“What do your customers care about? This seems like a simple enough question, but many product teams struggle to answer it honestly. Often the first instinct is to frame an answer in terms of what your business cares about. But remember: Your customers don’t care about your business outcomes.”
This Tools of the Trade installment profiles Steve Cheshire, a PM at Pendo, to show how one team runs continuous discovery with a practical tech stack. The core argument is that there is no single correct toolset; the…
Teresa Torres argues that handing discovery findings from a product trio to the rest of the delivery team recreates the old waterfall 'game of telephone', losing context and distorting customer needs. Discovery should…
This opening post in a planned series argues that a company can only launch a successful product if it builds something customers actually want, which requires deep knowledge of the customer's need, context, and…
Cagan argues that product teams commonly treat requirements and design as a scheduled, sequential phase, which leads to engineers building unvalidated solutions that customers don't want. He reframes this stage as…
"It can feel like you are the lone champion pushing for change in your organization." That's why we are reading Continuous Discovery Habits together throughout 2026. 📚 The book turns five this year and many of you have bought and read it. But reading isn't the same as doing. So we are reading…
Teresa Torres argues that product trios, small cross-functional teams of product, design, and engineering, should jointly own both discovery (deciding what to build) and delivery. She contrasts this with waterfall…
Teresa Torres surveys how product teams build and maintain opportunity solution trees, the visual map linking a desired outcome to opportunities and candidate solutions. She interviewed six practitioners about the tools…
Teresa Torres profiles Gary Clift, a Senior Director of Product for a travel-industry API, who used continuous discovery habits to address why customers were resisting migration to a new version of his company's API…
This post announces the 2026 Continuous Discovery Habits Book Club, a monthly reading program built around Teresa Torres's book to help readers practice continuous discovery rather than just read about it. The January…
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…