Continuous Discovery Habits: Book Summary

This article contains vital takeaways and my thoughts on one of the highly recommended books for product managers.

About the author

Teresa Torres is a Product Discovery Coach with diverse experiences in UI design, Product management, and Interaction design. She has around 18+ years of experience. She also runs her own blog Product Talk Academy through which she has taught discovery skills to 8000+ people.

Let’s dive into the book now!

The book starts by addressing the common misconception between product discovery and product delivery. Teresa explains:

Product discovery: Deciding what to build

Product delivery: Building it

Generally, the product discovery is carried out using a project management approach where the users are interviewed in the beginning, then the product is built and finally, the users are asked to use the built product.

The problem with this approach is that it does not take users’ insights in between the building process. The earlier the feedback is received, the faster we can address it.

Teresa highlights that discovery is not a one-time activity, but a continuous process that evolves over time with constant feedback.

What is continuous discovery?

A minimum weekly touchpoints with the customers

By the team building the products

Where they conduct small research activities

In pursuit of the desired outcome

The product trio (Product managers, designers, and techies) take numerous decisions on a day-to-day basis and the goal of continuous discovery is to infuse those daily decisions with customer inputs to achieve the desired outcome.

But what is desired outcome? Aren’t output and outcome the same?

Output and outcome are interchangeably used several times. But they aren’t the same. Output talks about what of a product whereas outcome talks about the value created by that product. It is not about how many features we could ship, but it is about what value those features created for the users.

Output: different features

Outcomes: impact of those different features on our customers and business.

In continuous discovery, we focus on outcomes over outputs. Thus it requires us to shift from an output mindset to an outcome mindset.

Prerequisites to build continuous discovery habits:

Before we deep dive into how to inculcate continuous discovery, Teresa highlights these 6 important mindsets to be cultivated to successfully adapt to this habit:

Alright! Let us now learn about how can we practice continuous discovery in real life.

The Opportunity Solution Tree (OST)

Teresa proposes a simple yet effective framework to practice continuous discovery: The opportunity solution tree.

OST consists of clear desired outcome, opportunities (customer pain-points, needs and desires) that emerge our of customer interviews, multiple solutions to those opportunities and underlying assumptions.

Want to understand OSTs in detail?

I have explained the OSTs with an example in this article: Opportunity Solution Tree: Go to strategy for decision-making as a PM! I am certain you’ll love it.

Easy said than done!

The opportunity solution tree looks extremely simple to understand but the execution here is quite tricky. It involves two major steps: a) Discovering opportunities, and b) Discovering solutions

How can we discover opportunities?

The book covers each mentioned point in detail through chapters for each heading. Let me give you the overview here:

a) Visualize what you already know: Start with what you already know about the problem, business, and ideas. The plan is to keep your basics clear.

b) Continuous interviewing the customers: At every stage, it's important to seek feedback from the users. The earlier the feedback, the more time to act upon and better the decisions.

Teresa covers a lot of mispractices and best practices in this chapter of the book. I am going to revisit this chapter several times. I am sure you would too. Mark my words!

c) Mapping out the opportunity space: Mapping an opportunity space is mapping the path to the desired outcome, which in turn is an ill-structured problem and requires us to first structure it before diving into solutions. Our job is to address customer opportunities that drive our desired outcome. That’s how we create value for the business while creating value for the customers.

d) Prioritizing opportunities not solutions: We must always focus on outcomes rather than outputs. The teams that focus on outputs, eventually get into the build trap. We should focus on one target opportunity at a time, this leads the team to think of multiple solutions for the same problem. To decide which opportunity to pick, always compare and contrast various opportunity spaces. Use the trees to aid decision-making.

How can we discover solutions?

Again, the book explains each mentioned point in detail by having one chapter for each heading. Let me give you the overview here:

a) Supercharged ideation: Brainstorming ideas with the team has its own advantages and disadvantages. The best way for ideation is: to start ideation alone, share it with the group, hear others' ideas and get back to ideation alone.

b) Identifying hidden assumptions:

Types of assumptions: a) Desirability assumptions: Does anyone want it? Is there a demand for this? Will the customers get value from this? b) Viability assumptions: Is it viable — can we create a return out of it? c) Feasibility assumptions: Can we as a team build it? (Technical feasibility) Is it feasible for our business? d) Usability assumptions: Is it usable? Can customers find what they need? e) Ethical assumptions: Is there any harm that the product is creating (Direct or indirect)

c) Testing assumptions, not ideas: While testing assumptions, we always should start small and iterate our way to bigger, more reliable, and sound tests only until each stage have given us an indicator that investing further is worth the effort.

My thoughts:

Honestly, I loved the book. It's not lengthy and is filled with great examples and real cases. My personal favorite chapters are: Continuous interviewing, mapping opportunity space, and identifying assumptions. These chapters exactly talk like your teacher who knows you would make these mistakes in the future. This is a great book and I would highly recommend you to read it.

But the book does leave me with these questions:

• How do apply continuous discovery habits to B2B businesses?
• Customer interviews are very subjective to time, how to tackle them?
• How do we allocate the right amount of time to do the continuous discovery given the bandwidth issue the team generally has?

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