Continuous Discovery — Weekly Contact, Opportunity Trees

Overview

Continuous discovery (Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits, 2021) replaces one-off research with a weekly cadence of customer touchpoints by the team building the product, structured around an opportunity solution tree: one outcome → the opportunities (unmet needs) that drive it → competing solutions → assumption tests. It keeps roadmaps anchored to real needs instead of the loudest stakeholder.

When to Use

• A product with users but no steady learning loop
• Roadmap fights decided by seniority, not evidence
• Turning a fuzzy outcome (e.g. "increase activation") into shippable bets

The Process

1. Pick one clear outcome (a behavior/metric, not a feature). Gate: if the target is a feature, back up to the outcome it serves.
2. Interview weekly — the trio (PM/design/eng), small and continuous, not a quarterly study.
3. Map opportunities as a tree under the outcome; keep them as customer needs, not solutions in disguise.
4. Diverge on solutions per opportunity (≥3), then converge.
5. Test the riskiest assumption cheaply before building (desirability, viability, feasibility, usability).
6. Prune to the next bet. Gate: no assumption test run = you're shipping opinion → stop and test.