Visual Notes from “Continuous Discovery Habits” by Teresa Torres

Truth be told, this was the first book for which I have attempted creating visual notes. I did this months before a similar exercise for another great book — “Interviewing Users” by Steve Portigal.

There are many reasons why “Continuous Discovery Habits” is a valuable resource for product people, be those designers, engineers, product owners, analysts, etc. on their journey to learn how to identify problems worth solving and find the most appropriate solutions for them. Here are my personal takeaways:

1. The discipline of conducting discovery interviews on a recurring basis (read weekly) is key to building any further product discovery practices. That practice also heavily depends on being disciplined in continuous customer recruiting for any discovery activities
2. Discovery interviews should not be done alone (otherwise, getting buy-in, and having to prove something to someone becomes a heavy price to pay and furthermore a recurring price as well!)
3. Brainstorming (in the traditional setting performed as a group activity) can be detrimental when looking for creative solutions
4. Any problem or solution you explore will have a plethora of assumptions tied to it and those assumptions can be classified differently (feasibility, viability, desirability). There is also a certain science to prioritization based on different assumptions. A useful tool here is Assumption Mapping (David Bland talks a lot about it in “Testing Business Ideas”)
5. There is a lot of rigor and art at the same time in customer interviews. This topic deserves a lot of attention by itself. This is where “Interviewing Users” comes handy as well as other books like “Just Enough Research” by Erika Hall.

Note: one concept I am still struggling with is the Opportunity Solution Tree. I see a lot of people using it but for me it has been a bit of challenge making it work for me in a practical sense.