Continuous Discovery Habits

21 Mar 2024

Book	Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value
Author	Teresa Torres
Published	May 19, 2021

The essense of capitalism:

“Managers must convert society’s needs into opportunities for profitable business.” — Peter Drucker

I don’t necessarily agree with this. Boredom/ lack of enjoyment is a problem, and all of these solve for that:

In the product world, we don’t just solve customer problems. The word “problem” implies something needs fixing. However, we have many examples of products or services that don’t fix problems. Disneyland entertains me. Ice cream is delicious. Mountain biking is fun. These products address my desires. I could try to shoehorn these desires into needs—I need something to fill my time, I need nutrients, and I need exercise. However, writing a book, eating spinach, and going to the gym might be more effective ways of addressing those needs. The key difference here is that I enjoy Disneyland, ice cream, and mountain biking. These products were designed to address my desires, not solve my problems.

Avoid bias and overconfidence in product discovery:

Chip and Dan Heath, in their book Decisive, outline four villains of decision-making that lead to poor decisions. The first villain is looking too narrowly at a problem. This is exactly why we want to explore multiple ways of framing the opportunity space. The second villain is looking for evidence that confirms our beliefs. This is commonly known as confirmation bias. We’ll be discussing this bias often throughout the book. We’ll be exploring several habits that will help us overcome this bias and ensure that we are considering both confirming and disconfirming evidence. The third villain is letting our short-term emotions affect our decisions. In the product world, this often shows up when we fall in love with our ideas. The fourth villain is overconfidence. This, too, is common in the product world. We are often sure our ideas will be runaway successes.

Ask/ focus on the past during discovery conversations:

Finding the right story question can be challenging. The scope of the story that you’ll want to elicit will change throughout your discovery process. For example, if you work at a streaming-entertainment company and you are trying to increase viewer engagement, you might ask, “Tell me about the last time you watched our streaming-entertainment service.” This question will help you learn about pain points and challenges with your product. 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. You could broaden the scope even further to, “Tell me about the last time you were entertained.” This might elicit stories about going to a movie theater, attending a concert, socializing with friends, and much more. This type of question is a great way to uncover what your product category (e.g., streaming entertainment) competes with.

Ideally, you want to automate user recruitment for discovery/ research:

The hardest part about continuous interviews is finding people to talk to. In order to make continuous interviewing sustainable, we need to automate the recruiting process. Your goal is to wake up Monday morning with a weekly interview scheduled without you having to do anything.

Products are never finished because people are never completely satisfied, and things can always be improved:

As you collect customers’ stories, you are going to hear about countless needs, pain points, and desires. Our customers’ stories are rife with gaps between what they expect and how the world works. Each gap represents an opportunity to serve your customer. However, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and not know where to start. Even if you worked tirelessly in addressing opportunity after opportunity for the rest of your career, you would never fully satisfy your customers’ desires. This is why digital products are never complete. 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.

Originality/ creativity correlates with the number of new ideas generated:

In other words, as we generate more ideas, the diversity and novelty of those ideas increases. Additionally, the most original ideas tend to be generated toward the end of the ideation session. They weren’t the first ideas we came up with. So even though our brain is very good at generating fast solutions, we want to learn to keep the loop open longer. We want to learn to push beyond our first mediocre and obvious ideas, and delve into the realm of more diverse, original ideas.

Individuals generating ideas on their own outperform groups brainstorming together:

As brainstorming rose in popularity, academic researchers started to question if it worked. Was brainstorming in groups the most effective way to generate ideas? For decades researchers ran studies in which they compared the creative output of brainstorming groups against the creative output of the same number of individuals generating ideas alone. Study after study found that the individuals generating ideas alone outperformed the brainstorming groups. Individuals generated more ideas, more diverse ideas, and more original ideas.

As researchers dug into why individuals outperformed groups, they identified four mitigating factors. First, research has found that people tend to work harder when working individually than when working in groups. This is called social loafing. When we are on our own, we have no choice but to put in the work, whereas when we are in a group, we can rely on the efforts of others. Second, brainstorming groups exhibited many of the common challenges associated with group conformity. The early ideas set the tone for later ideas. Ideas were often too conservative or similar to each other. Members censored their ideas due to concerns about how others would judge their ideas. Third, brainstorming groups ran into challenges with production blocking—that’s a fancy term for a simple idea. Have you ever been about to say something when someone else jumped in, prompting you to forget what you were going to say? That’s production blocking. In group brainstorming sessions, people lose ideas amid the chaos of everyone sharing ideas in rapid succession. And finally, the fourth factor is a common group trait known as downward norm setting—the performance of the group tends to be limited to the lowest-performing member. Rather than the strongest member raising everyone else up, the opposite happens. The weakest member brings everyone else down. These factors combined to inhibit the performance of the brainstorming groups as compared to the individuals who generated ideas alone.39

Find a way to build the habit of continuous interviewing:

I believe continuous interviewing is a keystone habit for continuous discovery. Of all the habits in this book, if you are looking for one place to get started, this is it. If you’re wondering how you’re going to make this happen, I hear you. I’ve worked with dozens of teams who have genuinely struggled to find customers to talk to. They aren’t allowed to build recruiting hooks into the product. Their sales and account-management teams want to own the relationship and be the go-between, rather than let product people have direct access. Their customers are busy doctors or secretive investors or high-powered CEOs. I can’t tell you how to overcome all of these obstacles. I know from working with many teams that every situation is unique. But I can tell you that there is a way. Even in the most challenging situations, the teams I’ve worked with have chipped away at getting more access to their customers. They’ve taken a continuous-improvement approach to the challenge. If they have never talked to a customer, they start small and try to find a single customer to talk to. If they can’t do even that, they start by talking with someone who is similar to their customers. They use each conversation to get introduced to another person to talk to. They make next week look better than last week. And with time, they find themselves on a path to continuous interviewing. No matter your situation, this is the habit to start with.