#35: Increasing your impact

A Q&A with internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and coach Teresa Torres

This week, I am a bit star-struck: Teresa Torres, global tech industry thought-leader, is our Q&A guest. As an acclaimed coach, speaker, and prolific blogger, Teresa has transformed how teams build digital products, helping us become more customer-centric, habit-driven, and impact-oriented. So after teaching over 8,500 product people, it was only fitting that in 2021 Teresa should expand her reach even further with Continuous Discovery Habits, her first book.

I invited Teresa to Pass It On because I believe that her frameworks are just as applicable to non-profits as they are to tech companies. Whether we’re building a delivery app or a charity initiative, we are all responsible for creating something that solves a genuine problem for end-users while achieving the desired outcome for the organisation. Teresa’s answers will help you understand what that process involves, why the conditions surrounding that process need to change for non-profits, and how the tech sector can support. I hope her ideas will impact your work as much as they have done mine.

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Increasing your impact - with Teresa Torres

You're an expert in teaching tech teams to be more impactful. What does that process involve, and why is it important?

How many apps on your phone don't work very well for you? A lot, right? We encounter challenges with technology every day. Typically, these challenges exist because the teams building the technology haven't engaged enough with the people using their products. They haven't fully understood the problems they are trying to solve for those people. Whatever the industry, one small change can make or break whether a product, service, programme, or initiative will work or not. So we have to engage with our end-users, talk to them, and make sure that our decisions work for them. 

Being impactful also requires us to measure the impact of our work. Otherwise, how do we know we've made a difference? Here, teams should start with the desired outcome and then identify the opportunities to reach that outcome. Let me give you an example:

On the US West Coast, where I live, many charities work with homelessness. One way those charities could focus and prove the impact of their work is to reduce the number of people sleeping on the street. With that desired outcome as the starting point, the next step is figuring out the best path to achieving it. After all, there are plenty of ways to reduce the number of people sleeping rough. But for those in Portland, let's say—how did they end up in this situation? What's keeping them there? What are their unmet needs? The best way to find out is by talking to those people and identifying the recurring pain points. And only then, start designing solutions to address those pain points.

If you're interested in exploring this discovery process, check out my opportunity-solution tree. It's a framework for charting the best path to impact.

Talking to end-users is easier said than done, especially with limited time and resources. Where do teams start?

Start building a habit. If your baseline is zero, begin with one monthly interview slot. Then next month, make it two slots, and so on. To make that habit stick, firstly: look for ways to reduce the effort and willpower. For example, could another company source interviewees for you, so you don’t have to? Would a recurring calendar invite to talk to end-users make you more likely to prioritise it? After all, habits work when they're automatic. Secondly, focus on consistency over quantity: talking to five end-users once a month is better than talking to 20 end-users in one go once a year. If you want to scale your impact, consistency is key. My book provides a lot of advice on this.

Image description: This is a photograph of Teresa’s book, Continuous Discovery Habits. The book is hardback, with a dark blue cover and white and yellow text.

To scale your work's impact, you recently evolved your coaching practice into a course-first business. Scaling is a challenging step for any organisation; how should we approach it?

Don't be afraid to do things that don't scale. Take Airbnb. Early in their journey, the founders learned that high-quality apartment photos were vital for securing bookings. So they visited the hosts' homes in NYC and took high-quality pictures for free. That solution wasn't scalable, but at that time, it made sense: those photos helped Airbnb build trust, which ultimately helped the company grow. The same logic applies to my business. If I had started as a course business on day one, I wouldn't have known what to put in those courses. But by starting as a coach, I was able to test out different ideas and figure out what people really needed. So we have to do things that don't scale to learn what works, especially at the start. 

Once we find what is working, we need to be extremely careful and deliberate about how we grow and expand. That step is a whole other challenge in itself, and so many startups struggle at this phase: all their existing processes, or lack thereof, start crumbling. Fortunately, Tech has a strong culture of writing about challenges and best practices, even across industry verticals. (Airbnb shared those photography learnings on their blog.) I'm not sure the same level of knowledge sharing exists within the non-profit world. Lack of resources is undoubtedly a barrier, but is there a cultural one too? I'd love to see more non-profits sharing their learnings out in the open. Pass It On is setting a great example, and there are plenty of other ways the tech industry could support, too.

Image description: Teresa is a woman with curly brown hair. She’s smiling into the camera, wearing a dark blue top with cropped sleeves.

Funding is another way the tech industry can support non-profits. Is there a “good” way to provide funding?

We need more flexible funding options if we want non-profits to embrace outcome-oriented processes. The typical funding model requires a non-profit to specify the solution already at bid-writing, before it's even fully understood the problem. It's great to see philanthropists like MacKenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos' ex-wife, challenge this approach:

"When our giving team focuses on any system in which people are struggling, we don't assume that we, or any other single group, can know how to fix it. We don't advocate for particular policies or reforms. Instead, we seek a portfolio of organizations that supports the ability of all people to participate in solutions."

Since June 2021, Scott has donated almost $4bn with virtually no strings attached. This sends a powerful and inspiring message, but I do think we need some conditions. Look at what happened when Mark Zuckerberg gave $100million to New Jersey state schools: they weren't equipped to spend that kind of money, and virtually nothing came from it. So we have to strike a balance between flexibility and accountability. Here, I think the concept of seed funding could help. If seed funding provides startups with some initial cash to prove that their business idea works, why couldn't a non-profit do the same with a new initiative? Under this model, fundraisers are free to chart the best path forward; but to raise more cash, they have to prove some impact. That seems like a fair deal to me.

How else can the tech and non-profit sectors come closer together?

If the tech industry wants to impact the non-profit world, it should start by trying to understand it. There's a lot of hubris in the tech industry—people thinking they can immediately build something better and/or throw money at the problem (à la Zuckerberg). On top of that, many startup founders simply build products for themselves and those like them, i.e., people living in urban areas with plenty of discretionary income, time, good internet connection. That's not a great foundation for empathy. So if we want to help, we must understand the pain points of the non-profits and their end-users.

I’d also like to see tech companies help non-profits better measure their impact. Consider the homelessness example again. In the US, we run an annual unhoused population count in the dead of winter—clearly held at that time of year to underrepresent the scale of the problem. To get the total, volunteers literally count the number of people sleeping on the street. But with the right skill set and technology, we could count in a much more accurate and scalable way. These are the kinds of challenges the tech industry is ideally placed to solve.

What top three books have had the most impact on you as a leader and why?

Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath—an engaging, accessible, evidence-based book on how to make good decisions. We all make decisions, and it's in our interest to learn how to make better ones.

Nudge by behavioural economists Richard Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein—an eye-opening read that shows how the smallest of decisions can help people make radically better choices. This book has been integral to my thinking about habits, both from an individual and organisational perspective.

How We Think by educational philosopher John Dewey—Written in 1910 and still highly relevant, this book examines the importance of critical thinking and its role in building a thriving democracy. In today's polarised world, it pays to be able to examine your thinking and the consequences of holding a particular belief.

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Keen to learn more about Discovery and outcome-oriented processes? Check out Teresa’s extensive blog, send her a tweet, or grab a copy of her book. I also recommend Scott Colfer’s Pass It On Q&A from last year.

Thanks so much for reading,

Lauren