Trash Can Tracking

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.