Hi fellow Agile enthusiasts and welcome to today’s episode, which is a very special one. I talk to Teresa Torres on the nuances of Continuous Discovery. Teresa is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and coach. She teaches a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery that helps product teams infuse their daily product decisions with customer input. She’s coached hundreds of teams at companies of all sizes, from early-stage start-ups to global enterprises, in a variety of industries. She has taught over 7,000 product people discovery skills through the Product Talk Academy and is the author of Continuous Discovery Habits.
We open the episode by learning a bit more about Teresa’s background and how she played each of the product trio roles early in her career. Teresa then defines what Product Discovery means to her before we dive into the details of the opportunity space. We chat about different mental models and tools like the Opportunity Solution Tree, and tips on how you can make discovery continuous in your context, whether that’s an empowered product team or a feature factory. Teresa then describes the importance of testing your assumptions with practices like unmoderated testing and story mapping. Lastly, we chat about how to prioritize opportunities over solutions with the help of the four lenses, which she outlines in her book, and examples from organizations like Netflix. If you’re involved in building any sort of product/service, this episode is highly recommended – regardless of your role or seniority level.
During the conversation, Teresa and I also brought up David Bland’s assumption mapping exercise, the dual track single flow model, Product Talk’s membership program and courses. You can connect with Teresa on Twitter, LinkedIn, and her website.
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Continuous discovery is more of a mindset shift – we see a lot of the same activities [as project-based discovery] but they’re adjusted to be smaller so that you can sustainably do them week over week.
We don’t interview a dozen customers because that takes weeks. We interview one or two customers a week on a regular cadence, we’re continuously testing assumptions, and we’re working on smaller batches of work so that we’re able to infuse more of our daily decisions with customer feedback.
TERESA TORRES ON THE AGILE ATELIER PODCAST
Rahul Bhattacharya 
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