Episode 269: Continuous Discovery Habits That Actually Work

Creating great products isn't just about features or roadmaps. It's about how organizations think, decide, and operate around products. Product thinking explores the systems, leadership, and culture behind successful product organizations. We're bringing together insights from multiple product leaders pulled from past conversations to explore one shared topic, offering different perspectives and lessons from real-world experience. I'm Melissa Perry, and you're listening to the Product Thinking Podcast. by Product Institute. We're starting with Teresa Torres, author of Continuous Discovery Habits. Her episode is one of our earlier ones, but the fundamentals she lays down are still the clearest articulation of what continuous discovery actually means. And we were not going to put this topic together without going back to the source. Teresa breaks down the three-part structure underneath all discovery work, outcome, opportunity, and solution, and makes the case for why teams that discover right never have to stop. After that, We'll hear from Christina Watka, lecturer at Stanford, on what a real weekly testing rhythm looks like when it's embedded in the culture from day one and how you scaffold feedback from yourself all the way to strangers. And we'll close with Julia Austin, senior lecturer at Harvard Business School at the time, who pushes back on the temptation to skip discovery in the age of AI and makes the case for why going slow on foundation work is actually the fastest path to shipping something that works. Let's start with Teresa. So can you tell us a little bit about what is the framework for continuous discovery habits? How would you describe it? Why should people do it? So I'm going to describe this in two different ways. So first is just what are we doing in discovery? And I think the first is it's I tried to come up with regardless of the framework or the tools or your favorite methods, what's the underlying structure to the work that we do? This is what led to the opportunity solution tree because I think that underlying structure is as simple as we start with an outcome, which is a common trend right now, hopefully people are familiar with what that is, that we have to discover the opportunities, which is jargon, but it just means customer needs, pain points and desires. And then we have to just, that if we address them would drive that outcome. And then we need to discover the solutions that would address those opportunities in a way that would drive the outcome. And so with that structure, what I was looking for is some people, I teach story-based interviewing to discover opportunities. The job is to be done, folks teach job to be done interviewing, but they're discovering. what I would call opportunities. Design thinkers say, go observe your customers in person in their environment. That's a way to discover opportunities. I don't think the way matters so much as long as that's a part of your process. Just like we have a million ways to discover solutions, design thinkers will tell you to prototype and get qualitative feedback. Lean started folks will tell you to test your assumptions and get quantitative feedback. They're all good, right? But I feel like there's these three components. Understand what the end looks like, what does success look like, define that outcome. That's usually your business value, right? Your outcome usually represents how you're going to create value for your business. Then define the opportunity space, that's how you're going to create value for your customer. Then make sure that your solution ladders up to both. Then the methods can be swapped in and out based on a team's preference. That's one part of what I would say is the set of discovery activities. Then I think for continuous discovery, I want to see teams engaging with customers every week and that it's the team that's building the product that's doing that and that what they're doing during those customer engagements is that they're conducting small research activities to figure out what are the right solutions, what are the right opportunities to ensure they're driving that outcome. I think that's so key. It's so important to just come back to the opportunities that you're talking about. figure it out as we go. And I see those things emerge as we do discovery. Your roadmaps will just be living documents like we like to talk about. But if you're doing the continuous discovery habits that you talk about, you'll always have the next thing on the roadmap. You don't have to stop and build one every July. It's just like the next opportunity will naturally be on there because you've been discovering it. Yeah, I love that you just said we don't have to stop because I actually tell every team that I work with. no matter what the context if you find yourself stopping to do something you're already doing it wrong right like people ask me when do i stop to synthesize my interviews no you're interviewing continuously you synthesize as you go when am i stopping to do my roadmap no you're working your way across the opportunity space this is what you're doing now this is what you're doing next that is continuous and that is what unlocks true agility the whole world can change and if you were doing continuous discovery habits the only thing that changed in a COVID world for you was you started breaking from home, which I realize is a big change, and maybe your next opportunity changed. But that's it. You didn't have to throw away a whole roadmap. You didn't have to redo a whole five-month planning process. You just said, you know what? This new opportunity is coming in that seems a lot more important. Let's do that next. What Teresa described is the scaffolding underneath every discovery method. The specific method matters less than the structure. Outcome, opportunity, solution. And the rhythm is non-negotiable. Teams engaging with customers every single week, synthesizing as they go, never stopping long enough to lose the thread. That is what unlocks real agility. When the world changes, you don't throw away a roadmap. You just shift to the next most important opportunity. Christina Watka built that same rhythm inside Zynga and now embeds it deliberately in her students at Stanford. Here's what it looks like when it's truly part of the culture. I don't recommend tools unless I actually use them. So when I tell you granola has become a daily essential for me, and most of my team that means something we're all in a lot of meetings granola is an ai notepad that quietly enhances your notes in the background no bots joining your call no awkward recordings just cleaner thinking after every meeting it's the rare tool that gives you time back instead of asking for more of it you can try it yourself with three months free on any paid plan at granola.ai product institute i do see this trap in product management where if we go after these business goals at all costs right we forget about that user value what do you think game design does as well to to make sure that you remember the user value like how do you teach your people when they're designing it to understand their users better empathize with them make sure there's really like a goal for them on that side well one of the unique things um with my class is we have play tests every single week period and we just i i got that from zynga where we would always have user research every single week i don't know if all game studios do it at that pace but that pace was mind-blowing you just always had people coming and i know teresa torres talks a lot about that as well about that just every week somebody's scheduled you're going to work with them period and so i build up the habit where i almost get them addicted to play testing because um if you play test really early and they're like always embarrassed. You know, they got these crappy paper prototypes, but I try to show them crappy paper prototypes to know what they're, they should expect to be play testing. And they play test with each other and then they debrief and talk about what worked, what didn't work, what else could they do? Um, and then it gets even more intense towards the end of, uh, the quarter when they're pay testing every single class, every single section. And that rhythm it's really right. If you remember right, uh, methodology, rapid iteration, testing and evaluation, something like that. It's that idea that you test with, you know, three people, maybe make some changes, test with two or three more, et cetera, et cetera. Um, but. That really connects you to the customer. It's really easy to drift off into like the sort of auteur mindset where you're so busy making the thing perfect and you don't feel like it's ready to be shown to anybody, especially with games. The thing about games is like music or movies. They are both a commercial product and art. And so the students will get very emotionally attached to the thing that they're working on. And you really have to push them to show that work to other people. That's really cool. Uh, and I. get a lot of parallels in there about rapid testing for for products too and i i see a lot of companies like disappear or not want to show anybody what they're working on because they're afraid they can't make this splashy launch and if we show it to people they're going to expect it right away and all of that stuff and that's where they get stuck building so many things that really don't matter at the end of the day and end up in the build trap when i think about the projects i worked on when i was in industry and we do a tiny bit of need finding and then maybe a usability test at the end I, I can never go back from this, this rhythm of testing once you've experienced it and it's just so powerful and so useful. You can't do anything else. A lot of places, they're not even testing internally with people in their company that might not be working on anything into like how they're building it. And that's an opportunity for like usability testing or helping there. Not that you should stop there, but I see those like baby steps, not even being taken sometimes. And I also think we paint this vision of this rapid iteration, rapid testing that. we expect everybody to get to at the end of the day. And I like what you're introducing because it's not like you have to be there today, right? It's like I introduce you to all that scaffolding before you actually get there. And I think that can apply for teams that are getting used to getting feedback, showing things that are half-baked, like how do we show it internally? Maybe how do we show it to one customer or like friendlies? And then how do we take it somewhere else? And how do we. keep building on this practice. And there's a lot of dog food and you're constantly playing your own game. The idea of doing kind of solo testing as a starting point, ask yourself, how does this feel? Is this working? Does this match my vision? But then immediately turning around and going to colleagues. And we talk about the path, which is first you test with yourself, which means building something so you can actually evaluate it. Then you test with other designers as a way of having someone who's very thoughtful and hopefully has some knowledge. to give you advice. And then you start moving out to friends and family. That could be admins at a company or other coworkers who work in something that's not in your area. And then that's a little easier. And then eventually you move to stranger testing where you're actually just giving them the game and letting them play by themselves without you there to tell any rules or anything. And it's just a nice staggering up that gets you a really good final product. Because if you think about it that way, you're not exposing strangers or playtesters to a really shitty thing. You start intimate, you start safe with people who understand that crappy is okay, and then you move your way out. Christina's model answers one of the most common blockers directly, the feeling that what you're building isn't ready to be seen. Her answer is to start where it's safe to be wrong and earn your way outward from there. But even the most disciplined discovery practice can face pressure to shortcut, especially when AI promises to replace the need for real customer conversations. For our last perspective, here's Julia Austin on why slow discovery is still the fastest path even now. What does it mean to go slow to move fast? Yeah, so my philosophy is if you put 80% of your time in laying the foundation and doing solid discovery work, really understanding the problem you're trying to solve for whom, and have some of those foundational questions answered, or at least you've thought about them, right? What kind of company are we building? What kind of legal things might we have to worry about? Those types of things. then you're not going to be spinning your wheels later and wasting a ton of time because you did the wrong thing, right? Now you can't do everything perfectly. And certainly again, with great tools out there now, you can whip up a quick MVP and do a lot of prototyping and other things pretty easily and experiment. But what often happens is... this temptation to build something and put it out there and then no one understood everyone says it must be a marketing issue i don't understand why nobody's adopting this and then you start unpacking it you realize we don't really understand our customer we don't really understand the pain point or guess what there's a user and there's a buyer and our user it lands for them beautifully but they're not the ones that are going to swipe your credit card to buy this thing so we haven't really fully understood the pain point of the people who are going to spend the money to actually give it to them to use if it's b2b So that's what I mean by slowing down is take the time, do the ethnographic research, do some experiments, really spend time with your target audience. And that's going to inform you, not only get you closer to we should build that for these particular groups of people, but then the other thing it does is it helps you understand and learn whether this is something you want to do. When we were talking to you about how we have to slow down and understand our customers to really figure out what the solution should be. It made me think of AI too, and I'm sure you have a lot of opinions on this, right? With all of these prototyping tools that are out there, your lovables, everything. I see so many people go, oh, we don't really have to do discovery. It's cheaper to just build it, put it in front of somebody and see if it works and tweak it from there. What do you say to people who say that? yeah i have such a visceral reaction to this because it's so funny right because i'm an innovator i've always worked on like cutting edge technology but also yeah it's not new right so i just it makes me laugh also is this false sense of security that an ai will give you all the answers so you don't have to actually talk to real people and this i think is a big struggle for founders is talking to strangers and actually getting out there and understanding human dynamics if human beings are going to use your product you need to interact with human beings and ai is definitely great it does a lot of really cool things but humans will do things that you don't expect and you and i've been building products for decades and even when we think we've done all the user research and all the focus groups and all the things and then we put our product out there i don't know about you but i've had plenty of times where then we put it in front of the customer and you're like oh they're doing that like i haven't heard about that or they developed some work around because we didn't think about some natural thing in their environment that some tab they opened on their computer they never told us about in an interview or like back in the day it was like opening a drawer and looking at a sticky note because there was some code they needed to do a thing they never bothered to tell us that so i think that ai can be helpful to get some efficiency going i'm going to go run an experiment what am i missing or what would be a great place to go find these people that i want to go run this test with or those so i think it can be a great thought partner and maybe a first pass and certain simulations you might want to do before you get out there but i don't know i don't know how you feel about this but i feel like at the end of the day you got to get it in front of real people and you got to see what the real environment is to really know if you're building the right thing that's all for today i hope you're leaving with a sharper sense of what continuous discovery actually looks like when a team is doing it well and at least one thing you can bring back to yours if you want to hear the full conversations with teresa christina and julia check out episodes 30 226 and 231. If you want to build stronger product management skills and learn practical approaches that you can use day-to-day, head over to Product Institute to learn more. And one more thing. For a productivity boost, I encourage you to try out Granola, a tool I use every day. It's an AI-powered notepad for meetings that helps capture notes and decisions automatically without interrupting your flow. You can get three months free on any paid plan at granola.ai slash product institute. Thank you so much for listening to the Product Thinking Podcast. We'll be back with another episode bringing you practical perspectives from across the product community. We'll see you then.

Continuous discovery sounds simple and breaks down constantly in practice. In this compilation episode of the Product Thinking Podcast, Melissa Perri brings together three perspectives on what it actually takes to build the habit and why slowing down on discovery is still the fastest path to shipping the right thing.

Teresa Torres, author of Continuous Discovery Habits, breaks down the structure underneath every method: outcome, opportunity, and solution. Teams doing this right never have to stop and replan. Christina Wodtke, lecturer at Stanford and formerly at Zynga, follows with the weekly playtesting rhythm she now teaches.

Julia Austin, former senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, closes the episode by pushing back on the temptation to skip discovery in the age of AI. Her 80/20 rule: spend most of your time on foundation work, because the false security AI offers cannot replace real conversations with real customers.

You'll hear us talk about:

- The structure underneath every discovery method
Teresa Torres walks through the three-part backbone of all discovery work: outcome, opportunity, and solution. She explains why teams doing this right never have to stop and replan: the next roadmap item emerges from ongoing customer conversations, not annual planning exercises.

- Building a weekly testing rhythm that sticks
Christina Wodtke describes the weekly playtesting rhythm she carried from Zynga into her Stanford classes. She also walks through the scaffolded path from solo testing to designers, friends and family, and finally strangers, so teams build the muscle without exposing rough work too soon.

- Going slow on discovery in the age of AI
Julia Austin makes the case for spending 80% of your time on foundation work and discovery before building anything. She explains why the temptation to skip this step in the age of AI is a trap, and why products that fail and get blamed on marketing usually failed in discovery first.

Episode resources:

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Episode 30: Understanding Continuous Discovery With Teresa Torres
https://www.produxlabs.com/product-thinking-blog/episode-30-teresa-torres

Episode 226: Why Every Product Team Needs a Playtesting Mindset with Christina Wodtke
https://www.produxlabs.com/product-thinking-blog/episode-226-christina-wotdke-game-design

Episode 231: Laying the Groundwork for Startup Success with Julia Austin
https://www.produxlabs.com/product-thinking-blog/episode-231-julia-austin-startup-success-idea

Teresa Torres on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/teresatorres/

Christina Wodtke on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/christinawodtke/

Julia Austin on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliaaustin/