Tools of the Trade: A Look at Optimal Workshop’s Discovery Tech Stack

Teresa Torres introduces a new series, Tools of the Trade, profiling continuous discovery practitioners and the tools they use. This first edition features Rebecca Klee, a UX Researcher at Optimal Workshop, who walks through how her team recruits interviewees, screens participants, runs sessions, synthesizes findings, prototypes, and runs experiments. The piece stresses that tools support but cannot replace the behavioral habits that define continuous discovery, such as frequent customer contact and clear outcomes. It matters because it shows a concrete, realistic stack and the criteria a team can use to evaluate new tools.

01Key takeaways

• Build the habits first: frequent customer contact and clear outcomes matter more than any tool.
• Write in-app recruitment copy that states the research purpose, the time commitment, and what participants gain.
• Include at least one open-ended screener question to gauge how expressive a participant will be in interviews.
• Capture observations of what people do and feel during sessions, and save your ideas and solutions for later.
• Track discovery experiments in the same backlog as delivery work so discovery is not neglected.
• Evaluate new tools against security and privacy requirements, time-saving value, integration fit, and user experience.

02Key sections

Tools support habits, not replace them

The author argues that continuous discovery is a behavior change, and that tools only help once the underlying habits like weekly customer contact and outcome setting are in place.

Meet the practitioner

Rebecca Klee describes her role and her team's self-assessment, noting strong customer touchpoints but weaker outcome-based prioritization and premature solution focus.

Recruiting and screening participants

The team intercepts users in-app with messaging tools, then uses short screeners with closed and open questions to find relevant participants and schedules sessions through a scheduling tool.

Running and documenting interviews

Sessions run over video with rotating note-takers who capture observations rather than interpretations, with transcription supporting quote extraction.

Synthesis, prototyping and experiments

Findings are mapped on a whiteboard tool and gathered in a database, prototyping happens in a design tool, and discovery experiments are tracked in the same backlog as delivery work.

03From the post

“Continuous discovery is about changing your behavior. That’s why Teresa named her book Continuous Discovery Habits. You don’t just think your way into continuous discovery. Sure, it’s important to understand the underlying concepts. But the concepts don’t mean much if you’re not making real changes”

04Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.