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

Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value (2021) is product coach Teresa Torres’s systematic approach to modern product development. Torres brings two decades of experience in product management, user experience, and coaching product teams at organizations ranging from early-stage startups to global enterprises. A prominent figure in the product management community, Torres developed these methods through her work with Product Talk, her coaching and consulting practice, as well as writing for industry publications and speaking at international product management conferences. Torres presents a framework for product teams to make better decisions by maintaining regular contact with customers, testing assumptions early, and working collaboratively across disciplines. Through practical guidance and real-world examples, Torres demonstrates how product teams can integrate discovery activities into their daily work to create products that better serve both customer needs and business objectives. The text explores themes of Customer-Centered Design, Systematic, Ongoing Refinement, and Cross-Collaborative Decision-Making.

This guide refers to the 2021 Product Talk LLC Kindle edition.

Summary

Teresa Torres’s Continuous Discovery Habits presents a comprehensive framework for customer-centered design drawn from her extensive experience as a product discovery coach and former product leader. The book emerged from Torres’s frustration with traditional product development practices, particularly after her 2013 departure from a San Francisco startup, where she struggled to advocate for customer-focused product management in a founder-led organization. This personal experience led her to recognize a widespread problem in the industry: While many companies claimed to value customer input, their actual practices often prioritized internal opinions and competitor analysis over genuine customer needs. After leaving her position, Torres spent seven years developing and refining her coaching methodology, initially working with individual product managers before expanding to collaborative team training.

The book’s central premise revolves around the concept of systematic, ongoing refinement, where product teams interact with customers weekly and conduct small, focused research activities aimed at specific outcomes. Torres distinguishes between two key aspects of product development: discovery (deciding what to build) and delivery (actually building it), tracing how this distinction evolved alongside Internet technology over three decades. She argues that many organizations over-emphasize delivery metrics while neglecting discovery, leading to products that fail to meet customer needs. She illustrates this observation through numerous case studies, including an example from Wells Fargo Bank, where a focus on business metrics without customer consideration led to the creation of fraudulent accounts and subsequent legal consequences.

Torres introduces the Opportunity Solution Tree (OST) as a primary framework for guiding product decisions. This visual tool helps teams map the relationship between business outcomes, customer opportunities (needs and pain points), and potential solutions. The OST framework serves multiple purposes: maintaining shared understanding within teams, enabling comparative analysis rather than yes/no decisions, and facilitating faster learning cycles. Torres illustrates the framework’s effectiveness through various real-world examples, including how the company Tails.com successfully pivoted its business model during the COVID-19 pandemic by systematically mapping and evaluating new opportunities in the changing market landscape.

The methodology places a strong emphasis on focusing on outcomes (desired changes in behavior or results) rather than outputs (specific features or products). Through detailed case studies, including Sonia Martin’s work at Tails.com and Ahmed Guijou’s crisis management at Seera Group, Torres demonstrates how teams can work with product outcomes rather than business outcomes to provide more direct metrics that teams can influence. She explores the challenges teams face when transitioning to outcome-based management, including the tendency to pursue multiple outcomes simultaneously or frequently changing focus between different outcomes. The book provides specific strategies for negotiating realistic goals and establishing clear accountability while maintaining flexibility for learning and adaptation.

Rather than relying on direct questioning, Torres promotes an innovative approach to customer research that combines customer-centered design with systematic, ongoing refinement. She advocates for story-based interviewing, where customers recount specific, recent experiences, supporting this approach with cognitive science research about how people process and report their behavior. This method yields more accurate insights because it focuses on actual behavior rather than perceived behavior, as illustrated through various case studies, including an example about jean-buying behavior where stated preferences differed significantly from actual purchasing decisions. Torres recommends documenting these interviews through “interview snapshots” and provides detailed guidance on implementing continuous interviewing practices, including strategies for recruitment automation and maintaining consistent customer engagement.

The book details a systematic approach to organizing customer needs through opportunity mapping. Instead of maintaining flat backlogs, Torres recommends using hierarchical structures that show relationships between opportunities. She identifies five critical categories of assumptions that teams must examine: desirability, viability, feasibility, usability, and ethical implications.

Torres provides practical guidance for implementing these practices, even in organizations that don’t formally support them. Drawing from her personal experience at HighWire Press, where she initiated customer engagement practices as a junior developer, Torres advocates for starting small and working within one’s sphere of influence rather than waiting for organizational change. She identifies regular customer interviews as a “keystone habit” that naturally leads to other positive changes in product development practices, supporting this with research on habit formation and organizational change. The book concludes with detailed strategies for stakeholder management and team collaboration, emphasizing the importance of visual communication and demonstrating decision-making processes through tools like opportunity solution trees.

Throughout the book, Torres integrates psychological insights, practical experience, and systematic methodology. She draws on research about cognitive biases, effective decision-making, and group dynamics while grounding these concepts in real-world examples and specific implementable practices. Through detailed case studies from companies like CarMax, Farm Credit Services of America, and Snagajob, Torres demonstrates how teams can balance competing priorities while maintaining focus on customer needs and business outcomes.