Series
Continuous Discovery, Hands-On
A six-module hands-on course on opportunity solution trees and continuous discovery, run against one product end to end — Donut CRM, a relationship-first CRM for founders. Defining an outcome, mining interviews and JTBD for opportunities, recruiting and running discovery sessions (including the no-show playbook), ideating solutions alone and with a group using Liberating Structures, assumption mapping and experiments that test the riskiest thing first, and making discovery a weekly habit that coexists with Shape Up, OKRs, and the rest of your stack. Interactive exercises throughout — you leave with your own tree.
6 parts · first published
- 01
Opportunity Solution Trees: The Shape of Good Discovery
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 read - 02
Finding Opportunities: Interviews, JTBD, and the Opportunity Space
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 read - 03
Running Discovery Sessions: Recruiting, Outreach, and No-Shows
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 read - 04
From Opportunities to Solutions: Ideating Alone and Together
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 read - 05
Assumption Mapping: Experiments That Test the Riskiest Thing First
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 read - 06
Making Discovery a Habit: CDH Alongside Shape Up, OKRs, and Agile
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 read