What makes a product successful beyond just getting it to market on time? How can companies ensure they’re creating something customers actually want?
In Continuous Discovery Habits, Teresa Torres explores how companies can better align their products with customer needs. She introduces a systematic approach to continuous product discovery that helps development teams make informed decisions through regular customer feedback and structured planning.
Keep reading to learn how continuous product discovery can transform your approach to creating products that truly resonate with your target audience.
Continuous Product Discovery
According to Torres, conventional product development focuses on delivery, which is the process of creating your product and getting it into the hands of consumers. Discovery, on the other hand, is the process of conceptualizing and selecting the product you’ll make. Torres suggests that many companies overemphasize delivery metrics (like on-time shipping and budget adherence) while underinvesting in product discovery, leading to products that may be well-executed but don’t meet customer needs. (Shortform note: Torres’s advice regarding continuous product discovery is primarily geared toward digital product development, but it may also be applicable to other types of products.)
For example, a company that sells digital courses might invest a great deal of time and energy into developing and launching a course on a niche topic like extreme mountain biking only for the product to flop because customers aren’t interested in it. Even though the company did everything right with delivery—they got it out on time and under budget—they failed to do sufficient discovery work to make sure the product was something customers would want.
To remedy this, Torres recommends that companies engage in habits that promote continuous product discovery—ongoing efforts to align your product with what customers want and need. The most basic requirement of this practice is to have the product development team collect feedback from customers on no less than a weekly basis to inform decisions about the product and the company’s activities.
(Shortform note: In addition to delivery and discovery, digital product development also requires deployment, which is the process of making the product available for use through activities like installation, updates, and configuration. While Torres focuses on continuous product discovery, other experts also recommend engaging in continuous delivery and continuous deployment by automating both processes in order to best serve customers. Combining these three practices can help a company consistently provide a product that’s easy to use and that keeps up with changing customer needs and desires.)
Torres’s specific intended audience is the team responsible for product development, consisting of product managers, designers, and software engineers. She emphasizes that these three roles are critical for success, as they bring business acumen, design expertise, and technical knowledge, respectively, to the team. Though teams can often expand beyond this trio, they must remain lean enough to be able to balance inclusiveness—getting input from other relevant experts—with decision-making speed.
(Shortform note: The makeup of your product development team can have a major impact on what it produces. In Team Topologies, Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais explain that the digital product a team develops will mirror how that team is structured—a rule known as Conway’s Law. Thus, overfilling your team with excess members is likely to result in products that are similarly messy and disorganized. Creating teams based on the three roles Torres describes can help you create products that are profitable, well-designed, and technologically sound. Additionally, keeping the teams relatively small will help keep the product efficient and streamlined.)
Torres outlines a process of continuous product discovery that involves the following steps: 1) Learn about your customers, 2) brainstorm solutions, 3) identify your assumptions, 4) test your assumptions, and 5) implement your solutions and assess their effectiveness.
Work With Your End Goal in Mind
Before you go through the steps of discovery, it’s important to plan out what you want to achieve in the process. Torres explains that you need to go about discovery with your end goal in mind—that is, what it is you hope to accomplish to better serve your customers. To do this, she recommends using a visual tool called the opportunity solution tree (OST). The OST serves as a roadmap for discovery work, helping teams navigate the complex process of creating both customer and business value.
To use this tree, you’ll need to define your desired outcome, which is the value you want to create for your customers. This is different from outputs, which are the features of your product. Outputs help get you to your outcome, but they’re not the end goal. Torres argues that focusing on outputs as your goal instead of outcomes is a shortcut that creates a disconnect between your product team’s activities and the value (outcome) they’re providing to customers.
For example, an online coaching service might seek to improve customer satisfaction with their coaching work. This is an outcome, as it refers to a value being provided to the consumer. The company might work toward this outcome by implementing certain outputs, like more specialized coaching or group sessions. The OST starts with your outcome at the top. Then it branches into opportunities (what your customers want or need), then into potential solutions, and finally into assumption tests. You can fill in these various pieces as you go through the steps we describe below, but you should start with the top bubble filled out so you know what you’re working toward.
Torres writes that this tree will serve as a living document throughout your continuous product discovery process: As your customers’ needs shift, so will your potential solutions and the assumptions that go into them. When solutions fail, teams must reflect on what they misunderstood about their customers and revise the opportunities they’ve identified before moving forward. The OST helps make this learning process explicit and visible.
According to Torres, this map will also be useful when your team needs to show other members of the company what they’re working on and how. Rather than overwhelming stakeholders with raw data or only sharing conclusions, the tree structure allows teams to show their work in a digestible way. This enables stakeholders to truly evaluate the team’s thinking and contribute meaningful feedback.
