Opportunity Solution Trees: everything you need to know
The best products solve customer problems while generating revenue for your business. So the best product teams are those that are laser-focused on both customer needs and business outcomes.
But it’s easy to get sidetracked without the right tools to structure and manage your product discovery process. That’s where opportunity solution trees come in.
Opportunity solution trees allow you to visualise, structure, and manage your product development — all in one clear diagram. In this guide to opportunity solution trees, you’ll learn:
- What an opportunity solution tree is.
- How opportunity trees improve the product discovery process.
- How to create an opportunity solution tree for your product.
What is an opportunity solution tree?
An opportunity solution tree is a product discovery tool that visually represents the link between three essential elements of product discovery and development: outcomes, opportunities, and solutions.
Opportunity solution trees: how it started
Opportunity solution trees are a relatively new approach to managing product discovery. The idea was formulated in 2016 by product discovery thought leader Teresa Torres.
According to Torres, the opportunity solution tree is a visual plan of how to reach your desired outcomes. It’s designed to:
- Enable product teams to arrive at valid conclusions in a methodical way
- Help you steer clear of linear, finite routes of experimentation and discovery
- Account for every stage of discovery and development.
By using this approach to map opportunities, you can maximise staff resources and achieve your goals more efficiently.
What is opportunity mapping?
Product development is never finished. Your customers have a constant flow of pain points and problems waiting to be resolved. But it’s hard to prioritise development that creates value — especially when you consider each problem in isolation. You could spend forever solving problem after problem, without stopping to consider how solutions impact your business objectives.
That’s why opportunity mapping and solution mapping are important. When you discover a problem or paint point, you can reframe it as an opportunity and map it to the tree. If solving this problem can impact outcomes, it’s worth exploring further.
Opportunity mapping helps you visualise the opportunity space, so you can determine which opportunities align with your goals. Armed with this knowledge, you can discover solutions and develop features that add the most value to your product.
Why use an opportunity solution tree in your product discovery process?
The product development process is complex. It takes time to understand your customer needs, link them to your business objectives, and build solutions that achieve both.
With an opportunity solution tree, you can take advantage of multiple product opportunities — without getting sidetracked or wasting time. Here’s why you should use an opportunity tree to achieve your product discovery objectives.
Focus on business outcomes
Whether you’re validating solutions, developing features, or exploring opportunities, it’s essential to stay focused on your desired outcome. Outcomes are always at the top of your opportunity tree — so they should be at the forefront of your team’s focus. This visual reminder means you’re less likely to get distracted by feature development that doesn’t directly impact business needs.
The simple structure of an opportunity tree helps agile teams understand the reasons behind their discovery and development work — keeping you on track and in alignment.
Involve your stakeholders
Every problem is an opportunity. But it’s not just the product team that can solve problems. Your stakeholders, customers, and co-workers are an untapped resource when it comes to ideation.
Opportunity solution trees allow your stakeholders to see and understand what you’re trying to achieve. When they understand your goals and opportunities, they can submit their own ideas throughout the solution discovery process. Stakeholders also benefit from the output and learning from discovery.
Release more regular updates
Opportunity solution trees clearly display your research, assumptions, and ideas. With all this information at your fingertips, you can explore and validate your solutions more quickly.
This empowers you to make effective decisions that prioritise customer needs and business objectives within short, highly-focused release cycles. You’ll release useful developments faster and more often, creating better relationships with your customers while achieving your core objectives.
Develop solutions, not features
Understanding customer problems is key to identifying opportunities — but you shouldn’t be drawn into specific feature requests. After all, it’s your job to discover the best possible solution for their problems.
An opportunity solution tree allows you to investigate and compare potential solutions to your customers’ problems. You can then validate solutions and prioritise developments that add the most value to your product — both for your customers and your business.
Why is visually representing a problem helpful for a team?
Multiple studies have shown that visually representing problems helps aid understanding and find solutions more quickly.
Visually representing problems creates simplicity and structure that can’t be achieved in paragraphs. This is useful because:
- It helps people make sense of complex problems and concepts — saving time on lengthy explanations
- Everyone has access to the same information — keeping your teams in alignment and focused on the same goal
- It demonstrates the link between outcomes, opportunities, experiments, and solutions — so it’s quick and easy to make evidence-based decisions
- You can easily track experiment results, giving a clear view of where your resources are best directed — saving money on endless exploration.
Opportunity solution tree structure
The structure of the opportunity tree consists of 4 layers:
- Outcomes — key results you want to achieve.
- Opportunities — your customers’ pain points, needs, and desires.
- Solutions — ideas for solving the opportunities identified.
- Experiments — tests you’ll run to validate your solution ideas.
How to create an opportunity solution tree
Create an opportunity solution tree in four steps. Each step corresponds with the structure outlined above.
As your opportunity tree grows, it will become more complex. But by following these steps, you can approach product discovery, customer research, and experimentation in an efficient, systematic way.
1. Identify your outcome
The most effective opportunity solution trees have a single product outcome or objective at the top of the tree. This should be decided with key stakeholders from across the company and should align with business objectives.
Ideally, outcomes should be a single goal that accounts for both your customer needs and business objectives. It should also be something that can be directly impacted by the product team.
Outcome examples:
- Increase average basket size.
- Increase customer lifetime value.
- Decrease average time from onboarding to activation.
If you are using OKRs, you can add key results to an objective and treat this as a product outcome. This gives you measurable targets to aim for. Key results are helpful in describing specific product outcomes.
2. Identify opportunities that align with your outcome
Ask your customers about their pain points. Instead of gathering feature development ideas requests and ideas, take the opportunity to learn more about the consistent problems your customers face. Feature requests are still helpful, but it is important to understand how to collect and manage these effectively.
Each pain point or customer need is an opportunity. When you understand your opportunity space, map the opportunities that align with your outcome to your opportunity solution tree. You should prioritise and explore opportunities that have the biggest potential impact on your product outcome.
Opportunity examples:
- Customers find our checkout process confusing.
- Customers want to discover products sold by the same brand.
- Customers want to make purchases while on the road.
3. Identify solutions that align with your opportunities
Now you can start brainstorming ideas. Don’t keep this within the product team — great ideas can come from anywhere. This includes stakeholders, other teams, and customers.
Disregard solution ideas that don’t map to your key opportunities — these are feature requests, not solutions. Focus instead on ideas that solve opportunities and impact your overarching outcome.
Solution examples for ‘Customers want to discover products sold by the same brand’ opportunity:
- Recommend products to customers at the point of sale.
- Targeted email promotions based on past purchasing behaviour.
- A VIP program offering early access to new products.
4. Test your solutions to find the one(s) that work best
Experimentation is key for validating your solution ideas. Test one solution with a single set of tests to keep your results focused. If your tests fail, you can either:
- refine your solution and re-test it, or
- repeat the process against another solution.
This process enables you to find the right solution before you start building. You can use your resources to achieve your desired business outcome — so there’s no wasted time, and no random feature development.
Opportunity solution tree example
Here’s a simple opportunity solution tree example using the problem opportunity solution suggestions above:
In this example, we assume that making new products, from trusted brands easier to find will increase the average basket size and drive revenue. Therefore we map that opportunity to the tree.
We’ll then test our ideas in a series of experiments to discover the best possible solution to the problem.
How to create an opportunity solution tree in Orbit
Orbit’s product discovery tool helps you create a clear, useful opportunity solution tree. You can draw together your problems, opportunities and solutions in a visual online map.
- Add outcomes and key results as objectives
- Add and prioritise opportunities and sub-opportunities, keeping your opportunity tree clear and uncluttered
- Hide opportunities that aren’t relevant to your outcome, so your team can focus on the most urgent and valuable tasks
- Link opportunities with specific customers, so you know exactly who will benefit from this solution
- Propose solutions and add experiment ideas
- Record the results of your experiments to help you continuously progress with product development.
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