Opportunity Solution Tree | Product Discovery

Hi everyone, welcome back and in this video I'll be giving you some information on the opportunity solution tree. So this is something very useful and interesting especially if you are into product discovery. So if you want to know what an opportunity solution tree is then this is the video for you. So the opportunity solution tree was introduced by Teresa Torres. Product Discovery Coach and author of Continuous Discovery, the book. So let's get to see what she has to say about this opportunity solution tree and how it can help your team. So the opportunity solution tree basically as a name goes is a decision tree. And what does this decision tree help teams to do and how is it different from other decision trees? So it is a visual representation that aids product teams. to perform critical thinking and make decisions of better quality okay so teams can put in a lot of critical thinking into this and make the right decisions which are of better quality in terms of whether they are building the right product so as we all know product teams and you know um dealing with products and customers and requirements sometimes there can be a overload of a variety of requirements that you might encounter and with this overload you might be having questions like where do you start what to build next and what are we you know reaching the desired outcome a lot of questions in your mind everyone has questions and don't know where to start and what to do so in this scenario let's be a little practical okay so every business okay that we see has some value some vision some mission outcomes and strategy so whatever gets built needs to be aligned first with the business outcomes so a business has all these things in their you know landscape and whatever product gets built or rolled out needs to be aligned with the outcomes of the business okay and with this said while there's an overload of so much of requirements as I said you have product customers have used the product and there are loads of requirements coming in not all requirements can be built by the products team okay you don't have to and the rule is also you don't have to build all products because not every feature of the product gets aligned with the business needs some might be really out of scope when you try to align it with what the business requires so when it's totally out of scope you don't have to take that into consideration and why am i saying this is because you have so many requirements and teams have these questions in their head as to what needs to be built when it needs to be built where do they start but whatever requirement a team works on especially in a product based organization everything ties up ultimately to the business outcome okay because businesses have this strong association with customers and products so whatever the product team is building is eventually associated to a product and that product is consumed by customers and indirectly with the customers the business benefits and generates revenue and profits and stuff like that So, I hope that I'm trying to make sense and make you understand how requirements that you build somehow ties up. So, it's very crucial as to what gets picked up and how you prioritize it. So, basically, whatever requirement that we need to work on, as I said, needs to be tied up to the business outcome ultimately, though you don't see it very evidently and directly, ultimately it somehow ties up to the business. And whatever gets built needs to provide value to the end customers as well as to the business. So it's a win-win situation, a win-win scenario where both the customers get value out of what's being built as well as the business indirectly gets the value out of it. So with all this background said, now what is this opportunity solution tree? So as I said, this opportunity solution tree helps business make decisions. especially in product discovery. So usually in product discovery everything is arum scarum and things like you don't know what to pick as I said things are like where do I start. So that's where this opportunity solution tree comes into picture and this is the structure. So I found this really informative picture online on Google Images and all thanks to the rightful owners to it I do not take any of credits for this. something to call out and the structure of the opportunity solution tree is very simple so on the first layer you have the outcome which is the business outcome the outcome that you're looking for the second layer is opportunities so it has a range of opportunities it can also have some opportunities but if you don't have some opportunities then the third layer is the solution layer and the solution layer is then followed by the test or experiment layer so though it's not mentioned over here that there is an experiment layer so you might be thinking by now how does this really help in product discovery so if you see here the outcome the outcome is nothing but the business outcome that the business is trying to achieve that's the main objective of the business and if you see who is involved in this space of determining the outcome is you have the product team as well as the product leaders you have stakeholders and all the business people involved in this particular phase where they define the outcome and they need to kind of negotiate and come up with some outcome some desirable outcome and mostly it needs to be a quantitative outcome only then you would be able to measure whether you're arriving to that outcome whether you have achieved that outcome usually qualitative outcomes are good to have but measurements of those outcomes are a little tedious and sometimes fuzzy so once you have the outcome you have a lot of opportunities as to how you can achieve that outcome so let's say that The business has products and there are there's a product and there's customers using it and you have a lot of things coming in as opportunities Opportunities can be either pain points of the customers. It can be something that's desirable It can be a need it can be a want it can be anything. So whatever you see is Indirectly an opportunity. It's not just some pain becomes an opportunity. Sometimes there's no issue with the product or a feature there can be an opportunity to improvise it, to enhance it. So that is an opportunity. So you need to kind of figure out what are the opportunities that indirectly drive to this particular outcome. And if you see again, products teams, they come together and they run customer interviews and you have researches going on, you have jobs to be done and different techniques in which they gather these opportunities and put them down. and ultimately you see that these opportunities need to contribute back to the desired outcome the third layer is the solution so for every opportunity there needs to be a solution only then we can you know drive and achieve that opportunity that that drives back to the outcome so that's why we have the third layer and we have again product teams coming down sitting together brainstorming to find solutions that's where innovation happens they compare and contrast different solutions which one is the best and things like that so once you have a solution teams also perform experiments which is hypothesis driven development experiments and tests in order to achieve that solution so if you see whatever experiment is being done it checks for whether you know it it achieve that particular solution and indirectly every solution needs to kind of address the opportunity in a way that drives to the outcome it also should have something that is feasible all these need to be checked in the solution phase and again product teams are involved in these phases so by this structure if you see you have a kind of a tree that helps businesses take the right decisions as to what opportunities they need to focus first and it helps business teams to even prioritize the opportunities that indirectly help them to achieve the outcome and also this acts like a product discovery uh roadmap on its own everyone gets to see what gets built and everyone has an alignment and visibility of what exactly is happening in the product discovery phase So to give you an example of how it might look like is let's say for example I have this business outcome which is to 98% of services are secure and compliant I want my services 98% of services to be compliant and secure so the possible opportunities that I might have is to ensure two-factor authentication for example and scan secrets and pipelines so for this opportunity what could be my solution so that's where teams sit together and understand what could be the possible solutions so either you have the on-shelf vendors that offer these services or you can build an hina's authenticator and if you're doing that then teams would have to run experiments and tests to see whether it's kind of feasible and that's where you write you you represent all that over here for example a beta spike and test can be done so If you see what even to the least child unit of tasks that teams work, if a team is right now working on a beta spike and test, it's not just they're working on a beta spike and test. If you see it ultimately ties out to the solution of an in-house authenticator that's going to solve this particular opportunity of ensuring two-factor authentication. which is somehow going to drive and boost up my metric which is trying to achieve 98 services are secure and compliant in one way or the other so if you see this is how this opportunity solution tree helps you to brainstorm and get these prioritized and do everything in a way that is aligned with business outcomes if it's not aligned then it's going to be a waste of time effort and money So finally with that it's very simple. Okay, so when you're doing this discovery you have Lot of things that you can do in this space. So when you work with desired outcomes It's usually OKRs that people use which is helps them to define these metrics and key results that they look for opportunities as I said identifying customer pain points and The needs and wants and stuff like that through different elicitation and requirement gathering faces feedbacks things like that you get to understand those and solution that's where you use you know kind of hypothesis driven development brainstorming and other tools in order to define solutions and experiments so ultimately with this opportunity solution tree it helps product teams to have a very visible visualization of the product discovery roadmap We have a roadmap to what gets built but when we talk about discovery and you know prioritization this definitely helps teams and By this you see stakeholders are aligned. They know what's happening right from the business outcomes to what's happening in order to drive that business outcome It also helps teams to product to you know of products to prioritize and in a way it's actually helping them to strategize what needs to move be pushed out next how they need to move strategies to align strategies or alter strategies in order to achieve that desired outcome and finally it also acts as a room for teams to look at alternate solutions and work and play around with them to see which one is feasible so usually this helps teams in a way to as i said identify Alternate solutions. When you see an opportunity as a problem, your mindset would generally be to fix that problem. But when you look at it as an opportunity, you might want to see how you want to kind of leverage that opportunity in a way that helps you achieve something. So, Trila Torres in one of her talks very beautifully says that why she didn't want to name this particular level as a problem space. Because Some people have problems with defining an opportunity as a problem. So she feels that mentioning it as an opportunity is much more inclusive, which includes problems, needs, wants, and desires. But ultimately, it just gives you room to look for different alternative solutions and to innovate and come up with the best solution. So I hope that you got some understanding on the opportunity solution tree. It's very interesting if at all you have a next product discovery phase and You want to use it definitely go for it. It has definitely helped many teams So I hope that it would also help your team So if you found this video helpful, please do give this video a thumbs up if you haven't subscribed Please do subscribe to this channel and also do share your feedback. Thank you