Bridging the Strategy Gap: Teresa Torres on Making Business Context Explicit for Product Teams

In a recent LinkedIn post, Teresa Torres discusses a pervasive challenge faced by product teams: the disconnect between daily work and strategic business context. Torres, co-founder of Product Talk, highlights how many teams struggle to articulate fundamental business details, leading to decisions that lack impact and create organizational misalignment.

Torres begins by posing a series of critical questions that many product teams cannot confidently answer, underscoring the lack of clarity around core business elements. She asks:

Can you clearly articulate your company’s business context with confidence? Do you know who your target customer is (and more importantly, who isn’t)? How they pay for the product? What drives a renewal?

The Elusive Nature of Business Context

According to Teresa Torres, this lack of clarity is often not the fault of the teams themselves. She explains that crucial business context is frequently implied, residing only in the minds of busy executives who assume it is common knowledge. This assumption, however, leads to frustration when product teams make decisions that appear to have little bearing on the company’s strategic goals.

Torres points out the consequences of this implied context:

In our experience coaching product teams, Hope Gurion and I have found that most teams struggle to connect their day-to-day work to strategic business context. They can’t answer how their work drives revenue. They think everyone is the target customer. They don’t consider market differentiators when making product decisions.

The result, as described by Torres, is a state of “chaos and misalignment” because teams lack specific, actionable insights to guide their product development efforts.

Solving the Contextual Disconnect

The Need for Explicit Business Fundamentals

Teresa Torres argues that it is time to address this fundamental problem head-on. She and Hope Gurion have developed a new course, “Business Fundamentals: Navigate your business context with confidence,” designed to equip leaders and teams with the necessary understanding.

The course aims to provide clarity by teaching participants how to answer what Torres identifies as “the 14 essential questions” that underpin sound product strategy. The core objective, as stated by Torres, is to bridge the gap between implied assumptions and explicit knowledge.

Get your business context out of your head. Make it explicit. This allows you to examine it, question it, and align around it.

By making this business context explicit, organizations can foster better decision-making, ensure alignment, and ultimately drive more impactful product outcomes. Torres emphasizes that this process enables teams to move beyond shallow answers and develop a deep, actionable understanding of how their work contributes to the company’s overall success.