Deliberate Practice
What is deliberate practice?
Deliberate practice is a focused approach to skill development that involves breaking a skill into its component steps, requiring full attention and feedback, and pushing yourself outside your comfort zone. This structured approach is what separates experts from novices across virtually every domain, from music to sports to product work.
The concept comes from Anders Ericsson's research, detailed in his book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. Ericsson argues that simply repeating a skill over and over only helps you improve until it becomes automatic. After that point, if you want to continue improving, you need the structured elements of deliberate practice.
What are the key attributes of deliberate practice?
Deliberate practice has four essential characteristics that distinguish it from simple repetition:
- Breaking skills into component steps means focusing on specific sub-skills rather than just doing the whole activity. For customer interviewing, this might mean practicing just the skill of asking good follow-up questions, or just the skill of identifying customer stories to explore.
- Requiring focus and full attention means eliminating distractions and concentrating completely on the skill you're practicing. You can't improve through deliberate practice while multitasking or going through the motions.
- Requiring feedback means you need input on your performance—from a coach, peer, recording, or self-reflection—so you can identify what you're doing well and what needs improvement.
- Getting outside your comfort zone means attempting things that are difficult for you right now, not just repeating what you can already do comfortably. Growth happens at the edge of your current capability.
These elements work together to override the shift to automatic behavior. They force your brain to slow down and actively improve the skill rather than simply executing it on autopilot.
Why does deliberate practice matter for product work?
Many product skills—like customer interviewing, opportunity mapping, and assumption testing—require practice to develop proficiency. But most teams don't improve at these skills despite doing them repeatedly, because they're practicing automatically rather than deliberately.
For example, conducting customer interviews week after week doesn't automatically make you better at interviewing. Once your basic interview approach becomes automatic, you stop improving unless you introduce the elements of deliberate practice: breaking down specific interviewing sub-skills, focusing full attention on improving them, getting feedback on your performance, and pushing yourself to try techniques outside your comfort zone.
The same applies to other discovery skills. Teams can conduct assumption tests repeatedly without getting better at designing tests, or map opportunities without improving their ability to identify meaningful patterns. Deliberate practice is what transforms repetition into genuine skill development.
Committing time specifically for deliberate practice—even just a few hours focused on honing a specific skill—accelerates learning far more than passive experience alone.
Learn more:
- This Keystone Habit Will Fuel the Rest of Your Continuous Discovery Habits
- The Results Are In! Feedback from the First Continuous Interviewing Cohort
Related terms:
- Customer Interviewing
- Opportunity
- Assumption Testing
Last Updated: October 25, 2025