Continuous Discovery Habits Book Club Template

Continuous Discovery Habits is one of the most practical books for product teams. Use these resources to help your team improve their customer discovery skills and build products that provide value to your customers and business.

Last Updated: 12/11/2024

Book: Continuous Discovery Habits By Teresa Torres

What: How to make continuous discovery a habit and how to work as a product trio (Product Manager, Product Designer, Software Engineer)

Who: Product, UX/Design & Software Engineering Teams

Length: Options for 8, 12 or 13 Weeks

Google Sheet: Continuous Discovery Habits Book Club Template

Author’s Website: Product Talk

Many teams have adopted continuous delivery but aren’t consistent in discovery, especially with customers/users. The discovery process is what makes products great. This book focuses on working as a product trio (product manager, product designer, and software engineer) to identify outcomes and opportunities before tackling solutions. This can only occur when you are talking to your customers regularly. 

The book’s working definition of continuous discovery:

At a minimum, weekly touchpoints with customers by the team building the product where they conduct small research activities in pursuit of a desired outcome

This is a great book to tackle as a team to learn how to create products that customers love.

This book is easy to divide into 13 weeks, allowing a team to cover it in about a quarter. We had planned to go through it in 8 weeks, but we realized there was enough content to cover one chapter a week in most cases. This helped make each chapter more actionable and encouraged teams to work together to build their opportunity solution tree over several weeks.

Google Sheet Template

The Google Sheet: Continuous Discovery Habits Book Club Template is designed to be shared with your group and has the following tabs:

• Reading Plan: 13 Weeks - This plan has you reading 20-62 minutes per week, averaging 32 minutes weekly. We started with the 8-week plan but decided to do it in 13 weeks to focus on one topic per week so we could focus on building an opportunity solution tree one step at a time.
• Reading Plan: 12 Weeks - This is a slight modification of the 13-week plan and combines the first two weeks readings.
• Reading Plan: 8 Weeks - This plan has you reading 24-65 minutes per week, averaging 53 minutes weekly.  It seemed rushed when we started with this, so we lengthened it to 13 weeks.
• Related Resources - These resources accompany the material for people who want to dive deeper into a topic or reference material in the footnotes.  I’ve started working through the book’s footnotes, slowly adding them to the sheet.
• Members - A sample sign-up sheet for the book club and a way to collect group orders for each edition of the book (Hardcover, Kindle, or Audible)
• Chapters - Lists each chapter, number of pages, and audiobook time for each chapter and used to create reading plans.
• Version History - This is a place to record updates over time as the plan is refined and additional resources are added.

My experience with this template:

• 2023 - RevLocal with Product Managers, Product Designers, and Software Engineers using the 13-week plan and was assisted by Alex White
• 2024-25 - Precision eControl with Product Managers, Software Engineers and Data Scientists using the 12-week plan and again assisted by Alex White

Read more about book clubs for teams that include templates for other books.

Originally published 2/4/2024 on justinmeats.com