The best teams recognize that digital products are never finished; they constantly improve.

There's always a need to have continuous product discovery in the digital world, and as such, it's important to create a regular cadence of interaction between the product team and the customers they’re building for.

At our recent Innov8rs Connect on Foresight & Business Design, we invited Teresa Torres, an acclaimed product coach, creator of the Opportunity Solutions Tree, and the author of the book Continuous Discovery Habits, to share the "what" and "why" of Continuous Discovery. Here's the recording of her session, with a summary of what we discussed below the video.


As recorded during Innov8rs Connect on Foresight & Business Design, October 2021. For access to 600+ other videos and resources, become a member of Innov8rs Community - apply to join here.

What is Continuous Discovery?

Continuous discovery can be summed up in four sentences:

Weekly touchpoints with customers,
By the team building the product,
Where you conduct small research activities,
In pursuit of a desired product outcome

The best way to understand continuous discovery is to go through this definition sentence by sentence.

Weekly Touchpoints with Customers

Continuous feedback aims to get regular customer input to see the gap in how you see things compared to your customers' points of view. With regular weekly feedback, your company doesn't fall into two things: the curse of knowledge and getting feedback too early or too late.

As companies work on their products, they develop product expertise. However, there is a risk that this creates the "curse of knowledge"- you make decisions from your expert point of view, forgetting that your customers don't have your expertise. As a result, your research falls short, and your products don't work.

Traditionally, companies get feedback at the beginning or the end of a project. The problem with this method is that you don't know which questions to ask initially. If you ask for it at the end of the project, it's too late, and you might not be able to fix the product.

The easy fix to these is to get feedback from your customers continuously. You need to see your products from the point of view of your customers. One of the significant benefits of weekly cadence with customers is co-creation. Co-creating means combining your customer's knowledge of their world with your company's knowledge of what's possible and how to build the right solution.

By the Team Building the Product

To get regular feedback and co-creators with your customers, your company usually tends to outsource data through market research or a business intelligence team. However, often these studies are not timely. They have highly generic answers and are not usable. The main reason is that your team is not involved in the research.

The ideal way is to have your team building the product engage with the customers weekly to get fast answers to your daily questions. However, this isn't always possible, especially with big groups. To bridge this gap, the digital world has the concept of a "product trio".

The product trio comprises the product manager, design lead, and tech lead in the digital world. The concept of a product trio is simple: to get the right people in the room working together and engage the customers so the right product gets built. The product trio leads the discovery, and although they are not the only ones involved in product discovery or talking to customers, they are the leadership team.

The product trio bridges the gap between quantity over quality when it comes to decision-making. Remember, the more people involved, the slower you will make any decision. However, the more key personnel involved, the better the decision. The product trio makes sure the minimum number of people are involved in making a good decision. The concept of the product trio is flexible, and critical people can be added when the situation entails their expertise.

Conducting Small Research Activities in Pursuit of a Desired Outcome

How do you stay focused on your outcomes while continuously conducting these small research activities? The solution is the Opportunity Solution Tree, a non-linear visual aid that allows the product team to reach the desired outcome and achieve this. The Opportunity Solution Tree Diagram can be summarized into four key areas: a clear desired outcome, opportunities that emerged from your research, solutions, and experiments to evaluate your solutions and the assumptions behind them.

Define a Clear Desired Outcome

The desired outcome is what your company wants to achieve or the business value. This outcome is usually a metric. This metric can be anything from increased revenue, increased retention, engagement, to name a few.

An important thing to remember is that it is challenging to influence customer outcomes, but you can influence product outcomes. Over the years, especially during the pandemic, there has been a shift from the output ( what we will build) to the outcome ( what impact will the product have). This shift was primarily because of the uncertain future and ever-changing technology landscape. Engaging in this outcome-based model makes you more agile. Product outcome is the behavior in the product you believe is a leading indicator of a business outcome.

In formulating your desired outcome, you usually need to have a theory. To illustrate, let's use Netflix as an example. The theory with Netflix is The more they entertain you, the longer you'll stick around. With this theory, you can use viewing engagement as metric driving retention.

Discover Opportunities to Drive that Desired Outcome

When you've formulated your desired outcome, the next step is to identify the tasks of the pain points you need to resolve to reach your desired outcome. Addressing the customer's unmet needs is the best way to create value for your customer. Look at only the unmet needs that can drive your desired outcome. Going back to the Netflix example, you want to discover what keeps people from engaging with Netflix, the pain points, and the problems and desires they run into. From there, you can map out opportunities.

Interview Your Customers to Discover Opportunities

To understand your customers' desires and pain points, you need to establish a weekly cadence with your customers. Weekly cadence is an ideal situation, but only a few companies do this because it's challenging to recruit customers. One viable solution to this problem is automation. You can achieve this by:

  • Recruiting people who visit your website. You can offer a survey and offer a gift in exchange for your customer's opinion
  • Define triggers for your support team. You can ask key people in your team to engage the customers when it falls on their specific area of study
  • Create a customer advisory board to create a relationship with your customers and make them your design partners. You'll work closely with a select few of your customers and, in the process, make them co-creators
  • Asking the right questions

In conducting interviews, it's crucial to ask the right questions to get the right answers. The best way to do this is to avoid direct and speculative questions. Don't ask questions like "Do you watch Netflix?" or "Do you like Netflix?".This is because human beings, in general, are terrible at answering direct questions. Direct your energy instead of focusing on the specific stories of your customers in the past. You can ask questions like "Have you watched Netflix in the last week?" In doing so, you're allowing your customers to tell their stories. Through these stories, you'll see customer pain points, desires, and needs.

Discover the Solutions that Deliver on Those Opportunities

When you've identified your customers' pain points and desires ( opportunities), you then need to identify the ways your product can solve these. You can have many opportunities, but you need to work with one option at a time. The ideal process is to choose one opportunity, solve it, ship it, and repeat the process with the other opportunities.

In working with an opportunity, it's best to consider more than one solution at a time. However, in considering solutions, avoid ones that lead to a whether or not decision. Whether or not decisions come from questions framed as "Is this idea good, or not?" Whether or not questions are not ideal because they can give rise to two things: Escalation Commitment Bias and Confirmation Bias.

In escalation and commitment bias, the more you commit to an idea, the more you identify with it, the more you think it's a good idea. On the other hand, a confirmation bias will have you looking at evidence to confirm your excellent idea but miss the ones that say it's flawed. These two can lead to a flawed solution.

A better way to frame your idea is to set up a compare and contrast decision. In this type of decision, you compare a few ideas, and you ask yourself which of these ideas can solve the problem.

To illustrate, compare the following questions: Is Usain Bolt fast? (Whether or Not Question). Is Usain Bolt fast compared to a cheetah? To a Tesla? To other human beings? ( Compare and Contrast) Which of these questions gives you a clearer answer?

Assumptions Behind Solutions

In every solution, some assumptions drive it. These often fall into the following categories:

  • Desirable assumptions. This answers the question, "Does anyone want it?"
  • Viable Assumptions. This answers the question, "Should you build it?"
  • Usability assumptions. This answers the question," Can anyone use it?"
  • Ethical assumptions This answers the question," Is there any potential harm?"

If you feel the need to make your assumptions clearer, you can create a Story Map to visualize your premises.

Experimentation

The bottom level of the opportunity solution tree is about experimentation. In this stage, you want to test the solutions or assumptions you've made. It helps to ask the following questions for each solution:

  • Does the solution address the opportunity in a way that drives the desired outcomes?
  • Does the opportunity address a real pain point, need and desire?
  • Do these solutions address the opportunity?
  • Is this solution usable? Feasible?

The next step is to test the assumptions. There are several ways you can test hypotheses:

  • Create a one-question survey to evaluate past behavior
  • Ask if your customers are already exhibiting the behavior you want them to see, or suggest that?
  • Research spikes to help assess feasibility. This is where you ask your engineers to identify a particular thing

In summary. Continuous discovery is a process that helps your product team include customer input in their product decisions, making customers a co-creator in the constant product discovery. In this way, you continuously refine your products to deliver most value to your company and your customers.