Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

Assumptions are underlying beliefs and expectations that product teams hold about how their solutions will work and create value. In Continuous Discovery Habits, Teresa Torres categorizes assumptions into five types: desirability (whether customers want the solution), viability (whether it creates business value), feasibility (whether it can be built), usability (whether customers can effectively use it), and ethical (whether it might cause harm). Product teams must identify and test these assumptions before committing significant resources to development.

The build trap, a term coined by Melissa Perri, describes a pattern in which organizations measure success by outputs rather than outcomes. In this situation, teams focus primarily on shipping features and meeting release deadlines instead of creating genuine value for customers. Product teams caught in the build trap often engage in feature-based competition, attempting to match or exceed competitor capabilities without considering whether these features address customer needs. This approach typically results in wasted resources and missed opportunities to solve meaningful customer problems.

Business outcomes measure the overall progress and success of an organization. These metrics typically manifest as financial indicators such as revenue growth, cost reduction, or market share expansion in specific regions or customer segments. Business outcomes often function as lagging indicators, measuring results after they occur, which can make them less effective for guiding day-to-day team decisions. While essential for tracking organizational success, business outcomes frequently require coordination across multiple departments and may fall outside a single product team’s direct control.

A child opportunity represents a subset or component of a larger customer need or pain point in an opportunity solution tree. Child opportunities break down complex problems into more manageable pieces that product teams can address individually. Multiple child opportunities often contribute to solving their parent opportunity, but each child opportunity can be tackled independently of its siblings.

A cognitive failure occurs when a participant in an ideation session becomes unable to generate any new ideas. The research discussed in Continuous Discovery Habits indicates that cognitive failures happen more frequently when individuals brainstorm alone compared to when they work in groups. These moments of mental blockage can temporarily halt the ideation process, though they may ultimately lead to more diverse and original ideas as individuals push through their initial mental barriers.

Confirmation bias is a cognitive tendency that leads product teams to seek out and remember information that supports their existing ideas while overlooking or dismissing contradictory evidence. Torres identifies this bias as particularly problematic in product development because it can cause teams to overestimate the potential success of their solutions and underestimate risks. This bias often works in conjunction with other cognitive biases to reinforce flawed thinking and prevent teams from identifying critical problems early in the development process.

Continuous discovery is a structured approach to product development that requires product teams to conduct weekly customer interactions and small research activities in pursuit of specific outcomes. This methodology ensures that product decisions are consistently informed by customer input rather than relying on occasional or sporadic customer feedback. Continuous discovery enables teams to adapt to market changes, evolving customer needs, and technological advances in real time.

The curse of knowledge refers to a cognitive bias that makes it difficult for individuals to imagine what it feels like not to know something once they have learned it. In product development contexts, this bias often manifests when teams have accumulated significant research and understanding about their customers but fail to recognize that stakeholders lack this same depth of knowledge. Product teams affected by this bias may rush to present conclusions without providing the necessary context, making it challenging for stakeholders to follow their reasoning or accept their recommendations. Torres identifies this bias as a primary reason why product teams should take time to systematically present their discovery work rather than jumping straight to conclusions.

Delivery is the process of building and shipping a product to customers. Delivery encompasses the technical implementation, testing, and deployment of features that have been identified through the discovery process. While delivery metrics traditionally focus on meeting deadlines and staying within budget constraints, these measures alone do not guarantee that the delivered product will create value for customers.

Discovery is the decision-making process about what to build in a product development cycle. Discovery involves understanding customer needs, validating assumptions, and determining which features or solutions will create value for both customers and the business. This process has evolved from an annual planning activity controlled by business executives to a continuous activity conducted by cross-functional product teams.

Escalation of commitment is a cognitive bias in which increasing investment in an idea makes people more resistant to changing course, even when faced with evidence that the idea isn’t working. In product development, Torres explains that this bias becomes particularly dangerous when teams have spent significant time and resources on a solution, making them less likely to abandon or substantially modify it even when research suggests they should. The bias can lead teams to continue pursuing suboptimal solutions rather than pivoting to more promising alternatives.

Excavating the story refers to the interview technique of guiding participants to share complete narratives about specific experiences rather than general observations or preferences. The interviewer must actively work to keep participants focused on specific instances rather than allowing them to drift into generalizations about their behavior. This approach helps product teams gather more reliable data about customer behavior by focusing on concrete experiences rather than perceived habits or preferences.

An experience map represents a visual documentation of a customer’s journey with a product or service. The map combines nodes (distinct moments, actions, or events) and links (connections between nodes) to illustrate how customers interact with a product, including their thoughts, feelings, and pain points at each stage. Team members initially create individual maps based on their unique perspectives before synthesizing these into a shared representation that captures the collective understanding of the customer experience. Unlike a simple process flowchart, an experience map evolves continuously as teams gather new insights from customer interviews and solution testing. The map serves as both a discovery tool and a foundation for product development decisions, helping teams maintain focus on customer needs while avoiding the limitations of purely verbal descriptions.

An ill-structured problem refers to a challenge that has multiple potential solutions rather than a single correct answer. These problems require significant effort to define and frame appropriately, as the way a problem is framed influences the range of possible solutions. In product development, reaching a desired business outcome represents an ill-structured problem because teams must discover and explore infinite possibilities within the opportunity space to find effective solutions.

The illusion of group productivity refers to the phenomenon in which teams systematically overestimate their creative performance during group brainstorming sessions. This concept, identified by Bernard Nijstad and colleagues at the University of Groningen, explains why many teams maintain strong positive beliefs about brainstorming despite research showing that individuals working alone typically generate more numerous and more original ideas. The illusion stems from the reduction of cognitive failures in group settings—since participants experience fewer moments of being stuck, they perceive the session as more productive than it is when measured against objective creative output metrics.

An interview snapshot is a one-page document designed to capture and synthesize the key insights from a single customer interview. This tool includes the participant’s photo (when available), memorable quotes, relevant contextual information, and identified opportunities. The snapshot serves as an index to the customer knowledge gathered through continuous interviewing and helps teams remember specific stories, even weeks or months after the interview. These documents are particularly valuable for sharing insights with stakeholders and team members who did not participate in the original interview.

Kanban is a workflow management method that helps teams optimize their delivery of value. This system emphasizes limiting work in progress to maintain consistent, high-quality output and reduce bottlenecks. Research from the University of Finland demonstrates that software teams using Kanban experience improved quality, more consistent delivery, and fewer customer complaints. The method encourages teams to visualize their work, establish clear work-in-progress limits, and focus on completing current tasks before starting new ones.

A keystone habit functions as a foundational behavior that initiates and sustains other positive habits in product development. Drawing from Charles Duhigg’s concept in The Power of Habit, Torres identifies regular customer interviews as the keystone habit for continuous discovery, explaining that teams who consistently engage with customers naturally increase their prototyping and experimentation activities.

The left-brain interpreter, a term coined by neuropsychologist Michael Gazzaniga, describes the brain’s tendency to create coherent but not necessarily accurate explanations for human behavior. This mental mechanism leads people to generate plausible-sounding rationales for their actions, even when they cannot possibly know the true reasons for their choices. In the context of product development, the left-brain interpreter explains why customers often provide unreliable answers to direct questions about their preferences and behavior. This concept underscores the importance of observing actual customer behavior rather than relying on self-reported preferences or habits.

A one-way door decision represents a choice that cannot be easily reversed once made. These decisions require careful consideration and extensive data gathering because their consequences are difficult or impossible to undo. In product development, one-way door decisions might include major architectural changes, significant financial investments, or strategic partnerships that create long-term commitments. Teams should approach these decisions with caution and thorough analysis.

Opportunity sizing involves evaluating potential product opportunities based on their scope and impact. This assessment considers two primary factors: the number of customers affected by an opportunity and the frequency with which they encounter it. Teams can use various data sources for opportunity sizing, including behavioral analytics, support tickets, and customer interviews. The process helps teams prioritize opportunities that will create the most value, though precise measurements are not always necessary or beneficial.

An opportunity solution tree represents a visual framework for mapping potential paths to achieve a desired business outcome. The tree structure starts with the business outcome at its root, branches into the opportunity space (customer needs, pain points, and desires), then extends to potential solutions, and finally leads to assumption tests for evaluating those solutions. This tool helps product teams maintain shared understanding, make better decisions through comparison rather than simple yes/no choices, and communicate progress to stakeholders. The OST enables teams to work both top-down (from outcome to testing) and bottom-up (using test results to refine understanding of opportunities).

A parent opportunity encompasses broader customer needs or pain points that can be broken down into smaller, more specific opportunities. Parent opportunities appear higher in the opportunity solution tree and provide context and organization for the more specific opportunities beneath them. They help product teams understand how individual opportunities relate to larger customer needs.

A pre-mortem is a strategic planning technique introduced by psychologist Gary Klein in which teams imagine their project has already failed and then work backward to identify potential causes of that failure. Torres presents this as a powerful tool for uncovering hidden assumptions and potential problems before they occur. Unlike a post-mortem, which analyzes actual failures after they happen, a pre-mortem helps teams anticipate and address problems proactively, making it particularly valuable in the early stages of product development.

Product outcomes measure how effectively a product contributes to advancing business goals. These metrics focus on specific, measurable changes in customer behavior that a product team can directly influence through their work. Product outcomes serve as leading indicators, helping teams predict future business success rather than simply measuring past performance. Unlike business outcomes, product outcomes typically fall within a single team’s span of control, allowing for clearer accountability and more focused effort in driving improvements.

A product trio is a core cross-functional team typically composed of a product manager, designer, and software engineer who collaborate on product development decisions. The product manager brings business context and ensures product viability, the designer contributes visual and interactive expertise, and the engineer provides technical knowledge for reliable implementation. While some teams may include additional roles, the trio structure balances inclusive decision-making with operational efficiency.

Sibling opportunities are distinct but related customer needs that share the same parent opportunity in an opportunity solution tree. These opportunities exist at the same level of specificity and contribute to the same overarching customer need, but each can be addressed independently. Sibling opportunities help product teams identify different aspects of a larger customer need that might require different solutions.

Traction metrics measure the usage and engagement levels of specific features or workflows within a product. These detailed measurements track how customers interact with particular aspects of a product rather than broader business or product goals. While traction metrics can be useful for optimization work and helping junior teams gain experience with discovery methods, they risk constraining teams by focusing too narrowly on specific solutions rather than broader customer problems. Traction metrics are most appropriate when optimizing known successful features rather than discovering new solutions to customer problems.

A two-way door decision describes a choice that can be reversed if it proves unsuccessful. These decisions allow teams to learn through action rather than extensive preliminary analysis, as the consequences can be undone if necessary. In product development, two-way door decisions might include selecting which opportunity to explore next or testing new features with a small user group. Research from the University of Amsterdam indicates that viewing decisions as reversible enables teams to maintain critical evaluation and avoid confirmation bias.