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

Everything you need to know to build a customer-focused team that can interview customers about pain points and unmet needs, agree on opportunity prioritization, quickly test assumptions and prospective solutions, all so as to deliver customer value that drives business outcomes.

Teresa Torres delivers a practical, no-nonsense guide to continuous discovery that every product manager should read. She breaks down the process of customer discovery into simple, repeatable habits that drive better decision-making and product outcomes. The book is packed with actionable frameworks, real-world examples, and clear explanations that make it easy to implement.What sets this book apart is its focus on making discovery a continuous practice rather than a one-time research effort. If you want to build products that truly solve user problems, this book is invaluable. Highly recommended!

Bought this to improve my product management skills and build better user-centered habits.What I like• Easy to follow with clear, real-world examples• Focuses on mindset shifts, not just tools or processes• Teaches how to talk to users regularly without slowing down deliveryWhat could be better• Some concepts get repetitive after the first few chapters• Could use more examples from non-tech industriesBottom line: A must-read for product managers wanting to build what users actually need. Perfect for PMs at startups or growth-stage teams, but look at Lean Product and Lean Analytics if you want more on metrics and experiments.

Teresa Torres’ Continuous Discovery Habits is filled with both insight and technique. I like her re-cast: from “customer problems” - to “opportunity space” (“we don’t just solve customer problems” but also their pain points and, importantly, their needs).But her chapter 13, “Show Your Work”, particularly resonated with me: “When meeting with stakeholders, don’t start with your conclusions. Instead, slow down and show your work…. Start at the top of your tree. Remind your stakeholders what your desired outcome is. Ask them if anything has changed since you last agreed to this outcome…. Share how you mapped out the opportunity space. Highlight the top-level opportunities…. Drill into the detail only when and where they ask for it. Ask them if you missed anything. Consider that they may have knowledge of opportunities that you might have missed. Capture their suggestions…. Share how you assessed and prioritized the opportunity space…. Ask them if they would have made a different decision at each decision point.”As I said, tons of insight and technique.

I wish I had read this book 8 years ago when I started my career in software development. I’ve always wanted to be close to customers but didn’t understand how to make that happen or even fully understand why that was important. This book contains a long running example that helps give context to the ideas behind continuous discovery as well as real life examples. Just such a good book to help you shift from being output minded to outcome minded.

I just finished reading, and then rereading, Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres and I truly believe it’s the most important Product Management book I have read to-date. The title in fact sells this book far short of its true value. The real gem is the introduction of the revolutionary construct of outcome-based development.As the Agile Manifesto converted me from preplanning waterfall solutions to iterating with customer feedback and as the MVP converted me from endlessly pursuing perfection to building and releasing just enough product to evaluate whether to persevere or pivot, so too will outcome-based development initiate a conversion in me. Nearly every development endeavor I am aware of has followed output-based development, need-based development, idea-based development, or problem-based development. While it’s good to have a lot of output, features somebody feels they need, cool innovations, or the solutions to peoples’ problems, it’s far more important to build things that help achieve our most desired outcomes.Teresa’s opportunity solution tree turns conventional thinking upside down by first identifying the most desired outcome, then identifying the top opportunity to pursue to reach the outcome, then ideating a large number of solutions to then select the best possible solutions to address the opportunity, all the while recognizing and testing our assumptions.I am so convinced this is the proper approach to development, I’m converting immediately.