Teresa Torres – Even You Can Do Continuous Discovery: Bringing the Discovery Habits to Every Organization
Jennifer Michelmann, 03.07.2023
We all know Teresa Torres by her super successful book Continuous Discovery Habits. Her book sold more than 80.000 times world-wide and included a lot of advice on how to introduce a continuous product discovery in our daily work as product managers.
Teresa defines continuous discovery as “weekly touch points with customers, by the team building the products, where they conduct small research activities, in pursuit of a desired product outcome”. Her book suggests 11 habits for product teams to adopt and try out – ideally one at a time. But while she aimed at making the book as actionable as possible, she noticed that some had trouble putting her suggestions into practice. An issue she regularly heard was “When it comes to discovery, I don’t know what to do when”.
This mattered a lot to Teresa, because her number one goal is to help teams adopt a continuous discovery cadence in their product work. She realized that while it’s easy for her to apply findings from books to real life, it might not be so easy for others. So even though her book was read by many, looking at the outcome, she discovered that there was work to do. She wanted to help people apply the insights from Continuous Discovery Habits in their work environments – and this inspired her talk at the Product At Heart conference.
Like a true product person, she started by asking her readers about their biggest obstacle when trying to adopt discovery habits, and by far the biggest response she got was: “My organization doesn’t work this way”. So Teresa came up with three common scenarios, describing company environments that many of us have seen and lived through:
The Feature Factory
The Messy Middle
Reverting to Old Habits
The golden rule of organizational change: Meet people where they are!
Each of these settings requires a specific way to deal with them, which Teresa describes in her talk in detail, choosing one of the eleven habits that is most likely to improve the outcome of the given situation. While she does this, there is one underlying pattern that she refers to in any given scenario, and she calls it “The golden rule of organization change”. When she asks the audience to repeat it several times during her talk, everyone happily goes along, because it simply makes sense: “We need to meet people where they are”.
Feature factory: Identify hidden assumptions
So what does this mean in a feature factory setting? It means that we are not starting by defining outcomes, demanding to talk to customers, stopping delivery in order to start discovery. These behaviors will likely be met with resistance and not get us anywhere. Instead, we start by applying just one of the 11 habits – identifying hidden assumptions.
This can be done by creating a story map, leading to a shared understanding of the situation. We are explicit about what the customer does when, and we spell out what needs to be true in order to be successful. Even if we don’t have the time (or the set-up) to test these assumptions, it is still a valuable exercise because it helps to visualize our thinking. A plus in a feature factory environment: It is entirely about outputs, so we meet people where they are. And we are likely to come up with many ways on how to improve our solution.
Messy middle: Turn your product trio into a bright spot
Next up in Teresa’s talk is the “Messy Middle”. One indicator that you are in this setting might be that you are new to OKRs and have introduced a product trio, but with limiting beliefs. According to Teresa, it’s a dangerous place to be, because this is the stage where we realize how hard change can be. Again, we want to meet people where they are, we want to create a momentum for change. But how? By creating a bright spot, showing that changing something can work in this environment, especially to all the people who say “that will never work here”. Turning your product trio into a bright spot is all about cross-functional collaboration.
Since most misunderstandings and fights at work come from having different sets of information available, we should start by doing customer interviews together as a product trio. The best way to successfully do this is by automating the recruiting process for our customer interviews, e.g. by recruiting people who visit your website.Teresa believes that this is crucial, because if you have to hustle to find a customer every week, you will likely not do it. Then, once you are interviewing, make sure to ask the right questions. There is no need to overthink this, but you want to get reliable feedback. This means avoiding questions that start with what, how and when. Instead of asking speculative questions, collect specific stories about past behavior instead. This will answer all your w-questions, but since they are grounded in a specific story, they are far more reliable. So by interviewing customers together as a product trio, you can make them the bright spot in your company.
Reverting to old habits: Escape micromanagement by showing your work
The last scenario is called “Reverting to old habits”. This is visible in companies that have made good progress with introducing continuous discovery habits, but that revert back to old strategies when faced with pressure from the outside. If the world around us changes, this often leads to additional stress. In this case people turn back to old patterns, for example asking their product teams to deliver specific solutions. Teresa asks the audience about what to do in this case, and by now everyone knows the golden rule of organizational change: “Meet people where they are!”.
Teresa spells out what we are not going to do in this environment, because it won’t help us fix the issue: We’re not going to say no every time when asked for a feature. We’re not going to be stubborn and ask for autonomy. And we’re not hiding our work. Instead, when we perceive signs of stress in the organization, we are trying to understand where it comes from. Imagine your boss asks you to deliver a specific output. That means that the boss is very likely asked by someone else to deliver that exact output. In the past this manager trusted us to do the work, but now they feel out of touch. They start to micromanage, and in the worst case, we start to hide our work to not get micromanaged anymore, which just makes the manager want to micromanage us more. It’s a vicious circle, and there’s only one person who can break the cycle: It’s not the manager, it’s you.
So in this particular scenario, Teresa advises us to use another of her 11 habits, which is to show our work. There is one particular caveat that Teresa warns us about when applying this habit: We are not supposed to present outputs without explaining how we got to these solutions. Showing all of our work means that we show our conclusions and a synthesized version of the results (not the three-hour recording and the messy notes that nobody will read anyway). While we need to take our audience (and or our boss) along, we cannot assume that they do all the synthesizing for us. Instead, we can use templates like one-pagers, learning cards and the opportunity solution tree to show and explain our outcome. We build trust by showing our work and break the vicious circle.
It’s up to you — and you are not alone
After talking us through these three scenarios and how to react to them, Teresa comes back to the most common reply she hears from teams trying to introduce new discovery habits: “My organization doesn’t work this way”. But according to her, that’s never a reason to give up. Organizations themselves will not change, it’s the people inside those organizations that do. So you can individually start to work on those habits for yourself. You can be the change you want to see.
Teresa leaves us with a last powerful message: You are not alone. You might be the lone champion in your organization, but there are many people out there who believe in a better way to do product discovery. And you can start to change your organization from within – today.