Continuous Discovery

The nature of product

Ch. 10: Testing Assumptions

This reading guide kicks off a monthly book club celebrating five years of Continuous Discovery Habits, focused this month on Chapter 10, 'Testing Assumptions.' The guide frames the chapter as a bridge between…

Organizational Change is Exhausting - All Things Product Podcast with Teresa Torres & Petra Wille

This podcast episode argues that organizational change is exhausting and that individuals usually waste energy trying to fix their companies' people and processes. Teresa Torres and Petra Wille describe a three-part…

AI Engineering - All Things Product Podcast with Teresa Torres & Petra Wille

Teresa Torres, a product discovery educator, describes how she drifted from occasional tinkering into spending a large share of her time on real AI engineering. She built AI-powered tools for continuous discovery…

Taste - All Things Product Podcast with Teresa Torres & Petra Wille

Teresa Torres and Petra Wille examine the sudden popularity of "taste" as a prized human skill in the AI era. Teresa argues the term is rarely defined, hard to teach, and can disguise personal preference as expertise…

Ch. 5: Continuous Customer Interviews

This book club reading guide introduces Chapter 5 of Continuous Discovery Habits, focused on continuous customer interviewing. Teresa Torres argues that product trios should interview customers on a weekly cadence…

Conversations with Claude: Can You Conduct a Content Audit?

Teresa Torres introduces a new series, Conversations with Claude, showing how she uses Claude Code for real work. Her first example is a content audit of Product Talk, which she delegated to Claude with a task file and…

Ch. 4: Visualizing What You Already Know

This book club post kicks off a monthly reading guide for Teresa Torres's Continuous Discovery Habits on its fifth anniversary. It focuses on Chapter 4, which argues that individuals should draw their own experience…

Exploring What's Just Now Possible: How AI-Powered Discovery and Expert Feedback Are Driving My 2026 Roadmap

Teresa Torres reflects on 2025 and lays out her 2026 roadmap, framed around the idea of 'just now possible' enabled by generative AI. She describes building AI coaches and tools, sunsetting her cohort-based Deep Dive…

Ch. 1-2: The What & Why of Continuous Discovery (+Opportunity Solution Trees)

This post announces the 2026 Continuous Discovery Habits Book Club, a monthly reading program built around Teresa Torres's book to help readers practice continuous discovery rather than just read about it. The January…

Role of Leadership in Transformations - All Things Product Podcast with Teresa Torres & Petra Wille

Teresa Torres and Petra Wille argue that product transformations stall when teams are trained in continuous discovery but leaders keep managing through feature requests and roadmaps. Training leaders first is presented…

Customer Interview Analysis - All Things Product Podcast with Teresa Torres & Petra Wille

Teresa Torres and Petra Wille revisit their earlier skepticism about using AI to analyze and synthesize customer interviews, now shaped by about six months of experiments. Teresa ran 15 interviews through…

The Product Operating Model Explained: From Pilot Teams to Full Transformation

Teresa Torres explains the product operating model, a set of first principles popularized by Marty Cagan, which focuses on achieving customer and business outcomes rather than shipping outputs. She contrasts it with the…

Customer Interview Analysis: Where AI Helps and Hurts

Teresa Torres argues that teams under pressure to keep up with continuous customer interviews are turning to generative AI for synthesis, and that this often backfires. The core problem is that AI cannot supply context…

Deliberate Practice - All Things Product Podcast with Teresa Torres & Petra Wille

In this podcast conversation, Teresa Torres and host Petra Wille discuss Product Talk Academy's shift from purely instructor-led cohort courses toward on-demand learning options. Torres explains why she resisted…

Q&A Session: Building AI Evals for the Interview Coach

Teresa Torres shares answers from the Q&A of her webinar on building AI evals for the Interview Coach, a teaching tool that gives students feedback on their customer interviews. She explains her lean, hands-on tooling…

AI Prototyping - All Things Product Podcast with Teresa Torres & Petra Wille

Teresa Torres and Petra Wille examine whether the wave of AI prototyping tools (Replit, V0, Bolt, Lovable, WindSurf) genuinely helps product discovery work. They argue these tools can rapidly produce interactive…

Building Skills: Setting Pilot Teams Up for Product Operating Model Success

Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion argue that teams new to outcome-oriented product management lack several hard skills, so leaders must deliberately build them for pilot teams to succeed during an organizational…

How to Choose the Right Pilot Teams for a Product Operating Model Transformation

Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion argue that when shifting to a product operating model, companies should start with a small set of pilot teams rather than training everyone at once, which tends to produce chaos and…

Ask Teresa: Do Product Teams Really Ship Value Weekly?

Teresa Torres answers a reader's question about how often product teams should ship customer value, concluding that weekly or biweekly delivery is an ideal benchmark rather than an immediate requirement. She explains…

Training vs. Coaching - All Things Product Podcast with Teresa Torres & Petra Wille

This podcast episode, hosted by Teresa Torres with guest Petra Wille, examines the difference between product training and product coaching and when each is the right tool. Training builds foundational knowledge and…

My Organization Doesn’t Work That Way - All Things Product Podcast with Teresa Torres & Petra Wille

Teresa Torres and Petra Wille discuss the gap many product teams feel between modern, outcome-driven practices like continuous discovery and experimentation and the realities of organizations that do not support them…

Tools of the Trade: Building Opportunity Solution Trees in Vistaly

Teresa Torres profiles how Edwin Yuen, a product designer at The Times London, uses Vistaly to build opportunity solution trees for his puzzle-focused squad. The piece presents a practical, tool-specific walkthrough of…

Y Oslo 2024: When It Comes to Discovery, Something is Better Than Nothing

Teresa Torres recaps her talk and fireside chat at Y Oslo 2024 on continuous discovery. She argues discovery is a team activity involving engineers, designers and PMs, that teams should start with the smallest possible…

Product in Practice: How Passion.io Applies Continuous Discovery to the Employee Experience

This Product in Practice profile follows Eva Spexard, Head of Operations and People at Passion.io, who applies continuous discovery habits to the employee experience rather than to a product. She treats employees as…

Customer Recruiting for Continuous Discovery: Get Easy Access to Customers Week Over Week

Teresa Torres argues that the biggest barrier to continuous discovery is getting consistent access to customers, and that teams must automate recruiting so interviews happen without weekly hustle. She explains that…

12 Hurdles to Effective Product Trio Collaboration

Teresa Torres draws on the 2022 CDH Benchmarks survey of roughly 2,000 people to examine why product trios (PM, designer, engineer) often fail to collaborate effectively. Although most respondents worked in trios, about…

Tools of the Trade: How HiveMQ Automates Customer Interview Recruiting with Orbital

Teresa Torres profiles Yury Oleynik, VP of Product Management at HiveMQ, and how his team automated recruiting for continuous customer interviews. Early manual outreach campaigns to thousands of free-plan users yielded…

Ask Teresa: For Customer Interviews, Who Counts as a Customer?

Teresa Torres addresses a recurring question from product teams: who should count as a customer for interviews in continuous discovery. She argues that a customer is whoever uses the product or makes the purchase…

Product in Practice: Why Ramsey Solutions Rotates Engineers in Their Product Trios

This Product in Practice story from Ramsey Solutions explains how the company got engineers to take part in product trios, despite their reluctance. Engineers feared falling behind technically and saw the tech lead role…

Ask Teresa: What Do You Do with Atypical Customer Stories?

Teresa Torres argues that atypical customer stories, the ones that stand out from the rest of an interview set, are valuable rather than something to discard during continuous discovery. Teams often focus only on shared…

Don't Use Generative AI to Replace Discovery with Real Humans

Teresa Torres argues against generative AI tools that try to replace real discovery work, such as synthetic customer interviews, auto-generated opportunity solution trees, or AI-drafted artifacts. She explains that…

Product in Practice: Testing Assumptions Was Tricky But the Convo Team Didn’t Give Up

Convo's product team set out to test assumptions about a feature letting Deaf users bring an interpreter into a Zoom meeting, but running those tests over Zoom introduced confusing meta-tasks and technical problems…

Product in Practice: Getting Value Out of In-App Surveys Takes Iteration

Teresa Torres shares four examples from coach Ellen Juhlin of using in-app surveys to sustain customer touchpoints as part of continuous discovery. Across different products, Ellen tried a Mixpanel pop-up, an onboarding…

Product in Practice: Shifting from a Feature Factory to Continuous Discovery at Doodle

Stephanie Leue, then Chief Product Officer at Doodle, describes moving a team that had been run as a top-down feature factory toward continuous discovery. Despite good data access, customer feedback channels, and a new…

Product in Practice: Introducing Opportunity Solution Trees at Texthelp

Teresa Torres profiles Tali Melchior, Director of Product Management at Texthelp, who introduced opportunity solution trees (OSTs) first at a previous company after a book club, then at Texthelp, and later through…

Tools of the Trade: Finding People to Interview Before You Have Customers

Teresa Torres surveys how early-stage teams recruit interviewees when they have no customers or even no product yet, a common blocker to continuous discovery. She draws on members of her Continuous Discovery Habits…

Product in Practice: Making Customer Interviewing a Habit in an Early-Stage Startup

This Product in Practice case study follows Kranthi Kiran, founder of ThoughtFlow, a collaboration tool combining visual mind mapping with data modeling. It opens by framing the risk founders face when they start from…

Product in Practice: Continuous Discovery Fuels Innovation at Sauce Labs

This case study follows Mike Donovan, SVP of Product at Sauce Labs, who credits a Product Discovery Fundamentals course with reshaping how his team works. Moving away from a feature factory where sales passed requests…

No Time for Discovery? Here’s How to Fix It.

Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion walk through the seven most common reasons product teams say they have no time for discovery, and offer practical fixes for each. The core argument is that discovery should run in tandem…

Product in Practice: Stepping Into Your First Product Leadership Role—What to Expect

New product leaders often struggle with the shift from doing discovery and delivery themselves to leading teams and stakeholders. Two leaders from the Continuous Discovery Habits community share how they handled this…

Product in Practice: All It Took Was One Product Trio to Inspire Change—The Hemnet Story

This Product in Practice piece profiles how Hemnet, Sweden's largest property portal, adopted continuous discovery through a grassroots start. A User Research Director and a Chief Product Officer describe how one…

Product in Practice: Learning to Interview Continuously

Product Talk's community manager, Welena Villasoto, shows how a non-PM can run a weekly continuous interviewing practice. She practiced story-based interviewing with Teresa Torres first, moving from talking too much to…

Bringing Order to Chaos: Using Opportunity Solution Trees in Everyday Life

Teresa Torres explores how the opportunity solution tree, a continuous discovery tool, can be applied beyond digital products to personal and organizational challenges. Through three examples, she shows how the tree…

Product Talk is Growing: Meet New Instructor Ellen Brandenberger

This Product Talk announcement introduces Ellen Brandenberger, a product coach and Director of Product at Stack Overflow, as a new instructor for the Product Talk Academy. It frames the expansion as part of the…

Leading the Change: How Ellen Juhlin Introduced Discovery Habits at Orion Labs

Teresa Torres interviews Ellen Juhlin, a product leader at Orion Labs, about how she introduced continuous discovery habits to a team that had been driven by founder-led outputs, sales-driven feature requests, and…

Tools of the Trade: Recruiting Customer Interview Participants

Teresa Torres argues there is no single perfect tool for recruiting customer interview participants in continuous discovery; the best tool is the one a team will actually use. The article walks through three steps…

Product in Practice: Building to Learn at Singularity Creations

Teresa Torres profiles product manager Helena Jeret-Mäe at Singularity Creations, who moved from building speculative features on request to a continuous discovery practice. Early on, she built an unused field a…

Slowing Down: Choosing Not to Set Goals for 2023

Teresa Torres reviews 2022, when her business shifted to being course-first and reached far more people than one-on-one coaching ever could. She describes the grind of the pandemic years, including launching several…

Product Discovery Series

This is an index page from SVPG (Silicon Valley Product Group) curating its articles on product discovery, the work of deciding what to build before handing it to delivery. The page is organized into four groups…

Customer Interviews: How to Recruit, What to Ask, and How to Synthesize What You Learn

Teresa Torres argues that customer interviews are among the most valuable and sustainable ways for product teams to learn about customers, creating a compounding competitive advantage. She separates true customer…

Product Talk Is Growing: Meet New Instructor Ellen Juhlin

Teresa Torres announces that Product Talk has added Ellen Juhlin, a product coach and Senior Director of Product Management at Orion Labs, to its instructor pool. The post frames the expansion as part of Product Talk's…

Product in Practice: Opportunity Mapping Led to a 20% Lift in LTV at Grailed

Grailed's Discovery team spent eight months building a curated feed that barely moved the business. After adopting continuous discovery habits and an opportunity solution tree, they reframed the problem in customer…

Ask Teresa: What if Your Buyers Aren’t Your Users?

Teresa Torres argues that B2B and B2C discovery are less different than people assume, since most consumer products also serve multiple stakeholders such as advertisers or content providers. The key issue in enterprise…

Ask Teresa: What Should You Do With Insights That Don’t Come from Customer Interviews?

Teresa Torres argues that product teams should monitor customer signals from support tickets, sales conversations, surveys, and behavioral analytics, but should not treat these fragments as a substitute for customer…

Product in Practice: Automating Customer Interview Recruiting at Zonar Systems

Teresa Torres's continuous-discovery practice depends on interviewing customers every week, but finding participants is the hardest part and often blocks the habit. This Product in Practice piece profiles Dan Clem at…

Ask Teresa: My Sales Team Won’t Let Me Talk To Customers. What Now?

Teresa Torres addresses a common obstacle to continuous discovery: sales and marketing teams that resist product managers talking to customers. She explains that this resistance usually stems from fear of the unknown…

Ask Teresa: What Are the Best Customer Interview Questions?

Teresa Torres argues that teams should separate their research questions (what they want to learn) from their interview questions (what they actually ask), because people answer direct questions unreliably due to…

Ask Teresa: Who’s Responsible for What in the Product Trio?

Teresa Torres argues that every member of the product trio (product manager, designer, engineer) is jointly responsible and accountable for all five risk areas: desirable, viable, feasible, usable, and ethical…