Trash Can Tracking - All Things Product Podcast with Teresa Torres & Petra Wille

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What if the ideas you throw away tell you more about the health of your product process than the ones you ship?

In this episode of All Things Product, Petra Wille introduces trash can tracking — a deceptively simple technique for making discovery work visible. By adding trash can symbols across your discovery and delivery boards, teams can see (and celebrate) the customer problems and solutions they deliberately choose not to pursue.

Petra and Teresa dig into what an empty problem-space trash can versus an empty solution-space trash can each signals about your team's innovation, strategy, and discovery culture. Along the way they wrestle with the "golden trash can," the hidden cost of solving every customer problem that lands on your plate, and how psychological safety shapes which problems ever surface in the first place.

Whether your trash cans are overflowing or suspiciously empty, this conversation will change how you think about the work you decide to walk away from.

Key takeaways

• Trash can tracking means placing trash can symbols along your discovery and delivery boards so that discarded work is tracked as deliberately as delivered work.
• It helps answer two questions leaders and teams ask often: "Are we innovating enough?" and "Is our discovery actually working?"
• The "golden trash can" is what happens when a shipped feature flops and the team removes the code — - Petra and Teresa debate whether that belongs on the delivery board (as wasted effort to avoid) or the discovery board (as learning to celebrate).
• An empty solution-discovery trash can is a clear red flag: it means the team isn't comparing and contrasting multiple options.
• An empty problem-space trash can is more nuanced — it could signal an innovation gap, a command-and-control culture, or, if your strategy and vision are strong, a perfectly healthy filter working as intended.
• Whether customer problems even reach the board depends on psychological safety — can support agents, salespeople, engineers, and customers all bubble problems up to be assessed?
• The trash can also becomes a ritual for retiring "zombie opportunities" — decisions a team made to walk away from a problem that the rest of the org keeps resurfacing.

Also discussed

• Why saying no to certain customer problems is a sign your strategy is actually working.
• A brief detour into German recycling supremacy.
• A teased future episode: "Unpacking Innovation."

Resources & Links:

• Follow Teresa Torres: https://ProductTalk.org
• Follow Petra Wille: https://Petra-Wille.com

Mentioned in this episode:

• Illustrations of the discovery and delivery task boards
• Petra’s blog post explaining the idea assessment: Opportunity Assessment: Do We Want to Invest in Discovering This Idea?
• Opportunity Solution Trees (OSTs) — Teresa's continuous discovery framework
• How Compare and Contrast Decisions Lead to Better Product Outcomes

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