Continuous Discovery — How to Stop Guessing

Build the ongoing-discovery muscle that replaces guessing with evidence: the weekly user-touch cadence, the opportunity-solution tree as a working artifact, and the discipline of going in with a hypothesis and listening for the signal that contradicts it. Run real interviews on a real product you own — this module's checkpoint is where the avoidance ends. Discovery is on-call engineering: you don't ask users what they want; you watch where their workflows fail, trace the failure to its source, and understand the system before proposing a fix. The Mom Test is a guide to not contaminating the failure report with your own hypothesis — exactly what a good incident retrospective requires. The opportunity-solution tree is a design-doc dependency tree: opportunities as nodes, solutions as leaves, and the same discipline good design docs enforce — every leaf must trace to a root that justifies it, and any leaf that can't be traced gets cut. The weekly user-touch is the cron job that keeps the dashboard fresh; without it, decisions get made on stale data. And continuous discovery is continuous deployment for hypotheses: small frequent tests against real users beat large infrequent tests against imagined ones, for the same reason small deploys beat big-bang releases.