Continuous Discovery Habits Quotes

“Our subscriber wants to watch sports.” This is an assumption that is core to the target opportunity, so if this assumption is false, we can abandon our set of ideas.”
― Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

“Good tests kill flawed theories; we remain alive to guess again.”
― Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

“The beauty of a continuous discovery process is that we can always course-correct as we learn. So, as you assess and prioritize the opportunity space, relax. Make the best decision you can, given what you know today, and know that, if you got it wrong, we’ll simply revisit the decision when we need to.”
― Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

“When we assess and prioritize the opportunity space, even though these are some of the most strategic decisions we make as a product trio, we are still making two-way door decisions. When you choose a target opportunity, you are choosing how to spend your next few days or weeks. You are not committing to addressing that opportunity. You are simply committing to exploring it further with your discovery work. If, as you proceed to explore solutions, you learn that this wasn’t the best decision (e.g., you learned something new, you found the solutions to be tougher than you imagined, you learned it wasn’t as important to customers as you thought), you’ll simply turn around and choose another target opportunity.”
― Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

“Depending on the competitive landscape, some opportunities might be table stakes, while others might be strategic differentiators. Choosing one over the other will depend on your current position in the market. A missing table stake could torpedo sales, while a strategic differentiator could open up new customer segments. The key is to consider how addressing each opportunity positions you against your competitors. With market factors, we also want to consider any external trends (both opportunities and threats) that might impact which opportunity we might choose.”
― Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

“Market factors help us evaluate how addressing each opportunity might affect our position in the market.”
― Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

“Opportunity sizing helps us answer the questions: How many customers are affected and how often? However, we don’t need to size each opportunity precisely.”
― Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

“Our strategy consists of playing catch-up, and, no matter how hard we work, we always seem to fall further and further behind.”
― Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

“You can integrate a single question into the flow of your product: “Do you have 20 minutes to talk with us about your experience in exchange for $20?” Be sure to customize the copy to reflect the ask-and-offer that works best for your audience. If the visitor answers “Yes,” ask for their phone number.”
― Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

“But you may want to widen the scope. You might say, “Tell me about the last time you watched any streaming entertainment.” This question will elicit stories about your product but also stories about your competitors.”
― Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

“asked a woman what factors she considered when buying a new pair of jeans. She didn’t hesitate to answer. She said, “Fit is my number-one factor.” I then asked her to tell me about the last time she bought a pair of jeans. She said, “I bought them on Amazon.” I asked, “How did you know they would fit?” She replied, “I didn’t, but they were a brand I liked, and they were on sale.” What’s the difference between her two responses? Her first response tells me how she thinks she buys a pair of jeans. Her second response tells me how she actually bought a pair of jeans. This is a crucial difference. She thinks she buys a pair of jeans based on fit, but brand loyalty, the convenience of online shopping, and price (or getting a good deal) were more important when it came time to make a purchase. This story isn’t unique. I’ve asked people these same two questions countless times in workshops. The purchasing factors often vary, but there is always a gap between the first answer and the second. These participants aren’t lying. We just aren’t very good at understanding our own behavior.”
― Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

“We were so accustomed to the tedium that we no longer noticed it.”
― Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

“Now, if you had interviewed customers before the original iPhone was released, nobody would have asked for visual voicemail. Nobody knew visual voicemail was possible. Most people weren’t even aware of their own pain points and challenges with how regular voicemail worked. Voicemail wasn’t important enough for us to give it any thought.”
― Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

“If you are too young to remember the first iPhone, one of the big features at release was visual voicemail. Visual voicemail is so familiar today, it’s hard to remember what voicemail used to be like. Here’s how Ars Technica described visual voicemail in their 2007 review:”
― Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

“wireflow”
― Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

“You’ll start by building an experience map that reflects what you currently know about your customer (Chapter 4). Your experience map will guide you as you interview customers to discover specific opportunities. You’ll capture what you are learning from each interview on an interview snapshot (Chapter 5). You’ll map out and structure those opportunities on an opportunity solution tree (Chapter 6) and use the tree structure to help you assess and prioritize the opportunity space (Chapter 7).”
― Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

“interview customers”
― Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

“Before you set your own outcome, ask your product leader for more business context. Try these questions: What’s most important to the business right now? Try to frame this conversation in terms of business outcomes. Is there a customer segment that is more important than other customer segments? Are there strategic initiatives we should know about? Use the information you gain to map out the most important business outcomes and what product outcomes might drive those business outcomes. Get feedback from your leader. Choose a product outcome that your team has the most influence over.”
― Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

“If you are being asked to deliver outputs with no regard for outcomes, try these tips to shift toward a more outcome-focused mindset: When your product leader assigns a new initiative to your product trio, ask your leader to share more of the business context with you. Explore these questions: Who is the target customer for this initiative? What business outcome are we trying to drive with this initiative? Why do we think this initiative will drive that outcome? (Be careful with Why? questions. They can put some leaders on the defensive. Use your best judgment, based on your knowledge of your specific leader.)”
― Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

“Teams tasked with a new outcome often have no idea how to measure that outcome, how to impact it, or even if it’s the right outcome to be pursuing.”
― Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

“When we learn through testing that an idea won’t work, it’s not enough to move on to the next idea. We need to take time to reflect. We want to ask: “Based on my current understanding of my customer, I thought this solution would work. It didn’t. What did I misunderstand about my customer?” We then need to revise our understanding of the opportunity space before moving on to new solutions.”
― Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

“Decisive,”
― Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

“The key here is that the team is filtering the opportunity space by considering only the opportunities that have the potential to drive the business need.”
― Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

“For most of us, when we encounter a problem, we simply want to solve it. This desire comes from a place of good intent. We like to help people. However, this instinct often gets us into trouble. We don’t always remember to question the framing of the problem. We tend to fall in love with our first solution. We forget to ask, “How else might we solve this problem?” These problems get compounded when working in teams. When we hear a problem, we each individually jump to a fast solution. When we disagree, we engage in fruitless opinion battles. These opinion battles encourage us to fall back on our organizational roles and claim decision authority (e.g., the product manager has the final say), instead of collaborating as a cross-functional team. When a team takes the time to visualize their options, they build a shared understanding of how they might reach their desired outcome. If they maintain this visual as they learn week over week, they maintain that shared understanding, allowing them to collaborate over time. We know this collaboration is critical to product success.”
― Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

“Why are brainstorming advocates so adamant that brainstorming works? It turns out researchers have an answer to this question as well. Bernard Nijstad and colleagues at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands found that brainstorming groups are subject to what they call “the illusion of group productivity.”40 This is a phenomenon in which groups overestimate their performance. They also report high levels of satisfaction with their work despite their lesser performance.”
― Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

“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.”
― Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

“Many of us stopped drawing sometime in elementary school. As a result, we have the drawing skills of a child. This makes drawing uncomfortable. Regardless of how well you draw, drawing is a critical thinking aid that you will want to tap into. Drawing allows us to externalize our thinking, which, in turn, helps us examine that thinking.”
― Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

“Many of the decisions we make in discovery feel like big strategic decisions. That’s because they often are. Deciding what to build has a big impact on our company strategy, on our success as a product team, and on our customers’ lives. However, most of the decisions that we make in discovery are reversible decisions. If we do the necessary work to test our decisions, we can quickly correct course when we find that we made the wrong decision. This gives us the luxury of moving quickly, rather than falling prey to analysis paralysis.”
― Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

“Finding the best path to your desired outcome is what researchers call an “ill-structured problem”—also commonly called a “wicked problem.” Ill-structured problems are defined by having many solutions. There are no right or wrong answers, only better or worse ones. Much of the work when tackling an ill-structured problem is framing the problem itself.5 How we frame a problem has a big impact on how we might solve it.”
― Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

“A business outcome measures how well the business is progressing. A product outcome measures how well the product is moving the business forward. A traction metric measures usage of a specific feature or workflow in the product.”
― Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value