How to set up continuous discovery in 5 steps

Five steps for setting up continuous discovery on a product team, following Teresa Torres: pick the outcome metric, build a steady pipeline of people to interview, run story-based interviews about past behaviour, update the opportunity solution tree after each one, and test the riskiest assumption before building. Koji can keep the pipeline running with async AI interviews, so a week without a scheduled call still produces conversations.

Where this appears

• The Continuous Discovery Handbook: How Product Teams Run Weekly Customer Interviews (2026)

What's in this process

1. Define your outcome: Name the metric you want to move, like week-2 retention, before you schedule a single interview.
2. Build your interview pipeline: Recruit in the product, through customer success referrals, from your own panel or with async AI interviews.
3. Run story-based interviews: Ask about past behaviour: the last time they did it, what made it hard and how they worked around it.
4. Update your opportunity solution tree: Spend 15 to 20 minutes after each interview mapping what you heard to new or existing opportunities.
5. Test assumptions before building: Find the riskiest assumption behind each solution and run the cheapest test: a landing page, prototype or fake door.