Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more

Jun 30, 2022 47m 32s 14 insights Episode Page ↗
Teresa Torres, author of Continuous Discovery Habits, discusses the Opportunity Solution Tree framework and continuous discovery. She shares how to integrate customer conversations weekly, improve interviewing skills, and shift from output to outcome-focused product development.
Actionable Insights

1. Adopt Continuous Discovery Habits

Integrate customer conversations weekly by automating recruitment, making it easier to do than not, to continuously make better product decisions. This shifts from project-based research to an ongoing process.

2. Utilize Opportunity Solution Tree

Structure product strategy visually from an outcome to opportunities and solutions, helping teams manage the complex problem of deciding what to build. This framework adds structure to a messy problem, enabling more strategic decisions.

3. Master Customer Interviewing

Elicit rich customer stories by asking ‘what happened next’ and being curious about their experience, rather than direct questions, to uncover unmet needs and pain points. This approach leads to more reliable insights and uncovers needs customers may not even be aware of.

4. Empower Individual Discovery

If your company is a ‘feature factory’ or restricts customer access, find ways to talk to customers yourself, even outside official channels, to gain context. This allows you to make better daily decisions and develop a deeper understanding of customer needs.

5. Shift from Project to Continuous

Integrate discovery and delivery in parallel, rather than as sequential phases, to continuously make better bets over time. This approach ensures you’re always learning and improving, even if leaders claim there’s ’no time for discovery’.

6. Automate Customer Recruitment

Allow customers to opt-in for interviews while using your product (e.g., via an in-app prompt) or leverage internal teams (sales, support) to schedule conversations. This makes weekly customer conversations effortless for the product team, who only needs to show up.

7. Deconstruct Opportunities

Break down large, evergreen opportunities into smaller, addressable needs as you move down the Opportunity Solution Tree. This allows teams to tackle manageable problems while still contributing to bigger, harder challenges.

8. Work with Multiple Solutions

When tackling core product functionality or differentiators, explore and compare multiple solutions for the same opportunity. This guards against over-committing to a single, potentially suboptimal, idea and helps make better decisions.

9. Embrace the Product Trio

Foster deep collaboration between the product manager, designer, and software engineer to make joint decisions from a shared understanding. This reduces disagreements and leads to building better products by leveraging diverse perspectives.

10. Prioritize Assumption Testing

Break down ideas into their underlying assumptions, prioritize them, and run small, rapid tests (half a dozen to a dozen per week) to evaluate solutions efficiently. This makes continuous discovery sustainable and allows for comparing multiple solutions simultaneously.

11. Measure Solution Impact

Instrument your product to measure the impact of everything you release, rather than assuming no risk in bets. This helps you hone your judgment on where risk lies in new ideas and solutions over time.

12. Address Small Data Skepticism

Counter concerns about making decisions based on small data by highlighting that one interview is better than zero, and that small experiments are valid due to continuous feedback loops. Product teams are in the business of changing behavior, not just seeking new knowledge, and can get large-scale data through live production prototyping.

13. Over-Index on Discovery Initially

When new to discovery, intentionally do a little too much research to develop your judgment for assessing risk in product bets. This helps build confidence and skill in identifying where robust discovery is most needed.

14. Unlearn Business Silos

Challenge the notion of functional territories and power dynamics in decision-making, instead focusing on collaborative ‘doing’ to build better products. This fosters a more effective working environment where teams intuitively collaborate rather than engaging in internal politics.