# Calibrating Training Expectations for Product Discovery

**Podcast:** All Things Product with Teresa and Petra
**Published:** 2026-10-13

## Transcript

Hi, folks.
This is All Things Product with Petra Wille.
And Teresa Kortz.
And we're so happy you're here.
Teresa, 12 people on my team.
We have one hour next week.
Can you deliver a training and make sure that everybody has the skills and capabilities necessary to do continuous product discovery well?
Yeah, I love this question.
I think three times.
I think I'm not exaggerating three times in the last week.
I got an email of the form.
Teresa, I'm getting my product team together in person on such and such date.
I have an hour reserved in the agenda.
Can you teach them how to do continuous discovery?
Yeah, because it's September and everybody does their offsites because it's budget season soon.
And then the strategy season.
Can you, Teresa?
Tell us, can you?
No, I can't.
No, I.
You know, it's funny.
People think about continuous discovery as one skill.
I'm going to go to a workshop and I'm going to learn how to do continuous discovery.
I'm going to hear a talk and I'm going to magically know how to do continuous discovery.
That's like saying, can you teach me how to be a marketer in an hour?
This is a complex area with a lot of skills and a lot of habits and a lot of abilities.
So I always push back.
I go, okay.
Tell me where your team is at.
Like what's the most important discovery habit for them to focus on?
They don't know.
Right.
And so I'm seeing a huge gap in that the people that are asking for training don't know enough about discovery to know even what training they need.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so I thought it would be fun to just talk about what different.
like options are good for.
So like, I'll try to outline the way that I think about it.
And then I would love to hear how you think about it.
Cause I'm sure you've experienced this too, where you get to ask this just a mismatch.
And I think about it as like, people ask for a service because they want this benefit, but the service they're asking for doesn't always deliver the benefit they want.
Yeah.
For me, it's so if I get these requests, My default answer contains something along the lines of, okay, there's different things that one could learn or acquire, and one is know-how.
So I don't know about the GDPR rules in Europe.
This is know-how that I'm lacking.
A one-hour training might do it.
I will have a high-level overview of the GDPR regulations and what I need to maybe consider if I build a product in Europe.
could be a maybe okay-ish one hour time spent or something like that.
But then there is this skills and capabilities and they need what you said, that's habit forming, that is not just like, and it starts with learning something, acquiring know-how.
that's then what you're offering them, right?
You say like, I can walk you through the things that you would need to understand and learn.
That gives them a bit of know-how about the field, the topic, the theme.
You can lay out the land for them.
But then you need to either design a gym where they go and build their own abs and muscles because you cannot help them.
It's just like, it's impossible.
They don't get...
the product discovery muscle from listening to you for one hour.
That does not work with real muscle as well.
So we need to go to the gym and go there.
I think there's a couple of elements to this.
So first of all, continuous discovery is not like, oh, I just need to acquire some knowledge.
And it's not.
It's also not even knowledge that you could like, even the overview of it isn't knowledge you can acquire in one hour.
Like if you just look at my book, which by the way, I don't think is covers all of continuous discovery.
It's a good start.
There's 13 habits.
Right.
I give a one hour talk.
Yeah.
I give a one hour talk on the what and why of continuous discovery.
I don't cover all of the habits.
There's not time.
Yeah.
So, and then if you think about a single habit, there's, it's called a habit for a reason.
Like it only works when you do it regularly.
And so to get to the point where it's a habit, there's concepts you need to know.
There's skill you need to develop.
There's mindsets you need to develop.
And so I think like what's hard about this.
Yeah.
Well, I think you develop skill through practice.
Right.
Yeah.
So I think what's hard about this is that like, I'm not sure people are aware of like, if I think about it from the sense of like, you ask for a service because you want to benefit.
I think it's our job to educate people on what's the right pairing.
So like a service, a one hour talk, what's the benefit you should expect from a one hour talk?
And I think in a one hour talk, I can inspire you that there might be a new way to work.
In a one hour talk, I can introduce some of the key concepts for a single habit.
Right?
I can't go deep on 13 habits in one talk.
I can't teach you skill.
in a one-hour talk.
That's impossible.
I can't change your mindset in a one-hour talk.
But the inspiration to follow through on certain things and with inspiration, I really mean this kind of, for example, I have this managing up talk.
And usually when I deliver the managing up talk afterwards, the people that are approaching me in this conversation, and I know that's why it's because a lot of people are not approaching me, but you get the idea.
So those ones that do.
For them, it is really like, ah, I actually never thought about influencing my boss a bit more.
Thank you for just like opening up that door because it's easy for me to go through that door.
So I know how to provide feedback.
I talk about that a bit in the talk as well.
So they feel equipped and capable of doing the thing because the thing itself is not very complicated.
And all that I'm giving them in this talk is basically permission.
and encouragement to do so.
I think this is something that a talk can do if the people already have the tools and have the environment where they actually can do a very simple thing, a very simple behavior change.
And it's not very risky.
But all of that is not the case for changing the entire...
I would argue even for your managing up talk, there's plenty of people in the audience that are going to get inspired by that and know that that's a thing, but still won't know how to do it.
Of course.
Right?
Yeah.
So I do agree with you.
Like the purpose of talks, like I think one of the best things you can get out of a one hour talk is to plant a seed.
Yeah.
That inspires change.
Give them a present.
Right?
That's my picture always.
Our job is to paint a picture of a different future.
Yes.
Here's a future where you can manage up.
Here's a future where you might become a continuous discovery team.
Yeah.
It doesn't create that future.
No.
So like.
When somebody says, can you give a one hour talk to teach my team continuous discovery?
That's a service request that's asking for a benefit that doesn't match.
Yep.
Right.
Agreed.
That's why I love...
if our talks are embedded in bigger coaching programs for example the other day i just commented on something from the letter medical where they have like a full-fledged six months training program and they bring in five external speakers along along the time to give inspirational talks but then they follow up with training yeah on that yes and that works perfectly fine Yeah, I actually think the one hour talk has a place, especially if your goal is organizational transformation.
Right.
It's a great starting point to paint the picture, to set a vision.
This is where we're going.
Yes.
I think the next big chunk, like then the other big thing I get is like, can you teach us the discovery habits in a four hour workshop or in a one day workshop?
Can you do that, Teresa?
Tell me that that's a yes.
Nope.
Still no.
I think, again, like if we talk about managing up, what are the skills that are required to manage up?
I have to know, I need to be good at communicating.
First of all, you have to have a bit of a reflection on what you can expect from a leader so that you know what to manage up towards, basically.
Okay, so I need a model of like what I can expect from my leader?
Exactly.
You need a model.
You need to be good at communication.
You need to be good in tailoring feedback in a way that it's not received as too personal, too confrontative.
You need to tie it to an...
impact.
So, and the question is always, is it your boss's behavior that you want to talk about?
Or do you have to make an ask for your personal, right?
And that's, that's very different as well.
So yeah, all these things need to be considered.
And then you need to consider your boss's persona.
Are they more like very risk aware?
Are they very micromanaging?
You have to tailor your message, all these kinds of things.
So I can imagine a four hour workshop where you introduce I could.
I could.
Your model of this is what you should expect from your leader.
10 leadership responsibilities in that case.
And that's like a 40 minute talk.
Yes.
And it gives me something to like attach to and say, okay, this is what I should expect from my leader.
Maybe you do an exercise where you have them write down what.
What they are getting from their leader.
Right?
That's what we do.
And then maybe you have time to do one round of practice.
Feedbacks.
Pick one thing and let's play with how you would ask for that.
How you would ask for that.
Yeah.
Okay.
That's a pretty reasonable four-hour workshop.
I'm not walking away an expert on how to manage up.
I just got introduced to it.
Yes.
Okay.
So now let's look at continuous discovery.
We have 13 habits.
Let's pick one of them.
So 13 four-hour workshops and they still would only be introduced.
Yeah.
What's hard is that we can deconstruct this because we have expertise in these areas.
The people asking for help don't have expertise in these areas.
They don't know there's 13 habits.
They don't know that each habit is complex.
They don't know that each habit requires a lot of practice to build skill.
So if I'm thinking about, I just need my teams to talk to customers more.
they don't realize that like, okay, well, first we have to introduce the proper way to talk to customers.
We have to talk about how do we recruit customers.
You have to practice the skill of collecting a story from customers.
You have to practice the skill of synthesizing what you learned.
You have to practice the skill of knowing how to, right?
And so like, I'm becoming really aware that like, we collectively, people that offer these training services need to get much better at communicating.
the full picture of what it takes to get good at something.
And I think it's scary to do that because like if I painted a really clear picture of what it took to get good at continuous discovery, then you would not sell any of those.
I think most companies would be like, this is too hard.
Yeah, but this is what we see.
So this is what we see in reality.
Like a lot of the people that are starting on the journey and embark on this, okay, we want to transform to more discovery habits.
All of us know it's not rare that they never end up there.
in their final destination of better improved discovery practice.
And I think what makes this work is that like, you don't have to become an expert to get the benefits of the habits.
You don't have to be an expert on managing up to get the benefit of having a single conversation with your leader about something that you would hope to get out of it.
Haven't we recorded the session on 5% better?
I think we did that in the past.
So, yeah.
I think what's hard is like when I get a request, can you come to my offsite and teach a four hour workshop?
I can't pick for you which four hour workshop is going to work best for you.
Right.
And so I need more information.
I need to know more about qualification, like what's driving this need.
Right.
And I, you know, sometimes I get on the phone.
call with a leader and we have that conversation and it's a great discovery call and we can really zoom in on this is the specific habit that would have the most impact.
And this is consulting, right?
Like that's, it is partly our job to help them figure it out.
Yeah.
But I don't always get them to engage.
Like sometimes they go, it feels a little bit more like a check the box.
No, I just need a speaker to come in and talk about something.
Right.
And so it's like, okay, well, I don't want to.
Be that speaker because it's not going to have an impact.
Yeah, yeah, I know.
So I have two tricks, fixes to that particular problem.
So one is, because who usually is asking us for delivering this talk is either HR, the product ops department, or a product leadership figure.
So that's usually the people come knock outdoors, sometimes a procurement department, but that's rare.
And I try to get exposure to the actual team members.
So I tend to ask, hey, can I have a quick conversation with, if it's more of not the talk, but more the four-hour training, then I would try to have.
quick 20-minute conversation with three team members that I get a bit of a better idea of where they actually are.
So that sometimes helps.
And then the other thing that I try to always sell with the talk is extensive Q&A.
Yeah.
That's not always possible, but I think there's so much beauty in...
me giving the introduction to a topic and then really opening up the floor and not every company is great at moderating this floor yeah i know i have been there but some really are um and i give them a bit of guidance how to best moderate that and how to collect the questions and yada yada Because then I can react to the real questions that the people are having.
And that always gives the best and brightest coaching, consulting moments and is more valuable than the talk itself to some extent.
But people don't love Q&A.
They're always like, yeah, and then we do 10 minutes of Q&A.
I know.
I actually, most of my talks are 30 minutes talks, 30 minutes of Q&A.
Yeah.
For exactly this reason.
It, I think.
What it usually surfaces is the organizational barriers to whatever the talk was about.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah, but then they have something to act upon.
Yeah.
So then I think, so like this is what I think is a great purpose of a one-hour talk.
Like the one-hour talk I love to give is my What and Why of Continuous Discovery talk.
I give the overview of, it's like the high level, it's the 30-minute pitch of what the book is about.
And I think what's really nice about that is for a lot of teams, They've never really worked in a continuous fashion.
A lot of teams, stakeholders tell them what to build.
So they haven't done true discovery.
Still true.
And they get introduced to the big ideas.
And then they start to imagine in their head, like, how would that work here?
And then when we open it up for Q&A, all the questions that come up are like, how does this work when we're told to build a big project?
How does this work when I don't have access to my customers?
Right?
And you start to uncover all the barriers in the organization.
And this is very painful to watch then for the leadership person or for the product ops team that brought you in at the first place.
But what's great about it is now when I talk to that leader about what kind of training do you need, we can have a much better conversation.
Because it doesn't matter how much I train your teams on how well to interview.
If they don't have access to customers, you're getting zero value from that training.
Right.
And so like it starts to surface the organizational barriers that need to first be addressed before training is effective.
So service to expectation calibration is actually what we need.
And then a one hour talk still can do a lot.
Yeah, I I'm not poo pooing the one hour talk.
I'm poo pooing the one hour talk is the silver bullet that changes your team's behavior.
Yes.
OK.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Teresa, thanks for bringing that topic.
I loved it.
Yeah, that was fun.
Thanks, Petra.