Continuous discovery

A weekly cadence of customer touchpoints — interviews, signal review, theme triage — maintained by the product team to keep decisions tethered to real user behavior.

Continuous discovery is the practice — codified by Teresa Torres in Continuous Discovery Habits — of running customer touchpoints on a weekly rhythm rather than in occasional research sprints. The argument: knowledge decays, customers change, and the gap between the team's mental model and reality widens quickly when you stop talking to users.

Torres' minimum cadence is one customer interview a week, conducted by the product trio (PM, designer, tech lead) together. Around the interviews sits the same continuous habit applied to passive signal: a weekly pass through new themes, dismissed signals worth reconsidering, and trends worth a closer look. Discovery isn't just talking to users; it's maintaining a real-time picture of what they need.

The discipline is hard to maintain. The week always has reasons to skip an interview, and the value of any single one is hard to defend in isolation. Teams that succeed at continuous discovery tend to automate two things: recruiting (a banner that triggers after a specific behavior) and signal review (a tool like Kiln that surfaces the new themes worth looking at, so the weekly pass takes thirty minutes instead of three hours).