── ── Cognitive bias
Continuous Discovery — Weekly Contact, Opportunity Trees
Continuous discovery (Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits, 2021) replaces one-off research with a weekly cadence of customer touchpoints by the team building the product, structured around an opportunity solution tree: one outcome → the opportunities (unmet needs) that drive it → competing solutions → assumption tests. It keeps roadmaps anchored to real needs instead of the loudest stakeholder.
Run Continuous Discovery — Weekly Contact, Opportunity Trees on a real problem
Bring something you're actually deciding — free, in the browser.
How it works
1. Pick one clear outcome (a behavior/metric, not a feature). Gate: if the target is a feature, back up to the outcome it serves. 2. Interview weekly — the trio (PM/design/eng), small and continuous, not a quarterly study. 3. Map opportunities as a tree under the outcome; keep them as customer needs, not solutions in disguise. 4. Diverge on solutions per opportunity (≥3), then converge. 5. Test the riskiest assumption cheaply before building (desirability, viability, feasibility, usability). 6. Prune to the next bet. Gate: no assumption test run = you're shipping opinion → stop and test.
When to use it
- a team ships features on opinion instead of evidence
- 'we need a discovery habit', 'how often should we talk to users', building a product roadmap
- connecting weekly customer contact to decisions
When not to use it
pre-first-customer (use the-mom-test first) or the org has no product to iterate.
Worked example
Continuous Discovery — Weekly Contact, Opportunity Trees
Continuous discovery (Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits, 2021) replaces one-off research with a weekly cadence of customer touchpoints by the team building the product, structured around an opportunity solution tree: one outcome → the opportunities (unmet needs) that drive it → competing solutions → assumption tests. It keeps roadmaps anchored to real needs instead of the loudest stakeholder.
Install this skill (free, MIT)
npx skills add deciqAI/knowledge-skillsUseful? Star the repo — stars help other builders find it.
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