Opportunity Mapping (Various Dates)
Discover the best path to your desired outcome.
Enroll in Course
This 5-week course is designed to help you map out and understand the opportunity space—the unmet customer needs, pain points, and desires that fuel successful products.
You'll learn how to synthesize what you are learning across customer interviews—finding patterns amongst unique stories.
You’ll learn how to identify unmet customer needs, pain points and desires helping you decipher where your product can have the biggest impact.
You'll learn how to structure the opportunity space—helping you turn large, intractable challenges into a series of smaller, more solvable challenges.
You’ll learn how to assess and prioritize opportunities quickly ensuring that you are always working on the highest impact needs.
This course follows a "flipped classroom" model. That means you'll work through about an hour of videos, articles, and exercises on your own before attending each week's live session. During the live session, you'll get hands-on practice putting the lessons into practice. As your practice, your instructor will be available to answer questions and give feedback.
- Week 1: Course Kick-off: How to Get the Most Value Out of Deliberate Practice
- Week 2: Uncovering the Hidden Structure in Your Customers' Stories
- Week 3: Identifying Unmet Opportunities—Customer Needs, Pain Points, & Desires
- Week 4: Structuring the Opportunity Space: Turning Big Challenges into a Series of Smaller Challenges
- Week 5: Strategic Product Decisions: Assessing & Prioritizing Opportunities
Instructors
This course has several instructors who each play different roles.
Course Designer: Teresa Torres designed this course, narrated all of the instructional videos, and wrote all of the instructional content.
Cohort Facilitators: Each cohort has a course facilitator that hosts the live sessions and is available to answer questions as you practice. This course has two course facilitators: Teresa Torres and Jeff Merrell. When choosing a cohort (see the bottom of the page), the description will indicate who your course facilitator will be.
Slack Support: All of our instructors are available at any time to answer questions and provide support in our active Slack community.
Community Calls: Additionally, all students will have access to twice-a-month community calls hosted by Teresa Torres.
Teresa Torres
Teresa Torres is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and
coach. She teaches a structured and sustainable approach to continuous
discovery that helps product teams infuse their daily product decisions
with customer input. She’s coached hundreds of teams at companies of all
sizes, from early-stage start-ups to global enterprises, in a variety
of industries. She has taught over 7,000 product people discovery skills
through the Product Talk Academy. She’s the author of the book
Continuous Discovery Habits and blogs at ProductTalk.org.
Jeff Merrell
Jeff
Merrell has co-taught the continuous discovery habits framework
alongside Teresa Torres since 2018, through the Learning and
Organizational Change program at Northwestern University. Their students
are business leaders who tackle organizational challenges such as
employee engagement, creating and sharing knowledge, team collaboration,
and much more. They use the same discovery framework adopted by product
teams around the world to drive outcomes for their organizations. Jeff
has hands-on experience putting the habits into practice through his
ongoing efforts to improve the Northwestern student experience. He has
worked as a leader and consultant across a variety of industries on
knowledge management, enterprise collaboration and educational
technology strategy.
Frequently Asked Questions
What to expect from this course:
- On the first day of the course, we'll meet for 30-minutes to review how the course works and make sure you are setup for success.
- Each week, there will be 20-30 minutes of instructional material (a mix of articles and videos) that you’ll go through on your own.
- You’ll also work through an individual activity that will help you put what you are learning into practice. These activities are designed to take 10-30 minutes and will need to be completed before that week's live session.
- During our live class sessions, we'll quickly review that week's instructional content. You'll spend the bulk of our live sessions working with your group, applying that week's lesson. We'll end each class with a brief discussion of that week's activity. Throughout the practice time, you'll have access to the instructor in case you get stuck or have questions.
- Live sessions are a great way to connect with other students in the course. We often hear that for many students this is their favorite part of the course. We also know from a learning standpoint, we learn more when we see how others tackle the same problem and have thought partner to discuss ideas with. Live sessions are a critical component of all Product Talk Academy courses.
- If you have questions in between our live sessions you can reach out to your instructors any time through our course channel in the Continuous Discovery Habits Slack community.
- You’ll continue to have access to all of the course content for 3 months starting from the course kick-off.
- Still have questions? Send us an email
One more thing ...
You'll also get a 3-month subscription to our Continuous Discovery Habits Membership Program. This membership program is designed to help you connect with and learn from likeminded peers as you work to develop and hone your continuous discovery habits.
Membership includes:
- Twice-a-month membership calls where we'll tackle your most pressing discovery questions. These calls are hosted by Teresa Torres and are informal conversations about whatever is top of mind for participants.
- Focused challenges that will help you put the continuous discovery habits into practice
- A virtual book club where we read and discuss books that help us become better continuous discovery practitioners.
- Access to our Worthy Reads library (over 300 of the best product resources from around the web) and a dedicated Slack channel to discuss daily finds.
- And much more.