“Welcome to the next installment of Ask Teresa, the column where I address common questions about continuous discovery. If you’d like to see the other posts in this series, you can find them here. Creating frequent touch points with customers is one of the core tenets of continuous discovery.”
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…
Teresa Torres argues that opportunity mapping, the first step of building an opportunity solution tree, breaks down when teams generate opportunities from memory, which produces vague, unactionable ideas. Actionable…
This Product in Practice story describes how Ellen Juhlin, a senior product director at Orion Labs, brought engineers into continuous discovery. Engineers often see product work as order-taking, but their technical…
Teresa Torres interviews Hope Gurion, Chief Product Officer at CareerBuilder, about how she built product management, UX, and analytics functions at a company that previously lacked them. Gurion describes shifting her…
Teresa Torres argues that teams should separate their research questions (what they want to learn) from their interview questions (what they actually ask), because people answer direct questions unreliably due to…
Sonja Martin, a product manager at tails.com, describes how her cross-functional team repeatedly refined their desired outcome. They began with 90-day retention, a useful North Star but too lagging and noisy to guide…
Marty Cagan argues that product discovery and rapid test-and-learn techniques, which startups use, apply equally to established companies. Startups have no legacy to protect, so they can take big risks cheaply…
Marty Cagan argues that market research tools such as surveys, analytics, focus groups, site visits and usability testing are valuable but have clear limits in product work. Tensions between marketing and product teams…
Teresa Torres uses a product manager and designer dilemma to argue that teams waste time designing a whole near-term vision upfront, because their assumptions about being right are usually wrong. She contends that…
Teresa Torres argues there is no single perfect tool for recruiting customer interview participants in continuous discovery; the best tool is the one a team will actually use. The article walks through three steps…
Cagan argues that teams who genuinely value product discovery still waste time when they lack a plan, so they should write a Product Discovery Plan spelling out who is involved, what must be done, what resources are…
Teresa Torres introduces Hope Gurion's approach to representing customer segments on an opportunity solution tree, noting that structuring the opportunity space is hard when customers are diverse, especially in B2B…