Teresa Torres

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

Due to high volume (and a high spam rate), I am no longer able to monitor my Linkedin message. To reach me, please send me an email. You can find my email address by clicking on Contact Info above.

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.

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. 

"When brainstorming solutions, engineers often come up with the best solutions. But it’s not because they’re the smartest people on your team—it’s because they have a depth of knowledge about what’s possible with technology."

https://buff.ly/3kfxL3H

#prodmgmt #ux #engineering

"Don’t waste time wishing the power dynamics of organizational hierarchies were different. Accept it as reality and work within those constraints."

https://buff.ly/3SDYnbp

#prodmgmt #ux #engineering

"Good product teams have a regular cadence of customer interviews, prototype tests, & assumption tests."

https://buff.ly/3jSr07v

#prodmgmt #ux #engineering

Worthy Read: The Multiple Hypothesis Testing Problem by Bhavik Patel 

https://buff.ly/3NHKcPp

#prodmgmt #ux #engineering

Worthy Read: Beyond Lean and Agile by Marty Cagan

https://buff.ly/2JT2Bb2

#prodmgmt #ux #engineering

"You don’t need to do perfect research, but you do need to collect reliable feedback."

https://buff.ly/3OdWe3P

#prodmgmt #ux #engineering

Ask Teresa: What’s the Difference Between OKRs and Outcomes? | Product Talk

https://buff.ly/3EOECbr 

#prodmgmt #ux #engineering

Worthy Read: Thoughts on Office-bound Work by Apple Employees

https://buff.ly/3ORdV9f

#prodmgmt #ux #engineering

"The longer startup founders work on their idea, the more invested they become, increasing the likelihood they miss the negative feedback altogether. It’s a vicious cycle."

https://buff.ly/3WoDcvb

#prodmgmt #ux #engineering

Most product trios don’t have a lot of experience with driving outcomes. 

They grew up in a world where they were told what to build. Or they were asked to generate outputs, with little thought for what impact those outputs had. 

So, when we shift from an output mindset to an outcome mindset, we have to relearn how to do our jobs.

Learn more in my book: https://buff.ly/3CQ4Zeq

#prodmgmt #ux #engineering

"We may not realize it, but when we set out to increase employee engagement, improve team efficiency, or expand knowledge sharing in our organizations, we are tackling design challenges."

https://buff.ly/3iUYdhP

#prodmgmt #ux #engineering

Worthy Read: Planning Doesn’t Have to Be the Enemy of Agile by Alessandro Di Fiore

https://buff.ly/2x7dFNh

#prodmgmt #ux #engineering

"Even when we show our work, people will forget to follow along. We need to remind them continuously where and how they can follow along. And we need to make it as easy as possible for them to do so."

https://buff.ly/3RnBW9s

#prodmgmt #ux #engineering

"A lot of teams conflate the concepts of research questions, which is what you're trying to learn, and interview questions, which is what you're going to ask to learn that.​​"

https://buff.ly/3XT26Ul

#prodmgmt #ux #engineering

"Trees depict two key relationships—parent-child relationships and sibling relationships. Both will help us make sense of the messy opportunity space."

https://buff.ly/3Gz3xRE

#prodmgmt #ux #engineering

Continuous discovery is about more than just tactics. It requires that we adopt new mindsets. We need to be:

✅ Outcome-oriented: We need to shift from valuing outputs to valuing the impact those outputs have for our customers and our business
✅ Customer-centric: We need to remember that the purpose of a business is to create and serve a customer.
✅ Collaborative: We need to embrace a model where we make team decisions leveraging all the expertise and knowledge that we each bring to those decisions. 
✅ Visual: We need to step beyond the comfort of spoken and written language and tap into our immense power as spatial thinkers. 
✅ Experimental: We need to learn to think like scientists, identifying assumptions and gathering evidence.
✅ Continuous: We need to move away from a project mindset and realize digital products are never done. 

Learn more in my book: https://buff.ly/3B7V5nu

#prodmgmt #ux #engineering

Insights from the CDH Benchmark Survey: How Are Teams Adopting Discovery Habits? | Product Talk

https://buff.ly/3IP7WAT 

#prodmgmt #ux #engineering

"When feature requests represent best guesses, we often end up building several features that don’t work for anyone when we could have built one solution that worked for everyone."

https://buff.ly/3xYmVSL

#prodmgmt #ux #engineering

"We often fall into the trap of treating ill-structured problems as if they were well-structured."

https://buff.ly/3jZvCJ4

#prodmgmt #ux #engineering

Worthy Read: First Principles: The Building Blocks of True Knowledge by Shane Parrish

https://buff.ly/2luvWxH

#prodmgmt #ux #engineering

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