User Interview (Teresa Torres Approach)

Why Weekly Customer Touchpoints Beat Quarterly Research

In most product organizations, customer research happens in bursts. A team schedules a discovery sprint, conducts ten interviews over two weeks, synthesizes the findings, and then goes dark for months while they build. By the time they talk to customers again, the market has shifted, assumptions have calcified, and the product has drifted from what customers actually need. Teresa Torres calls this the "project mindset" of research, and it is the default operating mode for the vast majority of product teams.

The alternative is continuous discovery, a practice where product teams maintain weekly touchpoints with customers as an ongoing habit rather than a periodic event. According to Torres's research across hundreds of product teams, those practicing continuous discovery are significantly more likely to ship products that customers adopt and retain. A 2023 Pendo study found that 80% of features in the average software product are rarely or never used. The primary cause is not poor engineering. It is inadequate understanding of what customers actually need, compounded over months of building without feedback.

The Problem

Quarterly research fails for structural reasons:

• The feedback loop is too slow. By the time research findings influence the product, the context has changed.
• Recency bias dominates. Teams remember the last interview vividly and the first one vaguely, skewing synthesis.
• Research and delivery are disconnected. The people doing research are often not the same people making daily product decisions.
• It creates a false sense of certainty. Ten interviews conducted six months ago feel like validated knowledge, but they are snapshots from a different moment.

Continuous discovery, as Teresa Torres describes it, is not about doing more research. It is about making research a regular operating rhythm, like standup meetings or sprint planning.

How This Prompt Works

The Teresa Torres Approach prompt helps you implement continuous discovery interviews:

• Opportunity Solution Tree mapping to connect interviews to specific product decisions
• Interview snapshot format for capturing key insights in a structured, shareable way
• Weekly interview cadence design that integrates with your team's existing workflow
• Question frameworks based on the Continuous Discovery Habits methodology
• Pattern synthesis techniques for identifying themes across multiple conversations

You provide your current product focus and target outcomes, and the prompt produces an interview system designed for sustained weekly practice.

When to Use It

• When transitioning from project-based research to a continuous discovery habit
• When your team builds features that customers do not adopt and you want to break the cycle
• During opportunity mapping when you need to identify the highest-value problems to solve
• When onboarding a team to the Continuous Discovery Habits framework

Common Pitfalls

• Making interviews too formal. Continuous discovery interviews are 15-20 minute conversations, not hour-long research sessions. Lower the bar to maintain the habit.
• Only talking to happy customers. Churned users, prospect drop-offs, and competitor users often reveal more than your most engaged power users.
• Collecting stories without connecting them to decisions. Every interview should feed into an Opportunity Solution Tree that maps customer needs to product options.
• Delegating interviews entirely to a researcher. Continuous discovery works best when the product trio (PM, designer, engineer) participates directly in customer conversations.

Sources

• Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres is the definitive guide to implementing weekly customer touchpoints.
• Pendo: State of Software Feature Adoption provides data on how most features go unused, reinforcing the need for continuous customer input.
• Product Talk Blog offers ongoing guidance on practicing continuous discovery from Teresa Torres herself.