Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:02)
Teresa Torres is a speaker, teacher, a consultant, a 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.
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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 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.

**Teresa Torres** (3:35)
Thanks Lenny, I'm excited to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:37)
How many PMs would you say that you've worked with through consulting and through your courses just to give us a ballpark?

**Teresa Torres** (3:44)
That's a good question. I know through Product Talk Academy, we're 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, this coaching is a little bit of a different beast. So yeah, I'd probably say maybe 12,000.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:13)
That's incredible.
Would you say that 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.

**Teresa Torres** (4:24)
I don't even know how to evaluate that. I still think about some of the really early people that had an influence on me and to see that some of them now recommend my book.