Chapter One: The What and Why of Continuous Discovery

How do you know that you are making a product or service that your customers want? How do you ensure that you are improving it over time? How do you guarantee that your team is creating value for your customers in a way that creates value for your business? In this book, you’ll learn a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery that will help you answer each of these questions, giving you the confidence to act while also preparing you to be wrong. You’ll learn to balance action with doubt, so that you can get started without being blindsided by what you don’t get right.

Let’s start at the beginning. All product teams do a set of activities to decide what to build and then do a different set of activities to build and deliver it. While you’ll learn that these activities can and should overlap and interweave with each other, the work that is required to do each is fundamentally different. In this book, I’ll refer to the work that you do to decide what to build as discovery and the work that you do to build and ship a product as delivery.¹ This distinction matters. As you’ll see, many companies put a heavy emphasis on delivery—they focus on whether you shipped what you said you would on time and on budget—while under-investing in discovery, forgetting to assess if you built the right stuff. This book aims to correct for that imbalance.

Discovery isn’t a one-time activity. A digital product is never done. It can and should continue to evolve. As we learn more about our market, as our customers’ needs change, as new technology becomes available, good products adapt. This book will introduce a continuous discovery framework that enables teams to discover brand-new products and to iterate on existing ones. It will help you continuously discover unmet customer needs and the solutions that will address those needs. Before we get into how to do this, let’s take a brief look at how we got here.