The Discovery Habit: Making Continuous Discovery Part of Your Week

Two Conversations a Week Changes Everything

Teresa Torres popularized the idea of continuous discovery in her book Continuous Discovery Habits. Talking to customers every week as a regular habit, not an occasional event. The principle is simple: if you are not learning from customers weekly, you are guessing.

Most PMs agree with this in theory and fail at it in practice. The reasons are predictable: "I don't have time." "I don't have a researcher." "Our customers are hard to reach." "I don't know what to ask."

All of these are solvable. I have worked with teams ranging from 4-person startups to 200-person product orgs, and the teams that maintain a weekly discovery habit consistently make better product decisions. Not because they are smarter. Because they are less wrong.

Here is how to build the habit, even when you are the PM, the researcher, and half the project manager.

The Minimum Viable Discovery Practice

You need three things:

1. Two customer conversations per week (30 minutes each)
2. A simple system for capturing insights (not a full research report)
3. A weekly synthesis ritual (15 minutes, not 3 hours)

That is 75 minutes of discovery per week. If you cannot find 75 minutes, the problem is not time. It is prioritization.

Finding two customers per week

This is where most PMs get stuck. Here are six reliable sources:

1. Recent support tickets. Your support team talks to customers every day. Ask them to flag customers who mentioned a problem related to your current focus area. These customers are already engaged and have a specific pain point.

2. In-product intercepts. Use a tool like Sprig, Maze, or even a simple banner to ask: "Would you be willing to chat with our product team for 15 minutes?" Target users who are in a relevant workflow. Conversion rate is typically 3-5%, so you need about 50-100 impressions per week to generate 2 conversations.

3. Recent churners or downgraders. These people made an active decision to leave or reduce usage. They have strong opinions. Most will share them if you ask respectfully. "We noticed you recently changed plans. I am trying to understand what we could have done differently. Would you have 15 minutes?"

4. Power users. Your most engaged users have deep knowledge of your product's strengths and weaknesses. Rotate through them. Do not over-interview the same people. If you are exploring a new feature area, start with how power users currently handle that workflow.

5. Sales prospects who did not convert. Talk to sales and ask for introductions to prospects who evaluated your product and chose a competitor or chose to do nothing. These conversations are gold for understanding positioning gaps.

6. Customer advisory board. If you have one, pull from it. If you do not, consider building one. 10-15 customers who agree to be available for monthly conversations in exchange for early access to features and a direct line to the product team.

The 30-minute interview structure

Do not wing it. Use this structure:

Minutes 1-5: Warm-up.

"Tell me about your role and what your typical day looks like."

This is not filler. It gives you context about their workflow and priorities.

Minutes 5-20: Story elicitation.

"Tell me about the last time you [did the thing you are investigating]."

Ask for a specific, recent story. Not hypotheticals. Not opinions. A story. "Walk me through exactly what happened." Follow up with "and then what?" and "how did that make you feel?"

Stories reveal behavior, workarounds, and emotions that direct questions miss. If someone says "I usually export the data to a spreadsheet," that is a product insight. Ask why. Ask what they do in the spreadsheet. Ask how long it takes.

Minutes 20-27: Opportunity exploration.

Based on what they shared, explore specific opportunities. "You mentioned you spend 45 minutes formatting that report. If that took 5 minutes instead, what would you do with the extra time?"

This is not asking users to design solutions. It is quantifying the impact of the problem.

Minutes 27-30: Wrap-up.

"Is there anything else I should have asked?" (This often surfaces the most important insight.)

"Can I follow up if I have additional questions?"

The insight capture system

Do not write full research reports. You do not have time and nobody will read them.

Use a simple format. I recommend a shared doc or Notion database with one entry per conversation:

• Date and participant (anonymized or named, depending on your context)
• Key quotes (2-3 direct quotes that capture the most important points)
• Observations (what you noticed about their behavior, workarounds, or emotions)
• Opportunity (what product opportunity does this point to?)

This takes 5-10 minutes to write after each conversation. Do it immediately. Your memory degrades fast.

The weekly synthesis ritual

Every Friday, spend 15 minutes reviewing the week's conversations. Ask:

1. What patterns emerged? If two people independently mention the same frustration, that is a signal.
2. What surprised me? Surprises indicate gaps between your assumptions and reality.
3. What should I investigate next week? Use this to set up the next week's conversations.

Post the synthesis in your team channel. Keep it short. 3-5 bullet points. This keeps the team connected to customer reality without requiring everyone to attend interviews.

Mapping Discoveries to Opportunities

Raw customer conversations are inputs. Outcomes require structure. The opportunity solution tree framework, also developed by Teresa Torres, is the best tool I have found for this. Her original blog post explains the concept in depth.

The basic structure:

1. Desired outcome (the business or product metric you are trying to move)
2. Opportunities (customer needs, pain points, and desires from your conversations)
3. Solutions (potential product changes that address the opportunities)
4. Experiments (the smallest thing you can build or test to validate each solution)

Maintain this tree as a living document. Each week's discovery conversations add new opportunities or validate existing ones. Over time, the tree becomes your best argument for what to build next. Grounded in real customer evidence, not opinions.

Read the full continuous discovery habits guide for a deeper dive on applying this in practice.

Common Objections and Honest Answers

"Our customers are enterprises. They don't do casual 30-minute calls."

True, enterprise customers are harder to schedule. Three workarounds:

• Partner with your customer success team. They already have regular calls. Ask to join for 10 minutes at the end.
• Use quarterly business reviews (QBRs) as research opportunities. Add 15 minutes of discovery questions to the standard QBR agenda.
• Build a research panel with your champion contacts. These are the people inside your enterprise customers who care about the product. Three or four reliable champions can sustain your weekly cadence.

"My manager thinks discovery is a waste of time."

Show the impact. After 4 weeks of discovery, present a synthesis: "Here are the three things I learned that we would not have known otherwise. Here is how it changed our roadmap priorities. Here is the estimated impact."

Most managers who are skeptical of discovery have never seen it done well. A month of disciplined practice, with visible outputs, usually converts the skeptics.

"I don't have the right research skills."

You do not need to be a trained researcher to have useful customer conversations. You need to:

• Ask open-ended questions (not yes/no)
• Listen more than you talk (aim for 80/20)
• Ask for stories, not opinions
• Resist the urge to pitch your product or solution during the interview

These are learnable skills. The first few conversations will be awkward. By conversation 10, you will be comfortable. By conversation 30, you will be good. There are excellent user research methods that work even without formal training.

"We have a dedicated research team. Why should I do my own interviews?"

Two reasons. First, the research team has a queue. If you rely on them exclusively, you will get research insights on their timeline, not yours. Second, direct customer contact keeps your instincts sharp. A PM who only reads research reports is working with second-hand information.

The ideal setup: the research team handles large studies (surveys, usability tests, competitive research), and the PM maintains a weekly conversation habit for lightweight discovery. These are complementary, not redundant.

What Changes After 3 Months

Teams that sustain a weekly discovery practice for 12 weeks report consistent outcomes:

• Fewer "build it and hope" features. Discovery evidence gives the team confidence that they are solving real problems.
• Better stakeholder conversations. Instead of debating opinions, you can cite customer evidence. "I've talked to 14 customers about this. 11 described the same workaround."
• More accurate prioritization. When you understand the frequency and severity of customer problems, prioritization becomes easier. The RICE framework is more useful when the "reach" and "impact" scores are based on real data instead of guesses.
• Stronger team alignment. When everyone has access to weekly customer insights, debates shift from "I think" to "customers say."

Starting This Week

Here is what to do right now:

1. Block two 30-minute slots on your calendar. Tuesday and Thursday at 10 AM work well. Early enough that you are fresh, late enough that customers are available.
2. Send three outreach messages today. Use the sources above. If nobody replies, send five tomorrow.
3. Create your insight capture template. Four fields: date/participant, key quotes, observations, opportunity.
4. Tell your team. "I'm starting a weekly practice of talking to 2 customers per week. I'll share a synthesis every Friday."

The hardest part is the first two weeks. After that, it becomes a habit. And once you have the habit, you will wonder how you ever made product decisions without it.