Jenny Whitney's Key Ideas from Continuous Discovery Habits
by Teresa Torres

Frame insights gathered from discovery activities as concrete, falsifiable hypotheses stated from the customer's perspective.

This leads to productive questioning and testing of assumptions rather than falling into confirmation bias where we seek validation of preconceived notions and existing solutions.

State hypothesizes in ways that can be tested.

• Conduct user and customer interviews well beyond just current users and segments to gain broad, diverse perspectives.
• Ask genuinely open-ended questions and listen intently.
• Go deeper into understanding true needs and desires vs just feedback on existing products.
• Include non-customers and extreme users.

Frequently and rapidly run small, contained experiments to validate hypotheses and ideas before investing heavily in building solutions.

Quick iterative tests with real users bring theoretical ideas into reality. Focus on learning over growth and scale.

Use visual tools like insight walls and product learning maps to visibly track key insights, hypotheses, experiments, results and pending questions over time.

Visibility builds collective knowledge and accelerates learning across teams. Learn faster together.

Proactively share insights from discovery activities cross-functionally to spread customer and industry learning.

Create feedback loops so that discoveries from the frontlines frequently inform strategy, product development, marketing and other groups.

• Hold regular, cadenced reviews as a team of the discovery backlog, key results, and pending questions.
• Jointly plan next round of discovery steps and priorities based on review findings.
• Rhythms maintain momentum.

Incentivize intellectual curiosity, openly sharing discoveries, and willingness to challenge assumptions and accepted beliefs with ideas that seem to contradict current thinking.

Foster environments where it feels psychologically safe to rigorously question.