“Continuous Discovery Habits”: A Must-Read For Product People

It’s useful not only for product managers, but anyone involved in creating products or services

This book was recommended by a good friend and former colleague. We work in the same (tech) industry, and it provides a great perspective on product development. You don’t need to be a product manager to appreciate it – I am not one myself!

The premise of this book is to explore how to build a product or service that customers genuinely need and love — one that constantly improves and moves your business forward (I am not going to say “creates value” because it’s a corporate cliché I am tired of).

It explores the historical background of product management as a profession and provides a detailed look at continuous discovery. In short, this approach involves frequent — at least weekly — customers touchpoints, with constant research activities.

What I loved most about this approach is its concrete steps for structuring incoming ideas and pain points as opportunities. These opportunities are then mapped and visualized as trees, showing parent-child relationships and making them easier to sort and prioritize.

The tree structure approach “helps us deconstruct large, intractable problems into a series of smaller, more solvable problems”.

The book then goes into how to assess these structured opportunities and make informed decisions about which ones to pursue, balancing market, company, and customer factors.

When deciding which opportunity to pursue, I really appreciated the point on embracing the messiness. Trying to “mathematize” the process of selecting and pursuing product development opportunities may feel like the right thing to do, but the reality is that these decisions remain a inherently subjective and “messy”. Honestly, it feels applicable to many things in tech industry and beyond.

It is also helpful to think of decisions as “one-way door” (we can’t turn around and reverse it) vs. “two-way door” (reversible decisions that allow for more experimentation).

Teresa Torres also emphasizes that any product decisions need to include uncovering ethical assumptions (her favorite question is “If the New York Times ran a front-page story about this solution [including internal conversations, benefit and harm for the community, etc], would that be a good thing?”).

While this book is heavily focused on product management methodology, I believe it’s extremely useful for anyone involved in creating products and services.

More often than not, companies assume what their clients want without following continuous discovery approach. This book is brilliant for helping teams avoid these assumptions.

I don’t post book reviews without a beer recommendation — why would I do such a thing?

Today’s beer is by a Dutch brewery Frontaal — it’s their “For the Love of Hops” turquoise IPA. It’s one of the better IPAs I’ve had recently.

The brewery is in the very south of the Netherlands, near the Belgian border. I have many fond memories of traveling around this region, since we used to live in Germany, not far from the Dutch border.