Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres
Building a digital product requires the coordination of the ‘product trio’: the product manager, designer, and software engineer. But before these roles collaborate in building the product (the product delivery process), how do they decide the right product to build? In Continuous Discovery Habits, product coach Teresa Torres discusses the importance and methods of product discovery, a necessary process that is distinct from and complementary to product delivery.
“Many companies put a heavy emphasis on delivery—they focus on whether you shipped what you said you would on time and on budget—while under-investing in discovery, forgetting to assess if you built the right stuff. This book aims to correct for that imbalance.” — Teresa Torres
But what does product discovery mean? What does it look like?
“At a minimum: (1) weekly touchpoints with customers (2) by the team building the product (3) where they conduct small research activities (4) In pursuit of a desired outcome.” — Teresa Torres, in defining continuous product discovery
In effective product discovery, product trios must identify assumptions in their solutions, then design and conduct experiments with customers to test those assumptions. Ideally, these experiments are conducted on a frequent, regular basis so that the trio can quickly validate or eliminate solutions.
Teresa Torres’s Opportunity Solution Tree (OST) framework
Torres outlines a product discovery framework called the Opportunity Solution Tree (OST). By first agreeing on a desired outcome and then identifying opportunities that would lead to that outcome, trios can come to a shared understanding of their goal and the problems they’re trying to address. Teams then diverge their thinking to brainstorm a range of solutions for each opportunity, and then identify assumptions within each solution for experimentation. After introducing the framework, Torres walks through exercises to help teams more effectively build out and take action on each section of their OST.
First of all, Continuous Discovery Habits is a must-read for anyone looking to enter a role in the product trio. Since the book’s publishing in 2021, the OST framework and process (which is really the heart of the book) have been gaining popularity and traction among product teams. I was recommended this book by the product team at my internship where we gradually tried to adopt the continuous discovery and OST process.
In the book, Torres jumps between the framework theory and its successful application to real companies. As she describes the case studies, importance of an OST becomes all the more evident to inspire and foster productive innovation among cross-functional teams.