“A few months ago, fellow Product Talk coach Hope Gurion and I sat down to discuss why there’s no single right way to do discovery. Want to read the previous parts of the series? Find Part 1 here and Part 2 here. In this third and final conversation in”
Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion, both discovery coaches, argue that there is no single correct way to do product discovery, because every company, team, and customer base differs. Instead of prescribing one method, they…
Teresa Torres argues that a simple visual structure, the opportunity solution tree, is changing how product teams do discovery. She explains that teams struggled to connect customer research with solution testing, and…
Teresa Torres, a discovery coach, shares a case study of a SEEK product team that moved from ad hoc, as-needed discovery to a structured, continuous discovery practice. Before coaching, the team interviewed customers…
Chris Jones of SVPG argues that many teams believe they practice product discovery but actually misuse it, falling into recurring anti-patterns. These include using discovery to confirm pre-chosen solutions, treating…
This Product in Practice feature profiles Lisa Orr, a former data scientist turned product manager at Airship, who leads discovery for the orchestration product area with coaching from Teresa Torres. It shows how a…
Marty Cagan walks through a fabricated three-week product discovery sprint to show what the fast, iterative rhythm of discovery actually looks like compared with linear, Waterfall-style processes. The team sets product…
Teresa Torres argues that continuous discovery is achievable in almost any organization, even when people say 'that would never work here.' She frames resistance into three scenarios: the feature factory, the messy…
Teresa Torres describes coaching the CarMax Digital Merchandising team, a mature product team that already practiced discovery but lacked deliberate organization. Through interviews with the PM, designer, and tech lead…
Torres argues that product delivery has matured through Agile, continuous integration, and story mapping, while product discovery, the work of deciding what to build, has lagged behind. She contrasts the traditional…
Teresa Torres reports on the second part of her inaugural CDH Benchmark Survey, which asked product teams about their discovery habits. She argues that many people doubt that continuous discovery exists in practice…
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…
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…
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…
This podcast episode tackles a common trap for internal product teams: gathering requirements through stakeholder meetings instead of observing how real users actually behave. The hosts argue that when colleagues are…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams waste effort ranking backlogs of solutions with made-up scoring formulas. Instead, teams should gather customer opportunities (needs, pain points, desires) from interview stories…
Marty Cagan argues that good product teams must excel at product discovery, which is fundamentally a skill of learning quickly: identifying the right target customer, finding the key problems to solve, and designing…
Teresa Torres asked members of the Continuous Discovery Habits community to share early mistakes they made when adopting continuous discovery. Three practitioners describe their missteps: a PM who ran discovery without…
Marty Cagan, who popularized the term product discovery, clarifies a common confusion: learning is valuable, but the real goal of discovery is to gain insights, which are learnings a team can act on. He explains that…
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…
Marty Cagan argues that the common split between a 'problem space' (owned by product) and a 'solution space' (owned by engineering) is overly simplistic and kills innovation. Validating that a customer problem is real…
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…
Teresa Torres recounts a 2008 product story in which her team at an alumni community startup fixed on an engineer's Google Maps idea while the real problem was unwanted spam. She argues teams fall in love with their…
Marty Cagan argues that product teams should actively seek out critical, negative feedback, since qualitative insight about why users don't adopt, buy, or stay is more valuable than most quantitative data. He observes…