Moving from roadmaps to opportunity maps
Anyone who’s gone through the discovery phase for any new project know’s that it’s hard to keep track of all the moving parts. It’s hard to capture all the opportunities, gather all the feedback, document all your learnings and align as a team with a defined clear direction and set of solutions moving forward. It’s no easy feet, especially when the realm of possibility is endless.
Although there are many different ways to approach discovery, having the right tools are a must to help you make sense of it all. For me, one tool that I’ve used successfully is the Opportunity Solution Tree (OST).
What is an Opportunity Solution Tree?
An Opportunity Solution Tree—let’s call it an OST for simplicity’s sake—is a way to visually map out and connect three important elements; an outcome, an opportunity, and all of the associated solutions that stream down from the opportunity. It ultimately gives you a big picture view of all the different ways you might reach your overarching outcome. The framework was coined by Teresa Torres and popularised in her book Continuous Discovery Habits.
Opportunity Tree Structure:
Why use an Opportunity Solution Tree?
Discovery is complex, and by applying a framework that allows your team to capture all the ideas while remaining focused on what has the greatest impact is important as it provides a layer of structure to the process.
It also allows for greater collaboration from design, business and technical perspective which results in fewer surprises and greater buy in as everyone is involved in the decision making from the start.
Lastly, it provides a space for you to test ideas and evolve your understanding of your customer base prior to committing to a product decision.
How to create your own Opportunity Solution Tree
There are 5 steps to creating and maintaining an opportunity solution tree:
- Identifying your business outcomes
- Identifying your opportunities
- Mapping out all your ideas and solutions
- Testing your solutions
- Evolving and refining your solutions
Let’s break it down.
1. Start with your overarching outcomes
When creating your OST, you want to start with the outcomes first. After all, everything feeds back to the overarching outcome, so having a clear understanding of what you are driving towards is a good place to start.
To do this, you want to sit down with your core team—AKA your product trio—to discuss and document the outcomes that you are wanting to drive towards. Think of these as beacons that keep you focused on developing the right product that meets your business needs. By documenting outcomes collaboratively with the core team, you are already beginning to create alignment across functions which will result in fewer blockers further down the track.
2. Map out all of the opportunities
Now you want to populate the OST with your known opportunities, as well as hypothesised opportunities. For the purpose of the OST, opportunities are essentially problems that branch off each of your defined outcomes. Opportunities are framed from a users perspective. Here’s a template: As [name], I want to [need, desire, or paint point], so that [outcome].
Example: As Julia, I want to be notified when someone is sick and cannot work, so that I can fill their shift.
Next, setup a workshop and invite key stakeholders from across the organisation to gather sub-opportunities that feed into your key opportunities that you’ve already documented with your core team. With larger scale projects where you have multiple opportunity streams, try to align stakeholders to their area of expertise so that you are getting the most out of the session.
3. Multi-solution gathering
Similar to before, you want to run a workshop, but this time with a focus on finding solutions that can potentially solve the identified problems.
Example: Set automatic alerts for important tasks
Remember to make sure that the solutions map to your opportunity space, and then up to our outcomes. If they don’t align, you will need to remove it.
4. Testing your solutions with customers
Now that your OST has substance, it’s time to experiment. Validating your solutions through testing is critical when determining whether or not your solutions are worth pursuing. To do this, you’ll need to reach out to your customers to learn about their specific needs, pain points and desires. The exact method you use is entirely up to you and your specific project needs.
Once you’ve tested your ideas, it’s important to reflect and update the OST so that the new findings are captured, and the previous solutions are validated or disproved.
After you’ve documented your findings, loop back with your core team and prioritise which solutions are worth pursing based off their level of impact that they will have on your desired outcome. To do this we use a priority tagging system (P1, P2 and P3).
5. Reflect, evolve and repeat (continuously)
As you talk with your customers, you will learn more about the problem and solution space. As you gain a clearer understanding of the problem, new solutions will become possible which can then be included into the OST. Your thinking will also evolve and as a result your solutions will become more robust.
The best thing about this framework is that the process doesn’t stop at discovery, it will continue through delivery on a regular basis.