Weekly customer contact, opportunity-solution tree. Teresa Torres' approach — and why discovery never ends.
Category · Project Management
Learn before you build.
Continuous Discovery, coined by Teresa Torres, is the weekly, structured contact with real users — by the team that builds the product, not by an upstream market-research function. The central tool is the opportunity-solution tree: from the business goal through identified needs to concrete solution ideas and experiments.
Discovery and delivery run in parallel, not one after the other. You don't build everything first and then ask.
Why we do it.
As an operator, our most expensive mistake is building the wrong thing right. Regular user contact and small experiments lower that risk before development effort is incurred. We anchor discovery directly in the team so that insights flow into decisions without being handed off.
Discovery never ends.
That's both the ambition and the burden: needs shift, every shipped solution raises new questions. Whoever mistakes discovery for a one-off project prelude has missed the point. Without a fixed weekly rhythm, it falls asleep immediately.