Course · 6 chapters
Continuous Discovery, Hands-On
Six modules, one running case. You'll follow the product team at Donut CRM — a relationship-first CRM for founders — as they define an outcome, mine interviews for opportunities, recruit and run discovery sessions, ideate solutions solo and as a group, and design assumption tests that kill bad ideas cheaply. Every module ends with work on your own product: an interactive tree builder persists your outcome, opportunities, and solutions across the course, and classification exercises train the distinctions (opportunity vs. solution vs. experiment) that make the method work. Reading it is the easy half; do the exercises.
- 01
The tree: outcomes, opportunities, solutions
A roadmap meeting where the loudest request wins is not prioritization — it's an auction. This module introduces the opportunity solution tree: one outcome at the root, customer needs in the middle, solutions and experiments below, so every priority argument happens on a shared picture instead of in the air. You'll leave with your own product outcome written and your last five feature requests decompressed into the needs underneath them.
14 min - 02
Finding opportunities: interviews & JTBD
An outcome with an empty opportunity space under it is a guess wearing a metric. This module covers the craft of filling that space: story-based interviews that produce evidence instead of polite yeses, one-page interview snapshots, the Jobs to Be Done lens for keeping opportunities solution-agnostic, and how to grow a flat list of pains into a structured two-level opportunity space — shown end to end on Donut CRM.
14 min - 03
Running discovery sessions
One customer conversation a week, forever — that's the habit. This module is the operational half nobody teaches: where interviewees actually come from, the internal asks that get sales and CS to hand you conversations, outreach emails that get replies, scheduling mechanics that cut no-shows, and what to say on the call when someone demands a roadmap commitment. Templates for all of it.
18 min - 04
From opportunities to solutions
Your first idea is almost always a category cliché, and your team's first shared idea is usually whatever the most senior person said out loud. This module covers picking ONE target opportunity, generating real solution variety solo, and running two Liberating Structures — 1-2-4-All and 25/10 — that beat groupthink with facilitation scripts you can copy. Then you put three solutions on your own tree.
15 min - 05
Assumption mapping & experiments
The auto-drafted follow-up email looked obviously good — which is exactly when a team stops asking questions. This module turns one build decision into a list of testable guesses: surfacing assumptions from the happy path, sorting them on the importance-vs-evidence 2×2, and running the smallest test that could change your mind. Two fully specified experiment cards included, plus what Donut CRM's concierge test actually found.
16 min - 06
Making discovery a habit
Six weeks in, Donut CRM's tree almost died — not from bad discovery, but from a launch crunch. The habit, not the artifact, is the product. This closing module builds the weekly cadence that survives a real delivery calendar, shows where JTBD, Lean Startup, OKRs, and dual-track agile plug into the tree, runs the honest CDH-versus-Shape-Up comparison, and ends with your first six weeks, week by week.
16 min