Continuous Discovery — Weekly Contact, Opportunity Trees

Activate when: a team ships features on opinion instead of evidence; 'we need a discovery habit', 'how often should we talk to users', building a product roadmap; connecting weekly customer contact to decisions. Do NOT activate when: pre-first-customer (use the-mom-test first) or the org has no product to iterate.

Overview

Continuous discovery (Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits, 2021) replaces one-off research with a weekly cadence of customer touchpoints by the team building the product, structured around an opportunity solution tree: one outcome → the opportunities (unmet needs) that drive it → competing solutions → assumption tests. It keeps roadmaps anchored to real needs instead of the loudest stakeholder.

When to Use

• A product with users but no steady learning loop
• Roadmap fights decided by seniority, not evidence
• Turning a fuzzy outcome (e.g. "increase activation") into shippable bets

The Process

1. Pick one clear outcome (a behavior/metric, not a feature). Gate: if the target is a feature, back up to the outcome it serves.
2. Interview weekly — the trio (PM/design/eng), small and continuous, not a quarterly study.
3. Map opportunities as a tree under the outcome; keep them as customer needs, not solutions in disguise.
4. Diverge on solutions per opportunity (≥3), then converge.
5. Test the riskiest assumption cheaply before building (desirability, viability, feasibility, usability).
6. Prune to the next bet. Gate: no assumption test run = you're shipping opinion → stop and test.

Applying It Well

• Automate recruiting so weekly interviews actually happen (the habit dies on scheduling friction).
• One opportunity tree per outcome; don't boil the ocean.
• Small continuous samples beat big infrequent ones.

Red Flags

• Discovery done by a research silo, not the builders.
• Opportunities written as features.
• Interviews stop the moment things get busy.

Verification

• Single outcome defined (behavioral)
• Weekly interview cadence in place
• Opportunity tree maps needs, not solutions
• Riskiest assumption tested before build

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Part of deciqAI Knowledge Skills — 223 open-source thinking skills that make rigor executable for AI agents. The same skills power every deciqAI agent, which runs them autonomously to operate your company. See it run → https://www.deciqai.com/c/continuous-discovery · ⭐ Star the repo → https://github.com/deciqAI/knowledge-skills · Contributions welcome.