# Organizational Barriers to Continuous Discovery Adoption

**Podcast:** All Things Product with Teresa and Petra
**Published:** 2026-11-10

## Transcript

Hi, folks.
This is All Things Product with Petra Wille.
And Teresa Kors.
And we're so happy you're here.
Teresa, we do have a preparation document for these podcast episodes.
And all you and I do before we hit record is basically look at the two topics that I suggest and the two topics that you have suggested.
And then we decide on which we record.
And today I found something in there and was like, huh?
What does she mean?
So it actually says discovery and the four risks and that you're not sure if discovery does duty to the four big risks or explain a bit more what you mean.
I'm wondering where the spicy take is on that one because discovery, the four big risks, they work so well together.
I love them in coaching.
I use the four big risks a lot.
Take us wherever you want to take us.
Yeah, I'm not questioning the four risks.
I'm questioning...
Okay.
Everybody, your whole audience is like, oh my God.
I wrote a blog post that I'm afraid to publish.
Oh, spicy.
We'll start there.
So maybe we can discuss it a little bit and then our listeners can tell me whether I should publish it or not.
Or maybe you can tell me if I should publish it or not.
Yeah.
The thing is, you will not actually sit with it for that long.
I think you will hit publish right before, but let's see.
Let's unpack.
We'll see.
We'll see.
Double click on the topic.
Okay.
So the blog post is titled, Does Continuous Discovery Have Product Market Fit?
For whom?
Well, who's the customer?
Discovery?
Yeah.
Like if I say the organization that wants to earn money with and therefore de-risk the stuff that they're building.
Yes.
Okay.
So if I think about the discovery habits as a product and my customer is the organizations that hire us for turning.
Yep.
If I'm a good product manager, I need to evaluate the risks in my product.
Yeah.
Okay.
So I've been doing this for 15 years.
When I teach a product manager how to evaluate risk, we look at desirability risk.
I know Marty uses value, but I prefer desirability.
I define desirability as...
By the way, the way I teach the four risks is I have them story map.
What does the customer have to do to get value from the solution?
And then we look step by step for desirability.
Do they want to take that step?
And are they willing to take that step?
Login is our famous example for that.
Do they desperately want to log in?
Yeah.
So do they want to and are they willing to?
And sometimes those aren't the same.
Right.
And then usability.
Are they able to?
Can they find it?
Do they understand it?
Are they able to?
Right.
And then feasibility is more like, is it technically possible?
And we've filled it with the people.
Viability is.
Will it be good for the business?
Okay.
If I think about the discovery habits and not just my discovery habits, like all of discovery, if I think about it as a product and I think about the customer as organizations that want to get better at building product.
And then I think about it from those four risks.
If I'm being a hundred percent honest, I don't think it has, I think there's a lot of risk and here's why.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Your.
claim is, theory, hypothesis, that from the perspective of the organization, discovery is expensive, the experiments are expensive, and the de-risking is not doing enough good for the organization for it to have product market fit?
Is that what you're saying?
No.
Explain it to me again.
Yeah, I will start by saying I wholeheartedly still believe in continuous discovery.
That is not in question.
I think companies think they want to adopt good discovery practices.
So they want it, right?
They're willing to pay for it, right?
So there's viability.
I don't see viability risk.
I have plenty of companies reaching out every week asking for help with discovery.
I think the challenge is if we look at each habit as a solution, Each of those habits have their challenges of willingness.
So, okay, I might want to talk to my customer every week, but am I willing to reserve the time on my calendar?
Am I willing to do it in the weeks when things get busy?
Am I willing to overcome the obstacles in the way when I don't have access to customers or my organization won't let me?
I bet you have thought it through, but my argument here would be...
that you beautifully addressing this with this habits aspect of your work.
Because the thing is, and that's at least what I see, I do have one slide, maybe I take a screenshot and we put it in the show note.
I have one slide and it's old, but it lists a ton of experiments that one could run to de-risk the four risks and just not sorted by any of the risks or something like that.
Just like...
tapestry of different experiments that one could run.
And in my experience, it's always like you have to expose people to several ones of them.
You cannot expose them to all of them.
Then you can get them to try some of them.
They fall in love with some of them and then they're willing to do those because they saw the benefit of them and they become a habit at some point.
And yeah, this has a personal tendency of people, product people coming from the design.
background, tend to do more usability de-risking, product people coming from a business standpoint doing more of a business case modeling de-risking viability standpoint.
But I think your idea and your teaching of it has to become a habit and we have to try several things and then we see what becomes the habit is the actual point, right?
And still, it is still patchy.
People could do more.
People could be more.
how do you call it, more precise on that they de-risk all four equally well, I'd say, somehow.
I think you're misunderstanding what my argument.
So I'm not arguing the four risks don't have.
Yeah, no, I get it.
I get it.
But you argued that then.
If, and I'm not, I don't even think the problem is at the team level.
I know plenty of product teams that are trying to adopt the habits and having a lot of success with them.
If my customer is a company and my solution is continuous discovery, in order for that solution to be effective in the organization, the organization has to be willing to change things to allow their teams to adopt those habits.
And what I see over and over and over again, there's something about the organizational context.
This is why we recorded a rep episode called organizational change is exhausting.
There's something about organizational context that make it, and I have a lot of theories about what that is.
We can get into this that make it extremely challenging for continuous discovery, the solution to work effectively in the organization.
Yeah, but isn't it on one hand because there is no such thing as the organization?
Because that is a hypothetical construct anyways.
There's just like people.
Yeah, but no, there is a thing called the organization.
And the organization has structures that I think are hard to change and make it so that this is not a good fit.
Like, what are some of those things?
I think we, and this is going to sound like blame.
I'm not blaming.
And that's where this is like a really delicate topic and why I'm afraid to write a blog post about this.
If I look at, if I look at, if I look at an organization at the, at the top, we have a board that governs the organization.
The board, if they're public, even if they're not public, still is looking at quarterly results.
They want to see charts that go up into the right.
They want.
There to be continuous improvement and not this like bumpy, jagged improvement.
So starting at the very top, there's this expectation that things be predictable and certain.
Then we get to the executives that run the company and the executives, almost all of them have experience in their industry, have experience in their role function.
And they have a very strong belief that what got them here will get them there.
And an incentives program from the board.
That reinforces those things, right?
And so it's really easy for an executive, and I'm not even saying this is wrong.
It's not a criticism.
It's not blame.
It's really easy for an executive to feel 100% certain about their proposed solution.
This is why we have the HIPPO acronym, right?
For decades, we've had executives walk into product team rooms and say, build this exact solution.
I had an idea.
We have lots of evidence that most of the things that we build fall short of our expectations.
Despite all that evidence, we're not seeing a change in this behavior.
We come in, we collectively, the consultants, the people in the world that believe in continuous discovery, and we say, we're going to teach you a better way.
But what happens is they learn that better way, they start to do it, and they run into these systemic obstacles that are...
I'm starting to believe are impossible to change.
Because I talk to a lot of consultants and I don't know, the only time I've ever seen a change like this last at an organization is when a leader, like a CEO and or a product leader with a lot of influence on the CEO stays at the company for a very long time.
I don't see it survive a leadership change.
It's the cases that I saw.
were companies that are below Dumbout's number.
Companies that what?
That are small, so below 120 employees.
Yes.
Okay.
So that's another...
Everything I'm arguing we're going to say is true for an organization larger than N employees.
And I don't know how to define N, but I agree with you.
This can work in small organizations really well.
But I think as an organization grows, it becomes more and more impossible.
Yes.
And so I can.
It's harder than impossible.
Yeah.
I, I'm not convinced it's possible.
And that's like a very alarming thing to me.
Right.
And so I can get frustrated by the organizational systems, which we all do, right.
We've all been at conferences, speaking to every speaker and consultant in this space.
Who's frustrated that, you know, leaders hire training for their teams, but they don't hire training for themselves.
They don't overcome.
They don't deal with the organizational barriers.
Like this is something literally every consultant in the industry gripes about.
But maybe that's the wrong way to look at it.
Maybe the problem is not the organization.
We should hold that those constraints as required.
Like the organizational incentives and governance and structure is not going to change.
And maybe our solution is wrong.
And I don't mean that like I've lost faith in discovery.
I mean it like we need another way.
to bring customer centricity and feedback loops into organizations in a way that fit better within these organizational constraints.
Is there a new book coming up, Theresa?
No, I don't have an answer yet.
I just see a glaring problem.
Yeah.
So, and the blog post that you're reluctant to write is, and I bet you already have written it because that's how we think.
Is it more about the observation or are you hinting at potential routes for de-risking your hypothesis?
So ways to finding your answer.
I think if we keep going into organizations and saying you need to push decision making to your product teams, we're going to be limited in the impact that we can have.
I think fundamentally it's about like we have this belief.
that product teams are closest to the customer.
They should be empowered.
And I believe that still wholeheartedly.
Like I do, I'm not questioning that.
I'm not questioning the value of that.
I'm questioning whether that's feasible in a modern organization of a certain size.
And I think we have lots of evidence, at least I do through my training practice, where companies try it and they try it and they try it and they try it and it doesn't stick.
And if it was just me, if I was the only one facing this, I would just conclude I'm not very good at this.
But it's not just me.
I talk to every other consultant in this space and we all face the same problem.
True, but I still find a lot of motivation and reward in, I don't know, even if it, if let's speak organizations that have 50 product teams and 25 of them running safe because Whoever decided that that is an ideal scenario for delivering software, that's what they do.
So there are a few left.
And we work with those and we have pilots and they really adopt these continuous discovery habits and they really see the benefit and they themselves.
Because to me, it's like once you work that way, what has been seen cannot be unseen, basically.
To me, it's very rewarding if even like, I don't know, 10% of the teams themselves, because the people in the team suffer less, the teams in the team, teams see their work having more impact and finally be successful because there's no, nothing more demotivating than numbers that are not moving in product, right?
And then you adopt some of the discovery habits and finally you deliver stuff that makes an impact and you see the numbers changing.
And that is...
at least for the team.
And yeah, we target the organization, but isn't it good enough of a result if 10% of the organization's products improve?
I'm not sure.
Okay, I don't question the impact.
I know hundreds of people.
I hear from them every day about the impact on my book, the impact on their individual habits, the impact on their team, the impact on their career.
That's all at the individual team level.
I'm questioning this at the organizational level.
And I think where there's not a willingness, where the desirability risk is, where there's a gap, is that we're asking, I think there's three components of this.
And the way that I'm going to say this sounds terrible.
And I don't, I'm not this cynical, but like, this is really what we're asking.
We're saying, look, in order to be successful, your teams need to learn a new way of working.
It's hard.
We know organizational change is hard.
It's going to take a long time.
Your organization is only going to change at the rate of the individuals in your organization.
They're all going to change at the same, at different rates, which means throughout the change, you're going to have a lot of chaos because you're going to have people working the old way.
You're going to have people working the new way.
You're going to have people working in between.
And by the way, it's not just your teams.
Your leaders have to learn to not dictate solutions, which is really hard for them because they're held accountable to outcomes.
And they need to hit those outcomes to be successful.
And the way they feel confident they're going to hit those outcomes is by dictating solutions.
But when they do that, they break trust with their teams, which means the teams no longer want to do good discovery.
So we have this vicious cycle of breaking trust, destroying habits, not getting results.
With each other.
Yeah.
And by the way, you're still being asked as a leader to deliver quarterly results during all of this change.
That seems like an impossible ask of organizations.
And I don't have an answer to this question, but what I'm starting to ask, is there a way to help organizations adopt the discovery habits in a way that works within the incentive system, within these constraints of we have to deliver quarterly results?
We have to...
Our executives are going to feel right and are going to want to dictate solutions.
How do we help in that situation?
And how do we, like what I'm questioning is how does our solution collectively as an industry, for those of us that advocate for discovery, how do we evolve to better fit what we're seeing from the organization time after time after time?
That's a very advanced thought that you're having.
I appreciate.
This is where innovation in the field comes from.
I think you should write the blog post, publish it with that particular question, and then a work group will form with people that love to think about these tricky questions.
Other thought leaders are invited.
And then let's see where we land.
It's a good question.
I just want people to write about it and share about it.
Okay, then let's do that.
So people, please.
Write to Teresa about your take on it and then maybe it becomes an even bigger blog post, I'd say.
This was philosophical.
Thank you, Teresa, for throwing that at us and at me.
Thanks, Petra.