Teresa Torres's Continuous Discovery Cadence for Product Teams

The framework

The Opportunity Solution Tree

Staying in the problem space is uncomfortable because it goes against most of our instincts. The tree's real job is to hold you there long enough to see more than one way out.

How to apply it

How do you build a continuous discovery habit?

Six moves. The cadence matters more than the artifact: a mediocre tree refreshed every week beats a beautiful one built once.

1. 1

   Put one outcome at the root.

   Not a feature list, not a quarter of initiatives. One measurable outcome the team owns. Everything below the root exists to explain how you might move that number, which is what makes the tree prunable later.

2. 2

   Structure the opportunity space around an experience map.

   Lay out the steps a customer actually goes through, then hang opportunities off those steps. Keep the top level to roughly three to seven branches so the tree stays something a human can hold in their head.

3. 3

   Frame each opportunity specifically enough to be solvable.

   Torres uses the example of entering password letters with an Apple TV remote. "Better onboarding" is not an opportunity, it is a wish. If you cannot picture the moment it happens, it is framed too high.

4. 4

   Make the interview a recurring meeting you did nothing to schedule.

   This is the load-bearing habit. Put an opt-in prompt inside the product or trigger recruiting from support and sales, wire it to scheduling software, and let the calendar do the discipline.

5. 5

   Collect stories, not opinions.

   Ask about a specific past instance and walk it forward by repeatedly asking what happened next. Direct questions and hypotheticals produce confident, useless answers; behavior produces opportunities.

6. 6

   Compare solutions, then test assumptions instead of ideas.

   For any opportunity that matters, generate several solutions and compare them rather than committing to the first obvious one. Break each into its underlying assumptions and run many small tests a week instead of one large experiment.

Almost every team that fails at weekly interviewing fails at recruiting, not at interviewing. Solve the calendar and the habit survives a busy quarter. On the interview itself, Torres's bar is tonal rather than procedural: skip the fifty-question protocol.

Boundary conditions

When it works, when it fails

The objection Torres hears most is evidential: a handful of conversations is not a sample. Her answer is that the comparison is wrong, because the alternative in most companies is not a rigorous study.

Where practitioners split is on who you talk to. Torres optimizes for a repeating weekly rhythm with whoever the product can recruit, on the theory that the habit compounds. Christian Idiodi of SVPG argues the opposite trade: pick a fixed set of reference customers, six to eight for B2B. Design with the same people until they will vouch for the product. One method buys breadth and consistency; the other buys depth and a reference list you can sell with. Neither survives if you only do it once.

The sources

Where Torres discusses this