Continuous discovery
Continuous discovery is the practice of maintaining a regular, ongoing habit of talking to customers and testing ideas throughout product development, rather than doing research only in occasional big projects.
Also known as Continuous product discovery
What does continuous discovery look like in practice?
A common benchmark, popularised by Teresa Torres, is weekly touchpoints with customers by the team building the product, feeding a continuously updated view of customer needs, opportunities and solutions.
Why continuous rather than one-off research?
Markets and customers change, and one-off studies go stale. A steady cadence keeps the team's understanding current and catches problems early, when they are cheap to fix.
What gets in the way of continuous discovery?
The usual blockers are recruiting participants and drowning in interview notes that never get synthesised. Centralising and automatically analysing the incoming signal removes most of the friction.
Put it into practice
Continuous discovery, in brief
Continuous discovery is maintaining a regular, ongoing habit of talking to customers and testing ideas throughout product development, rather than researching only in occasional large projects.
A widely cited benchmark is at least weekly touchpoints with customers, conducted by the team building the product, feeding a continuously updated view of needs and opportunities.
Related terms
- Product discoveryProduct discovery is the work of deciding what to build and why, by validating that a proposed solution is valuable, usable, feasible and viable before committing significant engineering effort to it.Read more
- Qualitative researchQualitative research is the study of customer attitudes, motivations and behaviours through non-numerical methods such as interviews, observation and open-ended feedback, aimed at understanding why people act as they do.Read more
- Customer insightA customer insight is a non-obvious, evidence-backed understanding of customer behaviour or motivation that can change a decision, distinct from a raw data point or a single piece of feedback.Read more
- Research repositoryA research repository is a centralised, searchable store of customer research and evidence, from interviews and tickets to survey results and the insights drawn from them, that a whole organisation can draw on.Read more
- Customer interviewA customer interview is a one-to-one conversation with a current or potential customer, used to understand their goals, problems and behaviour in their own words, usually by asking about specific things they have done.Read more
See what your customers keep telling you
Connect a source or upload a few files. Your first opportunities show up in minutes.