A Framework for Creating Customer-Centric Products & Business Value
Staying ahead in today’s marketplace through customer-centric design is no longer optional. Yet, many product teams struggle to align their solutions with real customer needs. They work on early hypotheses and when it comes to launching the product or features, the market doesn’t respond–silence. In fact, according to a McKinsey study, 40% of companies still don’t engage with their end users during development–a costly oversight.
What’s more, in the business of daily tasks and competing priorities, how can teams consistently solve for customers in an iterative and meaningful way? Without a structured approach to understanding user preferences, pain points, and opportunities, product teams risk building products that simply miss the mark.
As customers’ preferences change, so should product development processes. This is where Continuous Discovery comes in–a framework that helps product teams uncover user needs and preferences on an ongoing basis to inform product development.
By adopting continuous discovery–as a practice and mindset–teams gain a proven framework for delivering real value for their customers and in doing so, drive business performance. A win-win strategy for organizations that want to transform how they innovate.
In this article, we’ll explore some of the general concepts that make up the Continuous Discovery framework, zeroing in on the customer interviews’ step, as Userlytics offers its platform to carry them out in a flexible and scalable way. Let’s dive in!
Product Discovery and Where It Falls Short
Many product teams embrace the product discovery process—a critical phase for identifying and validating what needs to be built to address user needs effectively. This process involves understanding customer problems, testing assumptions, and ensuring alignment with market demands. Although product discovery helps teams determine what they’ll work on, it often becomes a one-time exercise.
Getting a product right is both time and cost-intensive. When product discovery stops after the initial phase, teams risk drifting away from user needs, leading to missed opportunities or features that fail to resonate with the ever-evolving needs of the ideal customer persona.
That’s why today, effective product discovery requires continuous discovery—a sustained practice that ensures ongoing user feedback is constantly informing product development.
What is Continuous Discovery and Who Does It?
Continuous discovery refers to a user research approach designed for agile teams to carry out throughout the product development lifecycle. As Teresa Torres, Product Discovery Coach and author, points out in her book Continuous Discovery Habits, product teams should ideally engage with customers on a weekly basis to gather feedback and insights through small research activities aimed at informing a specific outcome.
In essence, continuous discovery serves as a framework for executing these discovery activities and effectively integrating them into a more systematic and repeatable process that steers product development.
While many product teams conduct some form of discovery, not all consistently weave it into their daily routines in a manner that informs immediate product-related decisions toward defined outcomes.
A central concept for successfully adopting continuous discovery is the formation of a “product trio,” typically consisting of a product manager, a designer, and an engineer. The purpose of this team is to work collaboratively and bring varied perspectives to the table, ensuring the development of products that resonate with users.
Each member of this team is responsible for specific responsibilities within the product development cycle, yet they have to work together to ensure they reach their desired outcome.
The unique expertise and clear responsibilities of each member are essential to a Product Trio:
- Product Manager
- Value: Does it create value for customers?
- Viability: Is it aligned with our business goals?
- Product Designer
- Usability: Can users intuitively engage with it?
- Lead Engineer
- Feasibility: Is it achievable with current technology?
While these roles outline each member’s primary focus, it’s important not to treat these boundaries as rigid. This team may include other members (not limited to three), and all should collectively conduct ongoing research, fostering a shared understanding of customer needs and identifying opportunities.
One key aspect of the discovery process is making the shift from outputs to outcomes. Output-driven work typically focuses around deliverables, such as features or enhancements, whereas an outcome-focused approach to product discovery emphasizes the broader impact or results achieved by working on the outputs. Outcomes should typically create real value for both customers and the business. Here’s a guide to help Product Trios transition from focusing on outputs to achieving meaningful outcomes.
Identifying Opportunities That Offer Real Business Value
To build the right solutions and avoid spending time and effort on the wrong projects, it’s essential for teams to make strategic decisions early on in the process. But, amid daily tasks and objectives, how can product teams get focused on what matters? Here is where the Opportunity Solution Tree comes in.
Developed by Torres, the Opportunity Solution Tree (OST) is a discovery tool designed to help teams align their efforts to the right opportunities from the very beginning. It serves as a powerful tool for product management that helps maintain focus and alignment in decision-making.
The Opportunity Solution Tree
The Opportunity Solution Tree serves as a visual tool for product discovery and is composed of four key components:
- Define a clear desired outcome: The outcome should bring value to your business and customers, versus simply outputs, which refers to the deliverables or actions produced.
- Discover opportunities that will drive the desired outcome: Gather research to discover what the customer needs, desires, and pain points.
- Discover solutions that deliver on those opportunities: Generate a map of possible solutions, identifying hidden assumptions.
- Run experiments that will validate your solutions: Rapidly test assumptions through diverse experiments to confirm or invalidate solutions.
In essence, the OST enables teams to focus on the right outcome, identify the right opportunities to achieve that outcome and come up with possible solutions to tackle those opportunities. It also enables teams to design experiments that will validate the solutions.
In short, it facilitates efficient ideation and experimentation by mapping out opportunities and potential solutions, making it easier to design focused experiments to validate assumptions.
While the opportunity tree is an essential framework for ideation and exploration, the key to truly identifying and validating these opportunities lies in understanding the ideal customer. This is where continuous customer interviews come into play.
By engaging with customers regularly and uncovering their pain points and desires, teams can ensure they are tackling the right opportunities (and solutions) intending to create both customer and business value.
Uncovering Opportunities Through Continuous Customer Interviews
Conducting customer interviews is one of the most impactful tools for ensuring that every decision is informed by customer feedback. When done right, this exercise helps uncover customers’ unmet needs and desires that can then be translated into opportunities.
In an ideal scenario, short, 30-minute interviews take place once a week. Interview questions should be guided by what the team is working on at the time, and should ideally be conducted by all members of the product trio. Like anything, effectively interviewing customers has its own science, as not running these interviews correctly could misguide conclusions. Within the continuous discovery framework, ‘story-based interviewing’ is the ideal way to gather insights from users.
Story-based interviewing encourages customers to share specific examples of past experiences, rather than general opinions, helping to avoid the biases and assumptions that can arise from hypothetical or abstract responses.
By focusing on real stories, this method provides deeper insights into customer behaviors, challenges, and motivations, leading to a more reliable understanding of their needs. As a result, this approach helps ensure that every decision is grounded on how customers actually experience a product or service, making it a crucial part of continuous discovery.
Conducting Effective Customer Interviews
Do’s:
- Frame questions in a storytelling format: Use prompts like “Can you walk me through a recent experience?” to uncover customers’ actual behaviors and actions rather than their idealized version.
- Clarify your research goals: Clearly distinguish between your research question (what you want to learn) and your interview question (how you ask it). This ensures your questions are purposeful and aligned with your objectives.
- Guide the conversation toward specifics: Help interviewees move from general statements to detailed examples that reveal their goals, challenges, and desires.
- Stay engaged and practice active listening: To dig deeper into their experiences, pay close attention and ask follow-up questions to gain richer insights.
Don’ts:
- Ask direct or closed-ended questions: These often lead to short, surface-level answers that don’t provide meaningful insights.
- Avoid leading questions: Don’t frame your questions in a way that pushes interviewees toward a specific response.
- Ask hypothetical situations: Questions like “Would you use this?” often lead to unreliable answers.
When conducting interviews, a wide range of opportunities will be uncovered. To decide which to include in the Opportunity Solution Tree, teams should focus on those that represent: clear customer needs, desires, or pain points, are commonly experienced by users, align with the desired outcome, and are not prematurely framed as solutions.
A good test is to ask, “Is there more than one way to address this opportunity?” Once identified, teams should commit to exploring one opportunity at a time. By continuously conducting interviews, teams can course-correct along the way, ensuring a thoughtful and adaptive approach to product development.
The Value of the Continuous Discovery Framework
Product teams are making decisions all the time. But how to ensure that these decisions are based on real customer input? During the traditional product development process, companies tend to significantly focus on product delivery versus product discovery, that is, the part of product design that relies on figuring out user needs.
Alternatively, employing a continuous mindset towards product development means teams can consistently and iteratively engage with users to hone the product roadmap.
5 Key Benefits of Continuous Discovery Include:
- Regular Customer Interaction: Teams maintain consistent touch points with customers to gather insights about their needs, challenges, and how they use products. This ensures that customer input is embedded into the decision-making process at all stages.
- Small, Ongoing Research Activities: Discovery activities such as interviews, surveys, or usability tests are done frequently, focusing on specific product features or decisions. These are not one-off events but part of a continuous feedback loop.
- Customer-Centric Decision Making: Rather than relying solely on internal assumptions or assumptions validated at the end of the development cycle, teams continuously check their ideas against customer needs and real-world usage. This approach helps teams make better, more informed decisions.
- Co-Creation with Customers: Instead of just validating solutions with customers at the end, continuous discovery encourages ongoing collaboration. Teams can share early ideas, prototypes, and concepts with customers to ensure they’re solving the right problems and building the right solutions.
- Continuous Improvement: The process is not static; it’s iterative. Regardless of whether your team is constantly shipping updates or deploying software, the focus is on gradually improving based on ongoing learning. Teams should aim to make small improvements over time rather than making large, risky bets.
3 Common Obstacles to Implementing the Continuous Discovery Framework
Now that we’ve explored some of the key concepts and value of Continuous Discovery, the next question is: How feasible is it to implement this framework within an organization? While many teams recognize its benefits, they often encounter obstacles that make its execution challenging, as well as pitfalls—avoidable mistakes that can derail progress. Here are three of the most common hurdles teams face when implementing Continuous Discovery.
- Identifying and engaging with the right customers regularly
Finding participants who accurately represent the target audience requires careful selection and outreach, which can be time-consuming. But, even once the right customers are identified, engaging with them and ensuring their willingness to participate in regular interviews can be a hurdle, as this seasoned product manager points out. Additionally, based on our experience working with clients on their discovery efforts, resource constraints are a common challenge. Scheduling, coordinating, and executing customer interviews demands significant time and effort. Without dedicated resources and clear processes in place, maintaining a consistent cadence of interviews can become difficult to sustain over time.
- Prioritizing the right opportunities
A common pitfall of Continuous Discovery is that teams can become overly reactive by making decisions based on their most recent customer conversation, rather than looking at broader patterns, as explained by Torres in this recent webinar. To solve this, she points out that teams should instead focus on collecting and mapping out recurring needs, pain points, and desires, and use the Opportunity Solution Tree to then visualize all the opportunities gathered from customer interviews. This process will enable more strategic, outcome-driven decisions rather than reacting to isolated feedback.
- Balancing discovery with delivery
Many teams can struggle to balance discovery with delivery, as noted by Torres, when adopting the continuous discovery framework. The pressure to ship features quickly can often push discovery efforts to the side. However, discovery and delivery should go hand in hand; discovery ensures teams are building the right thing, while delivery brings it to life. The key is making discovery an integral part of the process, so it doesn’t feel like an extra task but rather a natural complement to the delivery efforts.
Getting Started with Continuous Discovery
While Continuous Discovery is a robust framework for driving customer-centered design and output, its many components take careful ideation and resource allocation. This is particularly true when it comes to maintaining a steady cadence of user interviews. That’s why we’ve designed a service to simplify this process and help teams focus on what they do best: deliver exceptional products.
Our Continuous Discovery service is tailored to support the interview portion of the framework, providing a seamless way to gather consistent, high-quality feedback. Our international panel of 2 million participants ensures product teams can easily connect with their ideal users. Additionally, through our Interview Moderation with Snapshots expanded service, teams can also delegate customer interviews to Userlytics, ensuring a consistent flow of insights without overextending internal teams.
Whether you’re aiming to uncover new opportunities, validate assumptions, or stay aligned with your customers’ evolving needs, our Continuous Discovery service is designed to make the cadence of ongoing customer conversations much easier.Curious to learn more? Explore how Userlytics can help you gather user insights seamlessly. Leam more.
Q&A
What is Continuous Discovery?
Continuous discovery refers to a user research approach designed for agile teams to carry out throughout the product development lifecycle. Product teams should ideally engage with customers weekly to gather feedback and insights through small research activities aimed at informing a specific outcome.
What is the difference between product discovery and continuous discovery?
Product discovery often occurs as a phase at the start of a project, aiming to identify user needs and define requirements before development begins. Continuous discovery emphasizes an ongoing, iterative process where teams engage with users regularly to gather evidence-based decision-making throughout the product lifecycle, helping ensure that solutions remain aligned with evolving user preferences, among others.
Who should perform customer interviews?
Customer interviews should be conducted by a cross-functional team to ensure diverse insights. This includes Product Managers (strategy and prioritization), Designers (usability and experience), and Engineers (technical feasibility). Often forming a Product Trio, they collaborate to understand customer needs, align on solutions, and avoid siloed decisions.
What is the Opportunity Solution Tree framework?
A: Developed by Teresa Torres, the Opportunity Solution Tree (OST) is a discovery tool designed to help teams align their efforts to the right opportunities from the very beginning. It serves as a powerful tool for product management that helps maintain focus and alignment in decision-making.
What are the benefits of Continuous Discovery?
By maintaining regular customer interaction, teams ensure that customer feedback is integrated into decision-making at every stage of the product development process. Ongoing, small-scale research activities, such as interviews and usability tests, create a continuous feedback loop, helping teams stay aligned with real-world needs.
