Framework for building a sustainable, weekly practice of customer discovery that keeps product teams making progress toward desired outcomes. Rather than treating discovery as a phase that happens before development, this framework embeds customer learning into the ongoing rhythm of product work so that every decision is informed by fresh evidence.

Good product discovery requires a continuous cadence, not a one-time event. Teams that talk to customers every week, map opportunities visually, and test assumptions before building consistently outperform teams that rely on intuition, stakeholder opinions, or quarterly research cycles. The goal is at least one customer touchpoint per week, every week, by the product trio (product manager, designer, engineer).

Goal: 10/10. When reviewing or creating a product discovery practice, rate it 0-10 based on adherence to the principles below. A 10/10 means the team has a weekly interview cadence, maintains a living Opportunity Solution Tree, systematically tests assumptions, and uses evidence to decide what to build. Lower scores indicate gaps in cadence, structure, or rigor. Always provide the current score and specific improvements needed to reach 10/10.

Core concept: An Opportunity Solution Tree (OST) is a visual map that connects a desired outcome at the top to customer opportunities in the middle and potential solutions at the bottom. It makes implicit product thinking explicit and shared.

Why it works: Most teams jump from a business outcome straight to solutions, skipping the customer need entirely. The OST forces teams to first understand the opportunity space -- the unmet needs, pain points, and desires customers have -- before generating solutions. This prevents building features nobody wants.

Ethical boundary: Never cherry-pick opportunities to justify a predetermined solution. The tree must reflect genuine customer needs discovered through research.

See: references/opportunity-trees.md

Core concept: Current-state experience maps capture how customers accomplish a goal today, step by step, revealing pain points and unmet needs that become opportunities on the tree.

Why it works: Teams often assume they understand the customer's current experience, but mapping it collaboratively from interview data reveals gaps, workarounds, and emotions that are invisible from the inside. The map generates opportunities you would never brainstorm from a conference room.

Ethical boundary: Experience maps must reflect real customer experiences from interviews, not the team's projection of what they imagine customers feel.

See: references/experience-mapping.md

Core concept: Story-based interviews capture specific past experiences (not opinions or predictions), and each interview is synthesized into a one-page snapshot that the whole team can quickly absorb and reference.

Why it works: Traditional interview methods ask customers what they want -- but customers are poor predictors of their own future behavior. Story-based interviewing grounds insights in real past events, revealing what customers actually did and felt. The snapshot format makes synthesis fast and creates a growing library of customer evidence.

Ethical boundary: Never lead interview participants toward conclusions. Use open-ended questions about past behavior and let the story reveal what matters.

See: references/interview-snapshots.md

Core concept: Before building a solution, identify the underlying assumptions that must be true for it to succeed, map them by type and risk, then design small, fast tests to validate or invalidate the riskiest ones first.

Why it works: Every solution is built on a stack of assumptions about desirability, viability, feasibility, and usability. Most teams test none of them before building, or they test the easy ones instead of the risky ones. Systematic assumption mapping and testing prevents investing months in solutions built on false premises.

Ethical boundary: Never design assumption tests that deceive participants. Painted-door tests should explain that the feature is coming soon, not simulate functionality that doesn't exist without disclosure.

See: references/assumption-mapping.md

Core concept: Use structured methods to compare opportunities against each other rather than evaluating them in isolation. Assess opportunity size, market factors, company factors, and customer factors to find the highest-leverage bets.

Why it works: Teams default to prioritizing by loudest stakeholder voice, recency bias (whatever the last customer said), or gut feel. Structured comparison forces explicit tradeoff discussions and surfaces disagreements that would otherwise go unspoken until implementation is underway.

Ethical boundary: Prioritization frameworks should surface real customer needs, not be gamed to justify features that serve business metrics at the expense of user value.

See: references/prioritization-methods.md

Core concept: Continuous discovery only works if it becomes a sustainable weekly habit for the product trio. This requires automating recruitment, creating lightweight rituals, and embedding discovery into the existing workflow rather than treating it as extra work.

Why it works: Most teams do a burst of research at the start of a project and then stop. Continuous discovery requires structural support: automated participant recruitment, standing interview slots, shared synthesis artifacts, and team norms that make discovery non-negotiable. The habit compounds -- teams that maintain it for months develop deep customer intuition that transforms every decision.

Ethical boundary: Respect participant time. Keep interviews to 30 minutes, compensate fairly, and never use discovery interviews as a disguised sales pitch.

See: references/case-studies.md

This skill is based on the continuous discovery framework developed by Teresa Torres. For the complete methodology, templates, and case studies:

Teresa Torres is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and coach who helps product teams adopt continuous discovery practices. She has coached hundreds of product teams at companies ranging from early-stage startups to global enterprises including Capital One, Calendly, and Reforge. Torres created the Opportunity Solution Tree as a visual tool for connecting business outcomes to customer opportunities and potential solutions. Her blog, Product Talk, is one of the most widely read resources for product managers, and her coaching programs have trained thousands of product trios worldwide. Before becoming a coach, Torres spent over a decade as a product leader and has been active in the product management community since 2006. Continuous Discovery Habits distills her years of coaching into a practical, repeatable framework that any product team can adopt.