Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

by Teresa Torres

To make sure continuous interviewing is a robust habit, make sure everyone on your team is well-versed in recruiting and interviewing.

Asking who, what, why, how, and when questions.

they allow everyone to get their favorite questions answe...

generate a list of research questions (what you need to learn), and identify one or two story-based interview questions (what you’ll ask). Remember, a story-based interview question starts with, “Tell me about a specific time when…”

Continuous interviewing ensures that you stay close to your customers. More importantly, continuous interviewing will help to ensure that you can get fast answers to your daily questions.

when we share pages of notes that make sense only to us and/or a video of the full interview, we are expecting our colleagues to put as much effort into our discovery work as we do. This isn’t feasible. They have their own jobs to do. Instead, use your interview snapshots to share what you are learning with the rest of the organization.

Rather than synthesizing a batch of interviews, synthesize as you go, using interview snapshots.

mapping out the needs of each group on respective opportunity solution trees. They spent a few weeks collecting and sorting opportunities until patterns started to emerge.

grouping similar opportunities together.

How do we decide which opportunities are more important than others? How do we know which should be addressed now and which can be pushed to tomorrow? It’s hard to answer either of these questions if we don’t first take an inventory of the opportunity space.

If you interview continuously, your opportunity space will always be evolving

Mapping the opportunity space is how we give structure to the ill-structured problem of reaching our desired outcome.

Limiting our work to only the opportunities that might drive our desired outcome is what ensures that our products are viable over the long run

Our goal should be to address the customer opportunities that will have the biggest impact on our outcome first.

good thinking requires that we explore our options

carry out a systematic search for longer than we feel comfortable.

We should compare and contrast the impact of addressing one opportunity against the impact of add...

We want to be deliberate and systematic in our search for the highes...

As the opportunity space grows and evolves, we’ll have to give structure to it again and again. As we continue to learn from our customers, we’ll reframe known opportunities to better match what we are hearing. As we better understand how our customers think about their world, we’ll move opportunities from one branch of the tree to another. We’ll rephrase opportunities that aren’t specific enough. We’ll group similar opportunities together.

we’ll use an opportunity solution tree (introduced in Chapter 2) to help us map out and understand the opportunity space. The tree structure will help us visualize and understand the complexity of the opportunity space.

Trees depict two key relationships—parent-child relationships and sibling relationships.

a child opportunity (or sub-opportunity) is a subset of a parent opportunity.

Siblings should be similar to each other—in that they are each a subset of the same parent—but distinct in that you can address one without addressing another.

When we learn to think in the structure of trees, it helps us deconstruct large, intractable problems into a series of smaller, more solvable problems.

The value of breaking big opportunities into a series of smaller opportunities is twofold. First, it allows us to tackle problems that otherwise might seem unsolvable. And second, it allows us to deliver value over time. That second benefit is at the heart of the Agile manifesto and is a key tenet of continuous improvement. Rather than waiting until we can solve the bigger problem

we can deliver value iteratively over time.

This allows us to ship value quickly. Now it might not solve the bigger opportunity completely, but it does solve a smaller need completely. Once we have accomplished that, we can move on to the next small opportunity. Over time, as we continuously ship value, we’ll chip away at the larger opportunity. Eventually, we’ll have solved enough of the smaller opportunities that we will, in turn, have solved the larger opportunity.

the tree structure is going to be invaluable when it comes time to assessing and prioritizing opportunities.

we’ll use the tree structure to help us make fast decisions.

To unlock the power of deconstructing big, intractable challenges into a series of more solvable, smaller opportunities, we need a well-structured opportunity space.

We need each opportunity to be distinct from every other opportunity. If there’s overlap, then we can’t work on one at a time. Instead, they all get enmeshed with each other, and we need to work on all of them at the same time. If this is how you are feeling, it’s a good sign that your tree needs more structure.

two ways to uncover the underlying structure of your opportunity space. The first is to use the steps of your experience map that you created in Chapter 4. The second is to use your interview drawings to identify key moments in time. Both strategies accomplish the same goal—they help you organize the opportunity...

Our goal is to identify distinct moments in time during your customers’ experience. Oftentimes this is as simple as mapping each node in your experience map to the top level of opportunities on your opportunity solution tree.

However, if your team isn’t starting from a strong understanding of the customer experience,

analyze the customer stories you are collecting in your interviews. In Chapter 5, I encouraged you to draw the stories that you heard. You do this by identifying the key moments in time that occurred during each story. If you take all of these drawings and start to label each key moment (or node), you’ll notice patterns across your unique stories. What nodes are showing up in story after story? How can you stitch the most common nodes together to create an experience map that represents the set of stories that you are collecting? You can then map these nodes to your top-level opportunities.

make sure there is no overlap between the moments in time. Overlap will prevent us from working on one opportunity at a time.

With your distinct branches in place, we now want to take an inventory of the opportunities you have heard in your customer interviews.

for each opportunity, ask the following questions:

Is this opportunity framed as a customer need, pain point, or desire and not a solution? Is this opportunity unique to this customer, or have we seen it in more than one interview? If we address this opportunity, will it drive our desired outcome?

If the answer to all three of these questions is “Yes,” you’ll want to add it to your opportunity solution tree. For now, simply group it under the branch in which it occurs. If it seems like it could live under more than one branch, reframe the opportunity to be more specific. You may even need to split it into multiple opportunities, one for e...

Work with one branch at a time. Start by grouping similar opportunities together. Similar opportunities might be siblings,

If your similar opportunities are siblings, look for a parent opportunity.

don’t fret if you need to add parent opportunities that weren’t explicitly stated in an interview.

Look for sibling relationships between the parents of those mini-trees. Which can you group together? If you need to, add a shared parent to cluster similar opportunities together.

You’ll want to examine each opportunity to ensure it is properly framed, that you know what it means, and that it has the potential to drive your desired outcome.

The key is to find the sweet spot between giving you enough structure to see the big picture, but not so much that you are overwhelmed with detail.