Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more

Teresa Torres, a product discovery coach and author of Continuous Discovery Habits, joins Lenny Rachitsky to discuss her opportunity solution tree framework and how product teams can build continuous customer discovery into their work. The conversation covers interviewing techniques, automating customer recruiting, making the case for research, and how product trios should make decisions together.

01Key learnings

• Use the opportunity solution tree: put a measurable outcome at the root, map opportunities as customer needs and pain points beneath it, and only then consider solutions.
• Keep opportunities framed in the problem space rather than as disguised solutions; Torres notes most people mistakenly write opportunities as solutions.
• Collect rich, behavior-based stories in interviews by asking about the last specific instance (e.g., 'tell me about the last time'), rather than asking hypothetical or opinion questions.
• Treat interviewing as a learnable skill and aim for a natural, conversational cadence rather than a long list of scripted questions; ask 'what happened next' to keep the story flowing.
• Automate recruiting by letting customers opt in during product use or through sales and support teams, so one interview per week happens with minimal effort from the product team.
• Continue shipping bets while building discovery habits in parallel; every backlog item is a bet, and discovery improves bet quality over time rather than being a prerequisite phase.
• Break ideas into underlying assumptions, prioritize the riskiest ones, and run small tests so a team can evaluate several solutions for one opportunity in a single week.
• If you lack organizational support, individual contributors can still start talking to customers within their own networks or via existing customer contacts rather than waiting for permission.

02Frameworks mentioned

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