Teresa Torres

World Pulse

Board Member

Product Talk

I help digital product teams adopt continuous product discovery practices including a regular cadence of customer interviews, rapid prototyping, and assumption testing. I emphasize strong critical thinking practices to ensure there is a strong connection between what the teams are learning in their research activities with the product decisions that they are making. 

Recent clients include: Allstate, CarMax, CapitalOne, Snagajob, Spotify, among others.

Product Discovery Coach

Master of Science in Learning & Organizational Change at Northwestern University

Instructor, Designing Solutions for Organizational Effectiveness

Executive Learning & Organizational Change Program at Northwestern University

Instructor, Co-Creating Change

Kindling

Advisor

AfterCollege

- Relaunched www.aftercollege.com to move away from traditional search and toward career exploration and discovery to better meet college students needs. 
- Repositioned employer products away from transactional job listing-based recruiting and toward on-campus relationship-building recruiting.
- Grew engaged users by 65% month over month and reduced audience churn by 3x.
- Redesigned product email strategy tripling MAU in first quarter.
- Introduced user-centered, hypothesis-driven product development practices.
- Launched content marketing strategy targeting college students (blog.aftercollege.com) and employers (employers.aftercollege.com).

Vice President, Products

Affinity Circles

Affinity Circles was acquired by Mingle LLC. 

Affinity Circles operates exclusive social networks for over 150 university alumni associations, professional organizations and honor societies, connecting 18 million members.

President & CEO

- Led an operational turnaround by focusing on core products, implementing new sales and account management processes, growing a key channel partner relationship and reducing operating expenses. 
- Extended operating runway from months to sustained profitability.

Vice President, Operations

- Drove product vision, strategy and execution for 2 revenue-generating product lines, including a social networking platform used by Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Purdue and 150+ other organizations and a corporate recruiting solution used by Google, Merrill Lynch, UBS and dozens of other Fortune 500 clients.
- Drove product discovery through client interviews, user research, usability studies and traffic analysis. 
- Managed a 4-person team of product managers and an interaction designer.

Senior Director, Product Management & User Experience Design

Become, Inc.

Become.com provides shoppers with product research and price comparison.

- Led design on core product from site launch to 3.5 million monthly unique visitors.
- Drove product discovery through user research, usability studies and site traffic analysis.
- Led design and development of key-performing features from concept to launch: “Suggest as You Type” Search Suggestions, “My Favorites” shopping cart, innovative shop filters including Find by Color and community-based shopping lists.

Product Manager / UI Designer

HighWire Press

HighWire Press, a division of the Stanford University Libraries, is the online publisher for over 1400 journals, books, reference works and other scholarly publications.

- Lead interaction designer for several Knowledge Environments (i.e. research collaboration communities) for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Oxford University Press and the International Bone and Mineral Society.
- Managed client design projects from concept to launch.
- Drove the design and implementation of several core features that became part of the Knowledge Environment platform including a suite of personalization services (i.e. saved searches, research folders, etc) and an innovative virtual journal that pooled topical articles from multiple publications.
- Implemented a robust template system that allowed diverse Knowledge Environments to maximize shared code while accommodating customizations.

Interaction Designer

As a product discovery coach, I help product teams make better decisions about what to build. I teach them how to:
- Identify clear business outcomes 
- Uncover unmet customer needs, pain points, and desires
- Discover the right solutions that deliver both business value and customer value

My book Continuous Discovery Habits has sold over 100,000 copies, we've taught over 15,000 students from 102 countries through the Product Talk Academy, and reach 100,000s of product people through our free blog posts and social media content.

If you aren't satisfied with how your teams decide what to build, get in touch.

I help digital product teams adopt continuous product discovery practices including a regular cadence of customer interviews, rapid prototyping, and assumption testing. I emphasize strong critical thinking practices to ensure there is a strong connection between what the teams are learning in their research activities with the product decisions that they are making. 

Recent clients include: Allstate, CarMax, CapitalOne, Snagajob, Spotify, among others. 

DocuSign

Senior Product Design Manager

Product Design Manager

Lead Product Designer

CarMax

Principal Product Designer

Responsible for reinventing the way customers find and fall in love with their next car. Worked hand-in-hand with Product Manager, Lead Engineer, and Field Expert to identify opportunities and develop hypotheses that can be quickly validated. Lead qualitative and quantitative research studies throughout the entire product cycle (discovery, delivery, iteration) and present findings to executive stakeholders. Collaborate daily with partner associates across product teams, disciplines, and other verticals to execute work that is holistically integrated and scaleable.  Additional responsibilities include guiding and mentoring junior product designers.

Senior Product Designer

Rockfish Interactive

Designed and oversaw experience architecture for national-level projects. Led rapid innovation workshops and design studios with clients to deliver effective solutions with built-in shared understanding. Increased team efficiency by establishing standard templates and style guides that the entire UX discipline integrated into their workflow. 

Clients included: Walmart, Valvoline, Sunrun, Corner Bakery Cafe, America's Health Rankings

Senior User Experience Architect

Deutsch

Managed advertising campaigns to success through novel applications of emerging technology. Collaborated across Creative and Strategy teams to develop ideas that were both technologically feasible and valuable to users.

Highlights:
• Launch of Pop Secret’s digital presence, Pop Secret Labs. Several micro-products were built to connect the brand to a relevant need (streaming movies at-home) in a meaningful way. Sales of the brand increased by 6%. 
• Complete redesign and overhaul of Volkswagens new website, vw.com. New website had a 323% lift in lead submissions. 
• Other clients included: Dr Pepper Snapple Group, Sony Playstation, Nike, Target

Creative Technologist

Facebook

Developed a mobile experience for Facebook's first ever marketing conference. Designed, developed, and launched a mobile micro-site for the event in under a month.

Creative Technology Intern

Freelance

Designed and oversaw experiential installations for a variety of venues and clients, from theme parks to corporate exhibitions. Collaborated with other designers, producers, and installers to ensure projects met deadlines and stayed on-budget. 

Clients: Universal Studios, Mattel, Showtime, MTV, REDCAT, CalTech

Experiential Production Designer

I am a passionate designer, technologist, researcher, and speaker who has helped companies innovate and achieve significant impact in their business outcomes. I follow a very simple set of principles to build great experiences:

1. Deeply understand the problem. Discover what "job" a customer is hiring to get done.
2. Build to learn. Prototype and test with actual customers frequently.
3. Stay humble, stay curious. Because customers are experts in their problems, it's crucial to co-create with them and learn how to make things better.

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Teresa Torres

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