Petra Wille wants product teams to track what they throw away as rigorously as what they ship. On the latest episode of the All Things Product podcast with Teresa Torres, she introduces "trash can tracking" — placing trash can symbols across discovery and delivery boards so discarded customer problems and solutions become visible, deliberate, even celebrated.

The premise is simple: the ideas you reject may tell you more about the health of your product process than the ones you deliver. An empty or overflowing trash can is a diagnostic signal, and Wille and Torres argue it answers two questions leaders ask constantly: "Are we innovating enough?" and "Is our discovery actually working?"

What does an empty trash can actually signal?

Not all empty trash cans mean the same thing, and misreading them leads to wrong conclusions.

• Empty solution-discovery trash can: a clear red flag. The team isn't comparing and contrasting multiple options before committing — a practice Torres has long tied to better product outcomes.
• Empty problem-space trash can: more nuanced. It can signal an innovation gap or a command-and-control culture where problems never surface for assessment. But if your strategy and vision are strong, it can simply mean a healthy filter is working as intended.

The distinction matters. A team that never discards solutions is skipping optionality. A team that never discards problems is either narrow by design or narrow by culture — and only an honest look at strategy tells you which.

What is the "golden trash can"?

The hosts disagree on one case: a shipped feature flops and the team removes the code. Should that land on the delivery board, as wasted effort to avoid? Or on the discovery board, as learning to celebrate?

Torres and Wille debate whether this "golden trash can" entry represents failure or validated learning. Where you place it shapes how your team reads risk: punish it in delivery and engineers learn to avoid experiments; credit it in discovery and they learn to run better ones.

The technique also carries a hidden cost warning: solving every customer problem that lands on your plate is not a virtue. Saying no to certain problems, the hosts argue, is a sign your strategy is actually working.

What has to be true before tracking works?

Trash can tracking fails quietly when upstream conditions aren't met.

• Psychological safety determines input. Whether customer problems even reach the board depends on whether support agents, salespeople, engineers, and customers can all bubble problems up for assessment. A tracking ritual on top of a gated pipeline just measures the gate.
• It retires "zombie opportunities." The trash can becomes a ritual for killing decisions the team already made to walk away from a problem that the rest of the organization keeps resurfacing — a common failure mode in matrixed companies.

Where to go deeper

The episode links to Wille's blog post on opportunity assessment ("Do We Want to Invest in Discovering This Idea?"), Torres's Opportunity Solution Trees framework, her writing on compare-and-contrast decisions, and illustrations of the discovery and delivery task boards. A future episode, "Unpacking Innovation," is teased. There is also, apparently, a detour into German recycling supremacy.

Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, via Torres's ProductTalk.org or Wille's Petra-Wille.com.

As product teams face pressure to prove discovery ROI rather than just shipping velocity, expect techniques like this — cheap, visual, artifact-based process diagnostics — to become standard practice in the continuous discovery toolkit.