“Continuous Discovery Habits turns five this year! And what a run it's been. Over 135,000 people have bought the book. And thousands of teams are putting the habits into practice. But I know it's not easy. It can feel like you are the lone champion pushing for”
Teresa Torres argues that product teams should talk to customers every day, even though famous quotes from Henry Ford and Steve Jobs seem to dismiss customer research. The key distinction is that customers can't…
Teresa Torres addresses a common problem in continuous discovery: weekly customer interviews surface valuable opportunities that fall outside the team's current outcome. She argues against forcing conversations back on…
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…
Marty Cagan asks whether product discovery applies to feature teams, which are handed a list of features rather than problems to solve. At a simple level, discovery is irrelevant there because the solution is already…
Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion share practical ways to use opportunity solution trees beyond the original tool. Hope adapts the tree with color-coding so stakeholders can quickly see which opportunities and solutions are…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams often misuse customer interviews by spending time evaluating solution ideas, which yields unreliable feedback because people overestimate their future behavior. Interviews are…
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…
Teresa Torres argues that product trios (PM, designer, engineer) should conduct their own customer discovery interviews rather than outsource them to centralized research, marketing, or BI teams. Centralized research is…
Cagan argues that the core goal of product discovery is finding the smallest valuable, usable, feasible product as fast as possible by failing fast. He describes two techniques: disposable user prototypes tested with…
Marty Cagan argues that product discovery depends heavily on judgement, which many product people try to replace with frameworks and templates. He identifies four areas where judgement is required: assessing risk…
Marty Cagan argues that testing high-fidelity prototypes with real users is the most important activity a product manager performs, because it reveals whether people can use a product and whether they want it before…
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…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams must map the opportunity space before solving problems, because customer interviews surface far more needs, pain points, and desires than any team can address. Treating…
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…
Teresa Torres announces the launch of her book Continuous Discovery Habits, presenting it as a guide for product trios to run a structured, sustainable discovery practice. She frames it as the distillation of eight…
Marty Cagan argues that the biggest risk facing most startups and new products is not market risk or business-model risk but solution risk: whether the team can find an approach customers actually choose to buy and use…
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…
When COVID-19 closed international borders in 2020, Seera Group's Digital Hotels team saw demand shift from hotels to domestic alternative accommodations like chalets and Istrahas. Using opportunity solution trees built…
Teresa Torres argues that opportunity solution trees, a simple visual map linking a desired business outcome to customer opportunities, solutions, and assumption tests, help product trios make better product decisions…
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…
Teresa Torres responds to Hope Gurion's proposal to add customer segments to opportunity solution trees, arguing that the tool should stay simple and focused on a single product outcome. She disagrees with two of Hope's…
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…
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…