Narrator: Imagine a city council, deeply concerned about gentrification displacing families from a historically Black neighborhood. With the best of intentions, they invest millions of taxpayer dollars into a new, affordable condominium project. The goal is simple: help these families return home. The developer, granted tax breaks, builds primarily one- and two-bedroom units, assuming this will maximize the number of families they can help. But years pass, and the condos sit empty. The displaced families, many of whom are multigenerational and need more space, aren't buying. The project, born from a desire to do good, fails, and the units are sold on the open market. This costly failure happened because of a single, untested assumption about what people actually needed.

This is the exact problem at the heart of product development, and it's the challenge Teresa Torres confronts in her book, Continuous Discovery Habits. She argues that to avoid building products nobody wants, teams must adopt a structured and sustainable approach to continuously learn from their customers, moving from flawed assumptions to validated insights.

Narrator: Product teams often fall into what is called the "build trap," where success is measured by what is shipped—the output—rather than the value created—the outcome. This focus on delivering features can lead to disastrous consequences, as seen in the Wells Fargo scandal. In the early 2000s, the bank's leadership set an aggressive outcome: increase the average number of accounts per customer. However, they incentivized this outcome so heavily that it drove a toxic output-focused culture. Under immense pressure, employees opened millions of fraudulent accounts without customer consent to meet their quotas. The result was a multi-billion dollar scandal that shattered customer trust and the bank's reputation.

Torres argues that the solution is to reframe the goal. Instead of chasing business metrics in isolation, teams must focus on product outcomes, which are the changes in customer behavior that drive business results. This requires falling in love with the customer's problem, not a predetermined solution. By asking how a product can change a customer's life for the better in a way that also helps the business, teams can align their work with creating genuine value, avoiding the ethical and financial pitfalls of an output-only mindset.

Narrator: To escape the chaos of feature backlogs and stakeholder demands, teams need a clear, visual way to navigate their work. Torres introduces the Opportunity Solution Tree (OST) as the central framework for this process. An OST is a simple visual diagram that connects a desired outcome to the potential paths for achieving it. It starts with a clear outcome at the top, which then branches into opportunities—the customer needs, pain points, and desires that, if addressed, could help achieve that outcome. Below each opportunity, the tree branches further into potential solutions and the experiments designed to test them.

The power of the OST is that it forces teams to think critically about the problem space before jumping into the solution space. It creates a shared understanding among product managers, designers, and engineers, preventing debates based on opinion. By mapping out multiple paths, it encourages a "compare and contrast" mindset, which research shows leads to better decisions than a simple "whether or not" evaluation of a single idea. This visual framework becomes the team's living map, guiding their discovery work and making their strategic thinking transparent to stakeholders.

Narrator: Steve Jobs famously said, "People don’t know what they want until you show it to them." This highlights a core challenge in product discovery: you can't simply ask customers what to build. Torres explains that the goal of interviewing isn't to get a list of feature requests, but to uncover opportunities by understanding customers' real-world behaviors and contexts. People are notoriously unreliable at reporting their own actions. For example, a person might say "fit" is the most important factor when buying jeans, but then reveal their last pair was bought online, on sale, without ever trying them on.

To combat this, Torres advocates for continuous interviewing—at least one conversation with a customer every week by the product trio. This isn't a formal, rigid process but a habit of collecting specific stories about past behavior. By asking about a recent experience, teams can excavate the real pain points and needs. This weekly cadence of customer contact acts as a keystone habit. It naturally fuels all other discovery activities, providing a constant stream of insights to populate the Opportunity Solution Tree and raw material for assumption testing.

Narrator: Product strategy doesn't happen when a team decides which feature to build next; it happens when they decide which customer problem is most important to solve. By prioritizing opportunities, teams ensure they are investing their limited resources in the areas that will have the most impact on their desired outcome. This requires a structured assessment of the opportunity space, looking at factors like how many customers are affected, how severe the pain point is, and how it aligns with the company's unique capabilities.

A powerful example of this comes from Seera Group, a travel company that faced a crisis when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down borders. Their hotel booking business vanished overnight. However, through continuous discovery, they noticed a new behavior: customers were booking local private properties called Istrahas. The team quickly interviewed hosts and guests, mapped the opportunity space, and identified a new market. By prioritizing the opportunity to serve this emerging need, they were able to pivot their business in a matter of weeks, demonstrating how focusing on the right problem can be a company's saving grace.

Narrator: Every new idea is built on a pile of hidden assumptions about desirability, viability, feasibility, and usability. The Portland housing project failed because the city assumed displaced families wanted small condos. To avoid this fate, Torres argues that teams must test their riskiest assumptions, not their ideas as a whole. Instead of building a full feature, they should design small, fast experiments to gather evidence.

For example, a streaming platform considering adding sports content might assume their subscribers want to watch sports on their service. Rather than spending millions on licensing deals, they could run a simple test. They could mock up a home screen with sports content and ask a small group of users what they would watch. They could even run a one-question survey asking which of three streaming services a user would choose to watch an upcoming game. By defining success criteria upfront—for instance, "at least 3 out of 10 people must choose a sporting event"—the team can quickly and cheaply gather data to validate or invalidate their core assumption, allowing them to iterate or pivot without wasting massive resources.

Narrator: Many teams feel they can't adopt these habits because their company "doesn't work that way." Torres counters this by sharing her own early career story. As a young designer at HighWire Press, she was given a list of feature requests and told to design a site navigation. When she presented her work, the client hated it. Instead of giving up, she took a small step: she invited the unhappy client to partner with her on the next iteration. That single action started a career-long habit of getting closer to the customer.

The key is to focus on what is within your control. You don't need permission to start. Build a coalition with a designer and an engineer. If you can't talk to customers, talk to customer support or sales. If you're handed a solution, work backward to map the implied opportunity. Use retrospectives to ask, "What surprised us, and how could we have learned it sooner?" By starting small and iterating, any team can begin to build the habits that transform their work from simply shipping features to creating real, measurable value.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Continuous Discovery Habits is that effective product development is not a linear path from idea to launch, but a continuous, cyclical system for reducing risk. It’s a disciplined practice of making small, weekly touchpoints with customers, visualizing the opportunity space, and rapidly testing assumptions. This approach transforms teams from feature factories, blindly executing a roadmap, into empowered problem-solvers who are constantly learning and adapting.

The book's ultimate challenge is a simple one: what is the smallest step you can take next week to get closer to your customer? Don't wait for permission or a perfect process. Just start. Because the journey to building products that customers truly love begins not with a grand plan, but with a single conversation.