The canonical continuous discovery cadence assumes access. In enterprise and regulated markets, access is precisely what does not exist. Users are behind procurement, legal, and security gates; sales owns the relationship; and the customer success team has strong incentives to filter what product hears.
The operating pattern that works is not "more interviews." It is a written access map that identifies, for every target segment, the specific pathway to a validated user, the confidentiality constraints that apply, and the named executive on the customer side who has agreed to the cadence. This is a governance artifact as much as a research one.
Once the map exists, weekly interviews become tractable. The synthesis layer, increasingly AI-assisted, must preserve provenance: every claim in a discovery brief traces to a verbatim quote with attribution and consent. This is not an academic point; it is what allows the organization to defend a roadmap decision to a customer whose feedback was misinterpreted.
The reward for this discipline is disproportionate. Enterprise buyers routinely tell us that the strongest signal of a mature vendor is a product organization that can describe its discovery cadence in a procurement conversation. The cadence itself becomes a differentiator.