Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value

Agile is an approach to software development introduced in 2001 that emphasizes shorter development cycles and frequent customer feedback. Agile principles promote sustainable work practices, adaptability to customer input, and simplified product development. This methodology emerged as a response to traditional, inflexible development approaches that often resulted in delayed projects and unused features.

Assumptions are underlying beliefs and expectations that product teams hold about how their solutions will work and create value. In Continuous Discovery Habits, Teresa Torres categorizes assumptions into five types: desirability (whether customers want the solution), viability (whether it creates business value), feasibility (whether it can be built), usability (whether customers can effectively use it), and ethical (whether it might cause harm). Product teams must identify and test these assumptions before committing significant resources to development.

The build trap, a term coined by Melissa Perri, describes a pattern in which organizations measure success by outputs rather than outcomes. In this situation, teams focus primarily on shipping features and meeting release deadlines instead of creating genuine value for customers. Product teams caught in the build trap often engage in feature-based competition, attempting to match or exceed competitor capabilities without considering whether these features address customer needs. This approach typically results in wasted resources and missed opportunities to solve meaningful customer problems.