Product
Continuous Discovery Habits
Teresa Torres
2021
Summary
Teresa Torres argues that product discovery should not be a phase or a project — it should be a continuous habit, woven into every week. Her framework centers on the Opportunity Solution Tree: a visual tool that connects business outcomes to customer opportunities to potential solutions. Torres shows how to run short, frequent customer interviews, synthesize insights into opportunity maps, and test assumptions with targeted experiments. The result is a product team that makes confident decisions based on real evidence.
Key Takeaways
- 1Continuous discovery means interviewing at least one customer every week, every week
- 2The Opportunity Solution Tree connects outcomes, opportunities, and solutions in a single visual
- 3Discover opportunities from customer stories, not from asking customers what to build
- 4Assumption testing: identify the riskiest assumption behind any solution and test it first
- 5Desirability, viability, and feasibility must all be tested in discovery, not just usability
- 6Small, frequent experiments beat large, infrequent ones — speed of learning is the competitive advantage