“You’ll often hear Teresa say that there’s no single right way to do continuous discovery. Something she might not say as often (that’s just as true) is that there’s no single wrong way to do discovery, either. Because discovery involves changing the way you work on”
Marty Cagan, who popularized the term product discovery, clarifies a common confusion: learning is valuable, but the real goal of discovery is to gain insights, which are learnings a team can act on. He explains that…
Teresa Torres profiles Tali Melchior, Director of Product Management at Texthelp, who introduced opportunity solution trees (OSTs) first at a previous company after a book club, then at Texthelp, and later through…
Marty Cagan argues that the common split between a 'problem space' (owned by product) and a 'solution space' (owned by engineering) is overly simplistic and kills innovation. Validating that a customer problem is real…
Teresa Torres profiles product manager Helena Jeret-Mäe at Singularity Creations, who moved from building speculative features on request to a continuous discovery practice. Early on, she built an unused field a…
Teresa Torres recounts a 2008 product story in which her team at an alumni community startup fixed on an engineer's Google Maps idea while the real problem was unwanted spam. She argues teams fall in love with their…
Marty Cagan argues that product teams should actively seek out critical, negative feedback, since qualitative insight about why users don't adopt, buy, or stay is more valuable than most quantitative data. He observes…
Teresa Torres profiles how Sören Weber and the Search & Flow team at trivago adopted continuous discovery habits on a mature hotel metasearch product. Despite existing user-focus rituals, the team tended to jump to…
Teresa Torres argues that asking how much time to spend in discovery is the wrong question, because discovery and delivery should happen continuously rather than in sequence. The right amount of discovery is whatever is…
Marty Cagan answers common follow-up questions to his earlier argument that builders should distinguish between building to learn (product discovery) and building to earn (product delivery). He argues that as delivery…
This Product in Practice piece profiles Chris Hockley, a lean agile coach at SuperAwesome, who introduced the opportunity solution tree to several product teams through a staggered rollout. He found that teams grasped…
Marty Cagan argues that product teams often use a predictable set of excuses to avoid doing real product discovery, and that these excuses usually reflect a misunderstanding of discovery rather than a genuine…
Teresa Torres wants to believe every product team does careful synthesis after each customer interview. The reality? It's hard, so teams give up and grab the two or three things they remember most. "We're not competing with making good synthesis faster. We're competing with making shallow synthesis…
Marty Cagan explains where the term "product discovery" came from and why he chose it. He argues that software has always faced two core problems: figuring out the right product, and then building it right, which he…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams should monitor customer signals from support tickets, sales conversations, surveys, and behavioral analytics, but should not treat these fragments as a substitute for customer…
Teresa Torres argues that customer interviews are among the most valuable and sustainable ways for product teams to learn about customers, creating a compounding competitive advantage. She separates true customer…
Teresa Torres argues that engineers should be active participants in product discovery rather than only writing code, since they contribute distinct knowledge and skills. She explains that different team members…
Teresa Torres argues that user researchers have a vital place in continuous discovery, even though most product trios don't include one by default because companies rarely have enough researchers. She outlines three…
This is an index page from SVPG (Silicon Valley Product Group) curating its articles on product discovery, the work of deciding what to build before handing it to delivery. The page is organized into four groups…
Teresa Torres argues that product teams should bring justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) principles into continuous discovery, since products often encode existing social biases (e.g., pulse oximeters…
Teresa Torres surveys how early-stage teams recruit interviewees when they have no customers or even no product yet, a common blocker to continuous discovery. She draws on members of her Continuous Discovery Habits…
Part three of Lenny Rachitsky's B2B series argues that founders should define their ideal customer profile early, alongside the problem itself. Drawing on interviews with dozens of startup leaders, it outlines a list of…