Opportunity Solution Tree: Go to strategy for decision-making as a PM!
As a product team, do you struggle to make daily decisions? If yes, this method is for you!
Are you a product manager, associate product manager, or part of the product team? Do you find it challenging to make your daily decisions for the product that derives business value and customer value?
As product managers, we take a lot of daily decisions from strategy to execution to communication which is crucial for business and our product. But, we often find ourselves surrounded by hurry, uncertainty, and self-doubt leading to having second thoughts about these critical decisions.
But not anymore! Here is a brilliant solution by Teresa Torres.
Presenting…… the Opportunity Solution Tree (OST)
To simplify everyday decision-making for the product team and make it more effective, fruitful, and well thought out, Teresa Torres introduces OSTs in her book Continuos Discovery Habits.
And I love the whole framework!
Time for some deep diving!
What is an Opportunity Solution Tree?
The Opportunity Solution Tree is a framework for better decision-making.
It consists of clear desired outcome, opportunities (customer pain-points, needs and desires) that emerge our of customer interviews, multiple solutions to those opportunities and underlying assumptions.
How to draw an OST?
Let us understand OST with a Netflix example from the book.
Step 1: Start with identifying the desired outcome that needs to be addressed.
Eg: Increasing viewing time.
Step 2: Once the desired outcome is identified, the product team starts researching to understand customer pain points, needs, and desires. The team also interviews several customers and determines the opportunities.
Eg: users want to watch movies on their flights, users want to watch sports etc.
The team then lists all the opportunities that emerge out of the interviews and bucket them.
Step 3: Later, various solutions are designed for the same opportunity. This is to ensure that the team brainstorms on picking multiple solutions for the same problems and later pick the best-suited one.
Eg: Adding live steaming of certain sports on Netflix, making content accessible offline etc.
Step 4: Once the solutions are identified, it's time to list all the associated assumptions. This helps the team to test their assumptions first, then freeze on the final solution.
Common mistakes!
OSTs seem easy to map and implement, but they can be tricky too. Here are certain common mistakes that should be avoided:
- Starting with identifying output over the outcome. Many teams consider output and outcome the same and use them interchangeably. But, that’s not right.
Output: different features
Outcomes: impact of those different features on our customers and business.
So always start by picking an outcome, not the output.
2. While interviewing the customers, we might get biased and seek validation about our already existing solution ideas. Remember, the purpose of initial customer interviews is discovery, not validation. So, we should avoid this.
3. While listing the solutions, we might fixate on just one solution and start testing it. In such cases, wait and ask “How else, can I solve this problem?” to arrive at multiple ways of solving the given problem.
4. While listing and testing the assumptions, we might test our solutions over the underlying assumptions. To avoid this, have a set of success criteria to align with the result.
Advantages of OSTs:
- Leads to better prioritization and decision making: OSTs help in analyzing the information and mapping them on a single board, which makes it easy for the team to prioritize and make better decisions.
- Builds confidence in what to build next: As all the information is already present, it becomes fairly simple for the team to decide what to build now, next, later, and so on.
- Better stakeholder management: We PMs coordinate with several teams on a day-to-day basis and getting them on the same page is quite a task! Trust me! So OSTs help you here as well.
- Better communication of goals: A lot of times, it gets challenging to make various teams understand the rationale and thought process behind the particular solutions. So OSTs help you visualize your entire thinking in a simple and understandable way.
Disadvantages of OSTs:
- Lengthy and time taking
- All the different teams must be actively involved to implement them successfully.
- Drawing OSTs could be challenging for B2B products (Just my thought).
Alright! This is all I had to share about OSTs.
If you have used OSTs before, do drop some of the advantages and disadvantages in the comments. I would love to read them.
Note:
This article is based on my understanding of the framework. The opportunity solution tree is a bigger concept and requires mastery at every stage. My intention with this article was just to give an overview of the concept and make you get started.
If you liked it, I would highly recommend you to read the book and clear misconceptions if any. Or drop comments and I’ll try my best to answer your queries.
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