Books Summary: Continuous Discovery Habits

I read Continuous Discovery Habits after going down a rabbit hole looking for a better way to organize information gathered from customer interviews. Teresa Torres has answers, and I highly recommend this book for anyone in Product Management.

Before I get to my big takeaway, I'll make a quick note that this book covers material that's also addressed in Inspired, Rocket Surgery Made Easy, The Mom Test, Sprint, and User Story Mapping. (There's also content from books on decision making, prioritization, and UX research techniques that I haven't read yet, but will put on my list). This book does an excellent job of condensing that material, though I'd still recommend reading the others.

Ok. Back to the big takeaway. Torres takes data from customer interviews, and sorts opportunities (which also encompasses customer pain points and problems) into a hierarchical tree.

This stands in contrasts to trying to assess each opportunity point independently on its own, using a technique like applying a RICE score (Reach Impact, Confidence, Effort). This is consistent with my personal experience that the RICE scoring can be fairly arbitrary and doesn't factor in the cost of context switching if addressing the opportunities in order on a sorted list.

By grouping related opportunities in a tree, it encourages a top down prioritization discussion and a more strategic approach to pursuing opportunities, rather than the apples to oranges to raisins to walnuts comparison that a flat sorted list entails.

From the opportunity tree, she then advocates for building solution trees, than rapidly testing the solutions with lightweight UX research methods. This is how it's possible for product teams to run 10-20 tests each week, as per Marty Cagan's Inspired.


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