Continuous Discovery Habits
Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value
Teresa Torres · 2021 · Business
13 min · 13 chaptersNarrated in your voice
What it's about
Teresa Torres argues that great products are not the result of occasional big research projects or brilliant insight, but of small teams building a weekly habit of talking to customers and testing ideas before committing engineering time. She offers a concrete method—the opportunity solution tree—for connecting business outcomes to customer needs and evaluated solutions, replacing feature-request roadmaps with structured, continuous learning.
Reading plan
Pick a finish date and Genius lays out the days — the plan shows today's target and keeps you honest.
Read together
Start a circle and share the code — everyone sees everyone's honest place in the book. Accountability, not leaderboards.
Who it's for
- Product managers who feel stuck reacting to stakeholder requests instead of shaping strategy - Designers and engineers who want a real voice in deciding what gets built, not just how - Product leaders trying to build a research habit into teams that currently only test after launch
What’s inside
- 1The Discovery Gap1 min
Most product teams fail not because they lack ideas but because they only investigate customer needs sporadically, in big research pushes disconnected from daily decisions.
- 2Touch Base With Customers Every Week1 min
A weekly touchpoint with customers, done by the people building the product rather than delegated to a research specialist, is the single habit that makes discovery continuous.
- 3Outcomes Over Outputs1 min
Teams should be held accountable for changes in customer and business behavior, not for shipping features, because output targets reward activity instead of impact.
- 4The Opportunity Solution Tree1 min
Visualizing the space between a desired outcome and possible solutions as a tree, with customer opportunities as the middle layer, prevents teams from jumping straight from a goal to a favorite solution.
- 5Continuous Interviewing1 min
Interviews should target specific recent experiences rather than general opinions or hypothetical future behavior, because people are unreliable narrators of their own preferences but decent narrators of what actually happened.
- 6Mapping and Prioritizing Opportunities1 min
Not every opportunity uncovered in interviews deserves a branch on the tree or a team's attention, so teams need explicit criteria for deciding which opportunities are worth pursuing before jumping to solutions.
- 7Testing Assumptions Before Building1 min
Before committing engineering resources to a solution, teams should explicitly list the assumptions that must be true for it to work and test the riskiest ones cheaply, because most solutions fail for reasons that could have been checked in advance.
- 8Small Experiments and Rapid Prototypes1 min
Testing an assumption should use the smallest, cheapest artifact that produces a believable signal, because elaborate prototypes and full experiments waste time on assumptions that a rough sketch could have already disproven.
- 9Deciding Together as a Trio1 min
Product decisions made durably require a stable small team—typically a product manager, designer, and engineer—who share ownership of discovery and decide together, rather than a PM gathering input and deciding alone.
- 10Making Discovery an Organizational Habit1 min
Continuous discovery only survives if leaders change how they evaluate teams—from tracking output delivered on schedule to tracking evidence gathered and outcomes moved—otherwise the old incentives quietly reassert themselves.
About Teresa Torres
Teresa Torres is a product discovery coach who has spent over a decade advising product teams at companies including Adobe, HP, and Spotify. She teaches through her Product Talk blog and workshops, and developed the opportunity solution tree as a practical framework distilled from years of hands-on coaching engagements.
