“Continuous Discovery Habits turns five this year. And to celebrate we are reading the book together. Each month, I am releasing an in-depth reading guide that includes: * The chapters we will be reading * A preview of the most important concepts we'll be learning about * Short videos you can”
Marty Cagan argues that the single most valuable thing a product manager can do is run face-to-face user tests on prototypes or live products. Each test has two parts in sequence: a usability check to see whether users…
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…
Teresa Torres argues that good continuous discovery depends on first surfacing the hidden assumptions behind each idea, since teams can't test beliefs they haven't named. She proposes five assumption categories…
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…
Teresa Torres introduces the Ladder of Evidence, a framework for judging how reliable customer feedback is. Asking people what they would do in the future, as focus groups and surveys often do, yields weak signal…
Marty Cagan argues that product teams relying on long, pre-negotiated roadmaps repeatedly fail to deliver business results because of two unavoidable realities. First, at least half of ideas won't work, whether…
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…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams should regularly test the underlying assumptions behind their ideas rather than whole solutions, so they can compare options quickly and drop weak ones early. She explains that an…
Marty Cagan reviews Eric Ries's book "The Lean Startup" and argues it is one of the best product books in years, relevant to both new and experienced product people and not only early-stage startups. He notes Ries…
Cagan argues that product discovery, the practice of validating ideas with real customers before building, is still essential in heavily regulated industries such as finance and healthcare, even though legal and…
Teresa Torres argues that frequent, consistent customer interviews are a keystone habit of continuous discovery, since they make other discovery habits easier to adopt. She addresses who to interview: early on, anyone…
Teresa Torres explains how she selects participants for a product management research study that drew 90 responses in 48 hours. She argues that interviewing is qualitative and descriptive, so the statistical idea of a…
Marty Cagan argues that most discovery work needs little planning, but larger efforts such as multi-team initiatives call for deliberate framing before diving in. He describes two goals: aligning the team on the…
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…
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…
Marty Cagan argues that the most important thing a product manager can do is get ideas in front of real target users, since that is where real learning happens. He addresses two kinds of gatekeepers who try to stand in…
Marty Cagan reflects on whether product discovery techniques built for software apply to non-technology products. He tested them while writing a book, using customer research, a small group of charter customers…
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…
Marty Cagan argues that during and after the pandemic, teams are sliding back into heavy requirements documents (PRDs) because remote collaboration is tiring. He reframes the core of strong product work as three things…
This post reports feedback from the first cohort of Teresa Torres's Continuous Interviewing course, which ran for 50 product managers, designers, and UX researchers. It recaps the course's rationale, drawing on…
Teresa Torres argues that engineers should be part of product discovery from the start, and offers three tactics for overcoming their resistance. Many engineers resist customer contact, but they still hold strong…
This podcast episode between Teresa Torres and Petra Wille argues that product teams are flooded with data but that not all evidence carries the same weight. Low-effort signals like support tickets and app reviews are…
Teresa Torres argues that continuous customer interviews generate far more learning than teams can hold in their heads, and proposes the interview snapshot as a one-page artifact that captures a single conversation…