of the solution space and it allows us to try on one solution at a time, one framing at a time and say, what impact does this have on the solution space? This is really powerful. It unlocks this compare and contrast mindset. We know from decision-making research that when we compare and contrast our options, we make better decisions. So even though it's hard, it's rarely easy to slow down. If you're facing complexity, one of the best things you can do is to slow down, consider multiple options, and take the time to compare and contrast them against each other. In my talk later, we'll be exploring exactly how you can do this. We're going to dive deep on how do we frame opportunities? How do we frame the situations that we're facing? And then how do we use those different framings to generate multiple solutions? And then how do we set up really good compare and contrast decisions with those solutions? And we'll use experimentation and assumption testing to really evaluate what's our best path forward. I hope you can join us. I look forward to it. Very interesting. So, Teresa brought up the concept of unintended consequences and messiness. Thomas, what do you make of that? Do you have any examples? Yes, definitely. Long time ago, when I was a CTO of the company called ResFaber, which later became Travelocity Nordic, when we were bought by Travelocity, we, quite early in stage, we had a forum. we are talking 1999 somewhere and it was very early so we had a lot of users but it was growing rapidly so we needed to rebuild it i would say so we were sitting down thinking how can we make the best forum we could think of and we built it and we launched it and no one was happy a lot of complaints from the customers they didn't understand how to use it. So we had to go back, listen to the customers, redo it again and at the end they were happy again. Do you have any good examples of unintended consequences? I think it's very common that we assume something, we try to build it and we of course don't know how people will react to it. And I remember an example from a gaming company. where the players complained about the specific challenge in the game and it was too hard and when they then changed it to make it easier and then player engagement dropped apparently people loved hard challenges and they didn't actually want to have it too easy there yes it's always hard to really know what the customers why the customer approaching you and and maybe that could be explained with something teresa is saying in the video uh she says take the time to frame the problem or to frame the situation from multiple perspectives maybe you have some explanation of what she's meaning with that yes so It's a key not to jump into solutions or thinking that we know the answer or knowing what to build, etc. We need to explore or make this discovery work to make sure that we are solving the right kind of problems for the right types of users. So one model that is commonly known among discovery coaches is the double diamond. where you actually have like two diamonds and in the beginning there's this um discover phase or kind of you explore the problem domain so first you can diverge on all different options opportunities uh understanding the problem and then conversion on the on the problem to actually then start to explore solutions in and then you go into kind of the solution space and start exploring there and expanding and before you kind of convert on some some possible solution that you need to validate and it sounds when you explain it a bit linear but in reality you're going back and forth you're learning you're kind of integrating what you learned you understand the problem better and you go back and forth but it's still kind of a good model to kind of remember to explore the problem domain, discover that first before you can start to define a solution. Yeah, I totally agree with the importance of really deeply understanding the problem. And I'm thinking of some another way of seeing this is to totally understand why customers are approaching you like your example with the gaming company. I'm thinking of a story I heard my wife told me. she was long time ago when she was a teenager she was working in an ice cream bar and they had a lot of different flavors and at the end most people anyway bought the strawberry the vanilla and maybe the chocolate so If you don't understand why the customers are coming to you, there's a big risk that somebody say, well, we're only selling those three flavors. Let's take away the other ones and, you know, save some money. But the thing is, the people came because they love to see those different options. Yes, they were selecting the common ones, but they came there just because they saw the options. So taking away all the other ones would probably make you have a lot fewer. people coming in to your shop but it can also be that you have too complex kind of offer and then you get too many options it creates more complexity it takes more effort and stocking and also maybe more yeah decision fatigue for the consumer so i think i've heard of what starbucks going kind of back to basics because they had just too many options and people yeah they start losing customers Yeah, again, it's important to understand what is important. So a little bit of experimenting, but also being clear that we maybe not really knowing what the customers value from our offer. Yes, she talked about compare and contrast and that she referred to research in decision making. it's easy that we think we have this solution and we just jump in and come up with an idea of how to solve a customer need a customer problem but it's important to come up with different options multiple solutions or can compare and contrast them and not thinking that one person has one id only and then jumping running with that so creating kind of a decision tree, for example, where you can kind of look at the different options, the alternatives that you have and look at their possible return on investments and then compare and contrast them and enhance your decision making in that way. Yeah, I think it's a big difference. If you only have one option, the question is yes or no. Should we have this or should we not have it? you will probably make a lot better decisions if you have multiple options and you decide which one of those and this is kind of the difference between having a budget process where it says yes should it be in the budget or should it not be in the budget and compare that with having a backlog like which one of all those options are the number one and which are number two and continue like that your decisions will probably become much better um think about it as investment decisions uh when you decide to bring something in into your backlog it's an investment decision and at least there is always an opportunity cost like if we do this thing uh what are we then turning down or saying no to so there's always this opportunity costs and uh optimizing them for for the maximize for maximizing value is essential and then you need to compare controls those different options and there are many techniques around that as well yeah i know that both of you are of us are investing in in companies and we get those prospects from time to time and everyone looks extremely good it's like just give us some money and then we will return a lot of it which seldom is true unfortunately um but i think i would have made better decisions historically if i would just have them all in front of me and say which one of those should i go for so maybe i should listen more to teresa um we talked about budgets and the difference between budgets and backlogs and that reminds me of the difference between projects and products but i think it needs a little bit more of explanation and maybe you can help with that yes as i used actually to teach project management a long time ago and the project per definition is where you have a temporary goal a temporary organization and temporary budget temporary resources etc so it's it's great for like one of initiatives But the problem is that if you're using it in product development, rarely you're making a one-off product. Typically, it's a product that you need to sustain, maintain, that have a life cycle and you need to have a strategy, a vision for that product and understand how to kind of maintain it and optimize it continuously. So it's better with the product focus and also with projects. It's a big risk that there are multiple handovers. Someone's coming up with an idea, you hand it over for some analysis, research, you do development, you do testing, and you hand it over often to a maintenance group or someone else to kind of maintain it or service it. But with a product focus, you typically will have a product group responsible for the full life cycle management of that product. And if, for example, building poor quality that will come back and bite you so to say and you get feedback and ownership so i think most agile organizations today are moving away from projects and more to a product focused approach approach and there is also a problem with the project where you're working and i would call it a trap and that is the focus on delivering on the plan uh or you know all this for this cost at that date and the thing is that then you don't consider this risk of unintended consequences as we talked about and i think that is problem so you will ignore it uh you will just keep on you have your focus on on the date and making sure that you deliver on that date and honestly most of the cases that is not the most important thing i mean no one cares about the project delivering on time but not according to what the customers want then it's worthless anyway it doesn't matter if you deliver it ever because it's not what the customers wants then it's better to have more focus on what is a customer considering why why do they value us what is important for them why are they paying us the money or the time they're spending on with us that is so much more important and and so i think it's a trap as soon as we start with the project there's this risk that we focus on the wrong things yeah there is a technique in project management called the work breakdown uh what you do is you kind of make an hierarchy of all the work to be done so you break down all the work but the problem is of course that if it's complex you don't it's impossible to identify all the work up front So even if you did, you cannot really put all those work pieces together at the end anyway. So it's much better to have the kind of outcome based approach, the more agile approach, only breaking down the outcomes so that you still have a connection to the whole. And I think Teresa, she has a tool for that called the Opportunity Solution Tree. Would you like to explain that a bit? Yes, exactly. She's kind of... very famous for this tool and the idea is exactly as you say it's to help the teams to stay focused on their outcome so the outcome is the value we produce the output is the work we do and this opportunity solution tree it's starting with some wished outcome it could be a strategic goal or something like that say and then we break that down into opportunities like we want to have thousand new customers by the end of this year what are the opportunities or the problems why don't we have them already or what are the possibilities how do we can get them then we have a possible choices on each of those choices we can look for different possible solutions how we can then kind of use this opportunity make use of it and then we can reach the desired outcome and then at the end we need to build some experiments to see if we actually are solving the problem and getting the outcome that we wanted from the beginning the thing is she's also adding that you don't really have the time or the money to build all those different experiments but you can also by having this compare and contrast thing you you could be just brainstorming like the double diamond idea about what are the opportunities we have what are the solutions we could be using and then how we can build them and by comparing different solutions we and contrasting that is focusing on the big differences between them we could even though it's just a thinking game we could actually come up with what are the the highest value experiments and do those but still having the other ones in our thought and if we don't see that the expanded is going is giving us the outcome that we are expecting then it's easy for us to go for something else and as Dave Snowden is saying in the complex domain we need to try inspect and adapt so small experiments test them in some way get some feedback and learn from that yes so the solution opportunity solution tree is highly recommended okay I think it's time to wrap up for today and we're curious about your reflections as always and please share your comments and your experience about discovery work if you want to learn more about leading in complexity we suggest that you check out all our earlier episodes you can find them at leading complexity.com slash podcast or you can search for your leading complexity podcast on youtube spotify or hopefully your favorite podcast platform and remember to subscribe to our channel thanks for today thank you

In this episode of the Leading Complexity podcast, hosts Tomas Björkholm and Michael Göthe dive into a thought-provoking conversation with Teresa Torres, a product discovery coach known for her Opportunity Solution Tree. Together, they explore key concepts around product discovery, including the importance of framing problems from multiple perspectives and comparing solutions to make better decisions. As they listen to Teresa's insights, Tomas and Michael clarify and highlight critical moments from the interview, offering their own reflections on complex decision-making and the challenges of product development. Join them for a deeper understanding of how to navigate complexity and drive smarter outcomes in your organization.