Workshop: Discovery Essentials: From Feature Factory to Customer-Centric Products

Stop guessing what to build next. This half-day workshop introduces you to the core principles of continuous discovery, helping you make better product decisions grounded in customer evidence, not just stakeholder opinions. 

You'll learn the essential frameworks and practices that outcome-driven teams use: connecting business goals to real customer needs, mapping opportunities before jumping into solutions, and designing simple experiments to test your assumptions. 

Through interactive exercises and real product scenarios, you'll get hands-on practice with the foundational tools of discovery. This isn't about becoming an expert overnight, it's about understanding the fundamentals and leaving with practical techniques you can start applying this week. 

Learning outcomes

• Escape the Build Trap: Recognize the symptoms of being a feature factory (output-focused roadmaps, stakeholder-driven decisions) and reframe product success around customer value and business impact.
• Shift from outputs to outcomes: Translate feature requests into meaningful customer and business outcomes, moving from "what we build" to "what changes as a result."
• Understand continuous discovery: Adopt discovery as an ongoing team habit rather than a one-time project phase, and appreciate why evidence quality drives better product decisions.
• Use Opportunity Solution Trees: Map business goals to customer opportunities before jumping to solutions, exploring the problem space more thoroughly before committing to a direction.
• Apply core discovery techniques: Know when and how to use customer interviews, assumption-based experiments, and evidence evaluation to make more confident product decisions.
• Leverage AI in discovery: Identify practical ways AI can accelerate discovery work while preserving the human judgement that matters most in product decisions.

Target Audience

• Product Managers who want to move beyond reactive feature requests and make strategic, evidence-based decisions
• Product Owners transitioning from backlog managers to outcome-driven product thinkers 
• Product Leaders looking to establish a discovery culture and coach their teams in customer-centric practices
• Anyone interested in customer research, experimentation, outcome-oriented thinking, or escaping the "build trap"

SPEAKER Bio

Fabian Aguilar is a Senior Product Leader and transformation coach with over 10 years of experience helping both startups and large traditional enterprises rethink how they build products.

Fabian holds a Master's Degree in Innovation and an MBA, bringing rigorous academic grounding to his hands-on practice. He has applied this directly in the startup world, leading products from problem fit all the way to product-market fit in B2B SaaS contexts. He has also mentored early-stage founders through hypothesis validation, MVP design, and Lean Startup experimentation.

On the enterprise side, he has led transformations across banking, insurance, and telecommunications, helping traditionally output-driven organizations shift to customer-centric, outcome-oriented product models.

Event Tickets

This event is open to all TPMA members and has an enrolment fee of $120. Community Builder members get 25% off on the fee. There are only 20 spots available for this workshop. If you want to attend, you must create a TPMA account.

Event Location

This will be an evening in-person workshop, starting at 4pm @ Schulich Downtown Campus, 5th Floor, 222 Bay St Toronto ON M5K 1K2 

For accessibility concerns, please contact us at info@tpma.ca.