R9 Meetup | Intro to the Opportunity Solution Tree by N26

20 people at once cool i already see some n26 people i can see some familiar faces yeah cool i just wanted to show you by the way that i have n26 card and i have n26 application i do not use it actually now because i'm not in germany anymore and i cannot top up it but yeah At least when I was working in one of the Ukrainian banks and we started developing application from scratch, I installed your application and I'm admitting someone. Okay, I need to turn off waiting. I cannot turn off waiting room, unfortunately. Yeah, I will be letting people. okay okay yeah so yeah hi all thanks for joining today so we are waiting like five minutes for uh five like two two three more minutes for everyone to join and would starve um yeah i also glad to see people joining and some familiar place faces and even colleagues that they that couldn't join but still joined so maria it's for you saying hi uh yeah and today we have guests from berlin i'm super super excited that they joined and that they would contribute to our david research community uh yeah it's super cool that we have uh like guests from abroad and they would share their experience as well it's very cool that they are working uh in um very popular uh in i not only in germany but most but fintech project n26 i know that people that are working with fintech fair no knows a lot about it so uh and getting the expert expert i forgot the world like they're getting inspired by uh and and 26 as well and um yeah today we would have um like like some kind of collaboration uh so we would have some um information from girls and they would tell it more about their project about themselves about the approach and as well we would have time for questions so uh just post your question in the chat during the the speech and if you're brave enough uh just raise your hand after the speech and we would have a q a session and just turn on your mic and ask all everything that you want to ask about this approach about the project about your experience um yeah that's all probably uh we would also have so we would have approximately 30 40 minutes for um for the information from the girls about this approach that they're using and they would also have some part of like collaboration interaction with us so please be active and join and collaborate because like the aim of our meeting today is to share our experience and to know about new approaches and like to get acquainted so So please be active, collaborate and ask questions and share your experience. I also want to say that today we have a kind of lottery. Lottery among participants who donate. I will give you the link where to donate to Ukrainian army. Minimum 200 krivnas, please. At least this is like 5 euro. And the winner... we'll get a mentorship session with our beloved daria ivashenka the founder of r9 community so now i'm sending the link in the chat you can where is the chat okay i need to find the chat yeah and we would have a raffle before q and a session and the winner would get a mentorship with daria yeah so Let's help Ukrainian army and somebody will also be lucky to talk to Daria Vashenka later. Okay, I'm done with lottery. Yeah, cool. Yeah, so I think we could start the presentation. Amazing. Thank you, Irina. Thank you, Anastasia. So let me share my screen to get started. And hi, everyone. Welcome, everyone. Thank you so much for being here. um let me know if you can see my screen um amazing yeah so um today uh we want to give you an introduction about a framework um that we use with alexandra at n26 it's called the opportunity solution tree um but first of all i'm sure you may wonder who we are so i am emily and i'm a user researcher um i come from france and i'm based in berlin i've been in in 26 since um more than four years soon five years actually um i started um in the customer service and and then uh after a year um less than a year i i saw a presentation from a few researchers actually from the company and it kind of sparked my curiosity and i i understood that i really wanted to learn more about it and this is how yeah all it started for me and to to to go through the the ux journey and discipline and join a community um so yeah maybe alex can tell more about her too Hi everyone, I'm Alex. I come from Serbia and now I'm currently in Berlin. I came here almost a year ago, two years ago when I started working for N26. A bit about myself is that, so I'm in N26 for around two years and in the UX of four to five years, something like that. I have a dog. You can just ask me later if you have any questions. And yeah, I do product design now and then 26 in the crypto team working with Emily from day one. Okay, we can take over. yes thank you yes so we as alex mentioned we both were closely together in the crypto team um at n26 and um a bit more about n26 um if you don't know so in 26 it's a it's a mobile bank uh we are based in germany and um so our vision is to change the world's relationship with money for the better and uh we have uh as a for a mission to build the bank the world loves to use um we have more than 8 million customers um across 24 markets um in in europe and um yeah inside of the company we are a bit more or around 1500 employees we're all coming from very various and diverse backgrounds and nationalities um so yeah that's uh that's about n26 and we also wanted to to briefly share with you our journey n26 with alex as we were mentioning we've been working since alex joined um on the crypto project and so we kind of open the opportunity space of investment um within in 26 and i think also that's why we are bringing the topic of opportunity solution 3 today um and beginning of this year we launched the crypto product um and we already um iterated on the the mvp uh on the on the product and uh we also proudly reached out the organization targets the first year of this year. So it has been a really, really great ride. And you can also see on the left side how the product looks like today. Cool. So we also wanted to give you a heads up that we prepared a few questions along the presentation so that you are, you know, also participating and it's not just us talking. So just to see that everyone's understand and see where it is. We're going to use the reaction, the emoji reaction on your Zoom bar of the call. And so, yeah. based on the question you will answer with the emoji of the correct answer. So maybe just to give it a go and a try, you can give me a thumb up with the emoji reaction. Amazing. Cool. Nice. So OK, let's get started, people. So as designers and researchers, we believe that our goal is to create a meaningful impact in people's lives. But sometimes it doesn't go as smooth as we would like. And as you may have experienced maybe yourself, we can encounter difficulties in gaining clarity and also structure while attempting to understand what are the user needs and also framing the problem. So you may ask yourself, okay, why do I start? Did we think about everything? And then... sometimes we rush also into brainstorming sessions and we are proposing solution without fully understanding what is the root problem and unfortunately sometimes it leads to um you know wasting time misalignment or even missed opportunities so what do we do about it um we want to to bring some magic because we need this and to organize this whole space about the user needs and the problem we're trying to solve and this magic that we want to introduce today is the opportunity solution tree as you may have guessed this is not a framework that we came up with it's a framework that has been created from Teresa Torres she's talking about it in her book continuous discovery So that's what we want to talk about today. So the plan for today briefly, in the first part, I'm going to talk about the opportunity space of the tree. Alex will talk about the solution space and we'll finish by talking about the culture of experimentation related to this. Cool. So you may wonder what it is. how can we define opportunity solution tree so it is a tool for um in order to reach a desired outcome by addressing user needs and those user needs are what we call uh opportunities so you will see like i we may both with alex like um use the term like opportunity or user needs but we're talking about the the same basically um but um yeah before we start digging into uh the opportunity space this is like to give you an idea of like how the oval structure can look like so you um come from the the top with the desired business business outcome then you have the first uh level which is the opportunity space so the user needs i'm mentioning you can have multiple layers actually within this opportunity space And then the bottom level is the solution space. So before going into this, it is quiz time already, people, to see if we did not lose some of you already. So first question is, what is the main idea behind the opportunity solution tree? And you can give me your best emoji here. Amazing. Yes. exactly so the main idea behind it as i just explained it's a tool for mapping opportunities and potential solutions um so now okay we understand i hope we all understand what is the overall purpose and um what does it mean so how do we start how do we build this tree so we divided this in uh four main steps uh to build the tree so the first one is to set the outcome The second one is to collect opportunities, so user needs. The third one is to connect those opportunities into smaller tree that you will always try to connect up to the top of the tree, which is the desired outcome. So that's the last main step for building the tree. So I'm going to go step by step and trying to be as clear as possible. So let me know if you know where I'm going too fast. um but let's get started with the first step which is setting the outcome so you need to ask yourself what are you trying to achieve right so as a reminder a business outcome that's the end result the end goal that comes from the company strategies uh choices and decision right um and so for today's um example and presentation we're going to take an example from a streaming platform it's taken from the book of teresa torres And so if we think about the streaming platform, the desired outcome could be increased viewing minutes. So that's the outcome we're going to stick to for the sake of the example and explaining to you how to build a tree and so on. So the next step is to collect those user needs, to collect the opportunities. So how do we do this and where they come from, basically? so those needs you're going to be able to collect them from various user research reports all sorts of methods really also from maybe your customer support department where you can have reports or maybe even transcripts from like chats or email um also um data analytics but also market research where you can find maybe um studies or um you know any any related benchmarking maybe that could help that could like help you to collect insights basically about uses so how the opportunities look like ideally this is like the yellow post is here so for example again taking the streaming platform i want to be entertained i want to do something with my friends i don't know which tv show to watch so it can be user needs but also pain points right it's important so that's the ideal format that we we want to use or that we use for building the tree. But sometimes it's not necessarily directly in this format, right? When you're reading reports, for example, it might be like more like shorty statements. It could be like more quantifying data. So for example, if you take this one, pulling out of a report, the top three criteria when choosing a TV show, let's take the third one, 13. person popularity and buzz is you know part of choosing a tv show maybe you can transform into the format of oh i want as a user i want to know what others are watching so that would be like the ideal format for you to better understand how to match and and also place those needs within the tree okay so as soon as you collect those opportunities now we're gonna start clustering them and grouping them so that we can build tiny trees. So it's all about the structure and the very base of the structure of the tree. So what we're going to do is we're going to try to find similar opportunities in terms of themes, in terms of characteristics. And this is what we call siblings opportunities. So if you take those, I want to watch my shows on my flight. and i want to watch my shows on my train commute you see that it's very similar right so that's why we call uh siblings opportunities um and then as soon as you have looks of siblings you're gonna need to find a parent opportunity so it's gonna be a bit more like high level and then like this you can differentiate those layers and and like the hierarchy also between those opportunities so here in this case it will be i want to watch my shows on the go And you may wonder, like, how do you make sure to, you know, to match those siblings, like the child to the parents? And so you can think about this tip and this logic. It's if I could watch my shoes on the flight, I would be able to watch my shoes on the go. So it's kind of like a logic that you can keep in mind to make sure that you're building the right structures. and of course you can you know build up and add as many other siblings that you can find just you know make sure that sometimes when formulating those user needs it's not more like a business wish like for example if you take again this example like i want to watch more netflix it's it's not something that a user As you're going to say, it will be more like what the business wants to hear. So just also keep this in mind. But otherwise, those are the tiny trees that we are mentioning here, right? Those tiny structures. Cool. So as soon as you have those small trees, you're going to continue until you reach the top of the tree. The top of the tree being the desired outcome. And so... The more you're going to practice, the more it will get easier. I know it seems a bit like complex right now and it's a lot of information. But if you take again the siblings I was just mentioning here, you see like the parent and then it even relates to a different like top layer of opportunities, which is here. and here we have the outcome right so the top layer here just so you know um you can see this as very related to the customer journey the the user experience um as um for example here it's like i need something to do so you can think about this as like pre-experience why i can't find anything to watch i'm watching a show it's more like during the experience and my show ended is more like towards the end of experience like post experience so this is kind of like also a way to help you to map you know those different opportunities within the tree and um kind of give you a bit of structure i also wanted to say that there is no right or wrong answers like i know it's it seems like there is like specific steps and specific structure but at the end it's really a common agreement with your team and open discussion as you know like the the outcome it's something that you need to decide with your team right and as it's the same for the opportunities you also need to to see what makes more sense and and see the the common ground here cool so to summarize because i know it was already a lot um first is setting the outcome the outcome you're setting this with your team it will depends um you know on your company strategies The second one is to collect the opportunities, which is the user needs. The third one is to connect, to start connecting the opportunities into like tiny structures, tiny trees, to then make it up to the top, to the desired outcome. Cool. So time for quiz people. First question is, how do you start building a tree? Give you emojis. Okay. Cool. Yeah. So by defining the outcome and collect opportunities. Exactly. So why is it important to cluster similar opportunities together? Nice. Cool. Yeah. So why is it important? It's simply to help identify those patterns. So the similar themes or similar characteristics related to... among the the opportunities um what do we mean by siblings opportunities okay yes exactly so that's what i was mentioning earlier so similar characteristics again um and making sure that they relate to each other basically um and this is there is no right or wrong answers here it's just like out of curiosity we wanted to to know with alex what is your favorite method of learning um about user needs um so about like you know collecting those opportunities um it could be also something else so you can also put in the chat in the comment um but those are just a few few examples and we're just curious about what you would preferably use cool thank you um okay so um now i'm gonna pass over to alex and she's gonna talk about the solution space okay now i just need to learn how to share my screen did you select any specific options so that you can see everyone while you're looking at the presentation or No, no worries. So you share the tab and then within Google Slides, I just put like, what's the name? I put like presenter view within the... Okay, just a second. Alexandra, what you're asking, I think it is predefined. So you just try and it would be the same. I see. Okay, let's give it a try. You see this now. um yes but we see the um okay i don't know what you see okay so we're going now into the the solution space uh mike is good you see the presentation so we're good to go so now is the part where we are solving for for these opportunities and we found our business outcome we went through the opportunity space we built the tree and now we're going into the solution space and when we're trying to solve now is we have to go through prioritizing the opportunity which one we want to tackle then we're going into ideation the fun part and then we're experimenting and now the first thing is prioritizing an opportunity and this is a messy process because sometimes we can have a tree that has 100 opportunities it can grow quite big you can have five six seven things on top usually they represent like these steps in the user journey and they can have five levels and it can be quite a lot so you don't want to go into solving each one of them we first need to find out which one is bringing the most impact so we do this by asking questions we want to to understand from different perspectives how many customers is this opportunity impacting how often is this happening how will it affect our position on the market will it make us different for the from the competition is there any threats related to this opportunity in the market how well is it aligned with the goals of our company how important is it to our customers is there like a big gap of user need that is unmet so we have all of these questions and we're trying to pit all the opportunities against each other please don't open excel spreadsheet and don't start typing in like a formula where you are having like the market size one to four and something like that because this is not what we're trying to achieve this is very subjective contrasting opportunities against each other with your team so it's a healthy debate you're already knowledgeable about the problematics of it and you know enough to to talk to your team what is better and there's no right or wrong answer the you can always go back on another opportunity this is experimenting so how do we do this we start from the top um we have to move uh through branches and first we we go from the parent branch and in this specific example i chose i can't find anything to watch For example, I was reading some reports from Emily and she said, hey, we have detected that a lot of people have got stuck in the browsing part of the experience and they can't find anything to watch and they drop off. And we believe that this is like. very crucial thing to the success of a streaming business so we say okay let's go to this parent and we believe that the opportunity that we want to tackle is inside of this branch so this is not like we know that this is it we believe that this is the highest chances and the least risk now we go down and we pit opportunities against each other we check stats we do this we do that and we find out that a lot of people can't find the categories that they want to watch and then for example we went through the searching queries inside of our streaming platform and we found the search queries what were people searching for and we learned that a lot of people wanted to watch sports so our target opportunities in this case is i want to watch sports again saying this is not the right answer this is just something the team has agreed on to solve so we're not committing to addressing it or just launching a product for sports we just want to explore it in this discovery process so this whole thing that we're doing is discovery we're going to explore this idea so the next part the ideation that we were mentioning is the fun part that a lot of people are already knowledgeable about, and quantity definitely leads to quality in this case. We first need to make sure that the whole team is on the same page when it comes to this opportunity, that everyone believes that this is the right opportunity, that we have all the data that we have, that we discussed it already, and then we can go into ideating. You can use how might we use storyboarding, sketching, mind mapping, whatever you want. Anything goes. And we gather as many ideas as possible. Sometimes I would suggest 15 to 20 ideas to boost your creativity. It is suggested not to just do brainstorming like that. You ideate alone so that you can just throw out all the ideas that you might have. and then you share the ideas with you with your team you share you exchange ideas and then you go again into ideating alone because uh you build upon each other's ideas and you get new ideas from what other person said and also incubation period it's very important you know that you get sometimes very good ideas when you're taking a shower or you're in the bus So you can also spread out your ideation in two days or you can spread it one session in the morning and one in the evening. So let people think it through, like let it ferment in the head. Okay, the next step is you have all these ideas and then you let your team dot vote. Everyone gets three votes and they vote to... how well does the idea target the opportunity so in our case i want to watch sports we might say how might we allow users to watch sports and then people are voting which idea is the best for them that is targeting this opportunity we get three ideas that are the best in our case the first one is We just put simple links to some external provider for sports. They leave our website and they go somewhere else. The second one is we provide live sports. So we embed some ESPN, Fox Sports, NBC Sports. We embed it into our website, some live channels. And the third one is we make a completely separate streaming service for sports. So let's say Netflix and then we have Netflix Sports. So these are the three ideas. Why do we have three ideas? This is very important. Usually if you have only one idea, you tend to cherry pick information from your research to just confirm it and just go with it because you have this escalation of commitment. You commit to one idea and then it's really hard to let go. And the more you investigate it, the more committed to it you become. But we actually want to be ready to give up on an idea if it doesn't work. And that's why we have three. Which one of these ideas is tackling the opportunity in the best way? We now have to decide what we want to do with this. So from all these three ideas, linking, embedding, creating a new service, all of them are allowing people to watch sports. But which one is the best for helping them find the right category? giving them something to watch, and then in the end, the most important for us, what is going to increase our viewing with minutes the most. you can assess these three ideas now you go a bit deeper into it right so you can assess these ideas by simple impact effort matrix you can do it with the rice scoring anything else that you like there are different factors that you can use for it feasibility viability usability desirability how ethical it is so we now need to to choose which one to go with and sometimes that's not that easy this is where experimenting comes into place some some ideas are very straightforward but sometimes like these three ideas they are a bit risky and we want to minimize risk we don't want to just go into an idea and launch it and then see if it worked because there's a lot of resources spent a lot of developers worked on it the designers spent hours and hours and we we're just not gonna go into one of them immediately we want to minimize risk And yeah, the obvious idea is not that obvious. We need to investigate it further. But we're not investigating the idea itself completely. We're uncovering the assumptions behind the idea that we are making. And we're doing this for each idea. In this case, I picked this providing users with live sports. So ESPN, Fox Sports, it's going to be embedded. Some assumptions that I... just randomly picked out is we're assuming that users want to watch live sports. Is it true? We don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no. Another one is that users will know how to find live sports on our website. Another one are we are able to charge enough fees to cover the expenses of this endeavor. Then we have technical capabilities to provide live streaming content on our website. And the last one is that users are fine with sharing their personal data with the third parties. And you can have 100 of these or 200 of these. There are so many underlying assumptions behind any ideas that we might have. And they can be clustered into these five categories. This is also from the book, but I'm pretty sure that there is more categories out there. So desirability, users want it, usability, viability, feasibility, ethnics, ethnical assumptions. and all of these can be tested you don't test the idea will the providing users with live sports work you're testing users want to watch live sports you can do surveys you can do a fake door test a bunch of tests and here it is some tools i don't want to go deeper into this but some tools to help you uncover these assumptions is assumption smash value proposition canvas story mapping you can conduct the pre-mortem we can even discuss it later but you do want to come up with a bunch of assumptions and don't worry you're not going to test all of them and so we want to get more information on just the riskiest assumptions just to reduce risk and to decide to help us decide which idea to pursue to find which ones are riskiest there's again another tool like everything there is a way to prioritize everything so in this case we can use assumption matrix and these uh riskiest ones are leap of faith assumptions these are deal breaker assumptions so you can google it or we can talk about it a bit later and then when you find these most important assumptions you can test them out with the so many different tests. I would suggest maybe this book by David J. Bland. He has a lot of ideas inside how to test out different things. And what I'm trying to say is it's easier to test out these small things rather than just go for the whole idea and risk failing, like failing small and failing big. Okay, so what Teresa says in the book, and I just try to quote it directly, is that we're not trying to prove that the assumption is true. the burden is too much we're just trying to reduce risk so it doesn't have to be perfect or anything it just have to be enough for the team to to believe that this idea is going to work okay and now when we reduce the risks and we finally found out which of these three ideas is the the one we launch and we measure Of course, before this, you have to set up some metrics, some KPIs, something to help you measure and track your success. I'm not going to elaborate on that that much. But here is the good stuff. Let's go into a quiz. The first question is, how do you prioritize an opportunity in the opportunity solution tree? I can't see votes of a lot of people, but I see that some of you are already voting for assessing its potential impact. That's correct. Next. There is only one way to prioritize an opportunity and you cannot go back on the decision. Okay. You can definitely go back and this is the whole idea. You test these small assumptions and if... if you just don't believe in it anymore just go back and that's it done next one why do we test assumptions amazing uh i think that's the no it's not the last one so last one what is the last and very important step of this discovery process i see some people want ice cream yeah that is also very important okay So the last thing we're done now with, you know, the whole cycle. The last thing that I would like to just have a small overview of is this whole culture of experimentation and why is it important? OK, so we want to say that failure is an option and this is something that we really encourage because when we try to do different stuff. When we fail, then we can learn and then we can grow and we can innovate. And I think me and I are very lucky to be a part of an organization that is allowing all this, that we have the resources to just go for it and test out different things. And here is just another view of this whole process that we were explaining today and how it works. So in the center of the whole thing is the opportunity solution tree that we were talking about. And around it is, so the first one is setting the outcome. Then we're collecting opportunities through these interviews, surveys, insights from data. Then we are prioritizing opportunities, which one we want to tackle. Then we are ideating the solutions. Then we're assessing these solutions, validating the assumptions. And then... we go back into collecting opportunities and it's just like a cycle. Every time we are testing something, we're using these learnings. Every time we make an interview, we update the opportunity solution tree. It's like a live thing that is constantly changing. It's not like a thing that you leave out there and that's like to frame it onto a wall. It's a live thing that constantly needs changing every time you make an interview or a new insight. And when you are sure about certain ideas and solutions, you go into refinement sessions and then you go into building it. So the Opportunity Solution Tree is a foundation for continuous discovery and this culture of experimentation that I was mentioning. For us, it's giving us a lot of things to work on and play with at all times. So it's a big tree and we always can just pick out uh fruits from it to play with and uh last but not least it's enabling us to grow an outcome driven mindset and uh here are some books that i was mentioning throughout the presentation um the first one is discontinuous discovery habits by teresa torres she created this whole framework with opportunity solution trees the second one is a book that might be a good resource to to find cool testing methods for business ideas and the last one is cool for research when you don't have a lot of resources and you want to learn how to hack it and i think it's good for designers to learn about research so these are these are the books that we would recommend and this is the last slide i'm gonna uh give the mic to to i think me yeah you and yeah i'm stopping yeah so uh before we jump to the questions uh we will make our shuffle I hope everybody who wanted already made the donations because now I will start compiling the list for this shuffle. I will need about one, two minutes. So if you are still, if you still want to donate but did not have time to do this, do it right now or say it, I'm doing this so that I do not forget you. Okay. Okay, so I'm jumping to this preparation. Please girls continue and in one minute I'll be back and we will make this shuffle. Great. Well, I guess in this one or two minutes you can just take some time to give us feedback because this whole presentation is an experiment and we're trying to make it better. uh you can either use the qr code or use the link below uh we really appreciate it it's boosting our confidence because we're suffering from imposter syndrome a lot wow it was great thanks uh thank girls a lot uh so yeah we have like two minutes to make the donation and to write the question or to i don't know to be ready to turn on the video and the mic and to ask the questions uh yeah so yes you're also supported in the comments about the imposter syndrome yeah so uh please write your questions or be ready to ask them so we have some in the chat and as well with we have some with nicer so uh after this uh this ruffle uh we would be ready for the questions. Okay, I'm ready. So, Alexandra, can you stop sharing? I will share the screen. My Zoom has updated and now it wants me to update the security settings. In between, feel free to write down your questions in the chat. um yeah we're happy to discuss and yeah there are no stupid questions so okay i will be back in a second because i need to rely no problem this program that this decided to update right now i'll be back yeah and i have a question about questions uh are we allowed to ask anything uh not about opportunity three three three but about and 26 like do you have some legal uh issues answering these questions so probably someone is from uh fintech company and wants to ask or something about crypto so could we ask such questions as well i mean i guess you can and then we decide if we can answer or not we did get a media training yeah yeah go for it go for it ask your questions no problem okay more hands i'm i'm terrified of questions yeah yeah sorry so that we are like increasing this time to the question so um but now people start to adding them so yeah after raffle we would start okay so i'm ready by the way i also donated and put myself so daria maybe i will be your next mentee are you here are you here oh great yeah yeah lucky person so yes you are the lucky one that are you here yes hey everyone okay so this is image yeah and i'll keep in touch and arrange mentoring session thank you for participating everyone and our courses i wanted to show to find where is this uh how much we raised now so we have raised six thousand very well okay good now i think we can proceed with the questions I have a suggestion. We were planning to start with our question for Boromaba, but I see that there are already some raised hands and questions in the chat. So let's start from the raised hands. And if we have time, we would finish with our questions. Nice. Okay. Cool. So the first one was Mert. So please go on. Hello. Thank you very much for the presentation. It was quite inspiring for me, especially for a person who is... and navigating in academia um i have two questions uh one of them is related to initial step of identifying an outcome um because uh as the first step we are identifying the outcome then we are collecting the user information user data and again we are trying to reach the outcome And it is the same outcome as we identified in the first place. Do you think that that outcome, the one that we reached later on, could be different based on the user findings or your evaluation as a designer? What of them is that? Should I ask the second one also quickly? Let's go one by one, not to forget it. I think I can take this. So the thing is, the outcome is usually business driven. So you might have something like a KPI tree in inside of your company or OKRs or some metrics that are on a very high level and that are not dependent on user needs. So, for example, in crypto case, our main outcome is to increase the volume of transactions because this is how you raise the generate profits right so no matter what the user needs are we're constantly trying to to lead this outcome but i do believe that outcome can change over time and this is a negotiation with with the top management and the team thank you and the second one is related to the user findings again for example as an example we identified that a user wants to watch more sports and then we find the encapsulating team related to that and then again we go back to the initial finding and we explore the uh ideas related to watching sports uh is there a i mean are we doing it to identify uh or to identify opportunities to scale it How can I ask why we are going again to do initial finding and why did we engage with the previous activities in terms of covering the greater pattern? I'm not sure if I get it, but maybe you can reformulate like why I know that you took like this idea of like watching the sport and maybe you can you can reformulate your question again. Yeah, and if we get the finding from the user that they want to watch sports, then we engage with this beautiful mind mapping activity that, you know, I cannot find the category I want. This is the upper category that we achieved. Then we find that I cannot watch anything. I cannot find anything to watch. This is a greater, let's say, category. Then again, we go back to the watching sports and started the idea generation session with watching sports. To what degree we are scaling the findings related to watching sports to the greater category of I cannot find anything I want to watch. I'm not entirely sure how we're scaling. You mean like how are we solving the upper category by solving the one lower? Yeah, and would it be, maybe I can ask it like this, could we start to idea generation directly with the initial user finding? I want to watch sports instead of doing all this, trying to find the greater parent category activity. Do we really need them if we are going to engage directly with the finding coming from the user related to I want to watch more sports? Yeah, but it's really hard then to connect to the outcome, right? Then you don't have this connection. You can't even track and measure how is that driving your profits. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. And a small suggestion for the brainstorming. I think it could be an interesting idea to create some matrices between the findings. For example, a user who would like to watch sports on the go. i think this could be interesting uh way of approaching the uh opportunities area thank you everything is allowed in the end it's a wild west with this and whatever you decide you do yeah cool thanks for the question uh the next one was eager uh do you hear me yeah okay thank you uh great so my question was very simple are you using a like a mural template or some other tool uh that is uh ready for each new session let's say or you you just have a a huge board or whatever tool that you use i'm just interested in what kind of uh what what do you use in your in your um in your processes that's basically it yeah so i i mean when you say new sessions do you mean like when we we go in experimentation and we do more research is what you mean yeah okay well you're you're continually working on on one product right and you're you're building so i'm just working like for the for the same project uh every iteration of you know like you're like so what what what template do you use do you have a like uh just one uh file that you work in from like four months or you have some kind of template okay we're doing this again let's use the template that's best yeah i understand yeah so we're always trying to relate to the same um uh bigger figma file let's say um but of course like per you know per project or per session as you say like we we can we can have a separated you know um templates or separated documents but at the end the goal the end goal is really to relate to this bigger opportunity solution tree that we keep in one file but you you definitely need to embrace the the messiness um because it can become quite um you know uh complex and and big so you also need to make sure i think it relates also to to how often do you need to update it and to need to to come back to it but we at least for us we we tend to to go back to the same same file yeah Yeah, just to add something. So if I wanted to do it myself, right, from scratch, could I use something that you use in essence? Like, is there a file that you can share for someone who is just about to start using this kind of process? That's basically the question. I see. Well, it's not a template. We use FigJam in N26. It's similar to Miro. And what we do is, well, initially for this, our opportunity solution tree, we had on whiteboard, we went to the office and we brainstormed. right there and then we would just type in in little boxes all the opportunities and then we were playing around with them and connected them with those lines so i wouldn't suggest any um template because not one or two opportunities solution trees they can't be the same but you know there is an outcome and then you just connect the opportunities below you you can spend hours reorganizing them and it's never going to be perfect so it's just like an exercise okay thanks for the question it's a cool question cool thanks and there was another hand alex i guess yes thank you for amazing presentation it was really cool so i have a question so from my experience it's always like the devils in the day when in in details when you work with different frameworks and probably can share what was your thing where did you find challenges while working with this framework and probably some unexpected things when you started in the beginning and then you find out well okay how we can manage this and what was its challenges thank you sure maybe i can start and alex you can add on but um i think um what's the most challenging part is is to get started with it because it's for us it was very new and we were kind of like learning about the framework and how to put it in practice as in parallel you know like reading about Teresa's book so it was really like a back and forth thing and as Alex mentioned like we were a lot in the office to see each other face to face and to have more like you know concrete thing to write on and I think we the challenges we had it was maybe misalignment at the beginning because we i feel like we were understanding in different ways and that's also what i was mentioning earlier that you know there are no right or wrong answers and what way to do it but at least you need to have a common agreement with your team um so i think that was the most challenging part and as soon as we got you know like this uh this uh logic of uh oh if i could uh xyz i would be able to xyz i think it really helped us to build on those like you know smaller structure to build in the in the bigger one and uh yeah so i would say um that was one of the the challenge to to get the the methods and um because you can understand it but putting in practice it's always different right um and i would say also one of the challenges it's um maybe like time, I don't want to say time consuming because it sounds negative, but it requires a lot of time, right? So if you're tight in capacity or, you know, in time in general, maybe it won't be the best methods you need to get started with. So that's the main challenge I have top of mind. Yeah. Thank you very much. You mentioned in some moment misalignment and understanding it differently. So for us in our team who did it is Emily, the researcher, me, designer and the product manager. And I have a feeling like we understood it differently. And that was the biggest friction point for all of us. So I believe if you want to include other people in this, you can start alone. you can start alone and try it out but if you want to introduce other people it's very important to to teach them first what it is and how it works and only then you go into the exercise yeah cool thanks for the questions is any of any anyone else that wants to to ask a question okay so because we have lots of other questions in the chat uh so I will try to pick several ones because, yes, first of all, lots of people saying thanks for the great presentation and asking if you have any open positions for researchers in your company. So, yeah, so there was a slide with LinkedIn, so I think that you could add follow girls and LinkedIn and ask this question about being hard. and so the questions there are several similar questions about implementing this approach in the company how to persuade to use it and if everyone's just start so someone is newbie to this approach how they would could sell it to their top managers or colleagues Yeah, that's a very good question. Yeah, I think it's, at least to me, it relates a lot to advocating for, you know, like this user-centric approach that at the end, this framework, you know, is trying to do. So... yeah and i think also like maybe involving your it's a collaborative process so if you involve as much as possible the cross-functional team and maybe your your top managers right um then maybe you can have more um leverage and and and you know sell this this framework better um so yeah i feel i feel like collaborations are involving people and also you know um managers but also um you can also start small right you don't need to go through the whole process maybe you you can start small and and making sure that you're showcasing the value and you know it's it's not coming out of nowhere right you're it's related to the company strategy it's data driven so i think you can kind of put those pros on your side to kind of like sell the the process and but i guess yeah educating and advocating is is always a big one around it yeah definitely i wouldn't i wouldn't wait for permission i would either start alone and test it out or i would find my my team to try it out with so you usually need someone who is advocating for the users You might find someone from the tech side. Also, it might be helpful to have someone on that side, someone from the business side to give you all these different perspectives. So just don't wait for permission, just go for it and then show the results. Because it's also in 26, this is not a usual approach where the CEO told us ages. use the opportunity solution tree it actually came from our pm and he said hey look at this book it's kind of cool let's try it out and then we we went for it so i guess don't wait for someone else just try it out yeah you keep the knowledge with yourself Exactly. And I wanted to add also, because I saw in the chat, Yulia's question that was related. Is this tree a part of everyone's standard process to launch new features? And does it compete? You know, like, is it something that leadership wants? And I mean, we partially answer, right? It was our own initiative. And I think if you are able and you have the capacity, you know, to push for it and with... partners, it's always better than alone, then go for it. But no, it's not a standard process at N26, I would say. Can I also ask a quick follow-up question? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just want to say that we have a hand. Yeah, yeah. Again, how often do you do this? Does it like a thing that was like tested once? Is it something that you come back to? Do you kind of like update the tree regularly? What is it like? yeah we do we do continuously update it and so we made our first tree before the product was launched and now we're trying to make a big update of the tree now that the product is launched and we have new information on like numbers and we're constantly doing like user interviews and putting in new opportunities inside so it's a very live thing and it evolved a lot since like a year and more so it's it's a live thing Thank you. There was some questions from Maria. And if you already have your video. I have one more question now. Yeah. Hello. Thank you. It's funny that we are together. We are like different organizations and everything. My initial question was, how do you leverage different? probably user types or archetypes because I thought that it's messy. So my instant idea was like of splitting it. And then I said, oh, it might be a way to prioritize opportunities at the same time. So I was wondering if you already solved this question problem. Did you work with it? I actually investigated this thing because I was very curious because there's different types of crypto traders, but also in some other companies, you might have different types of users, for example, customer support, and then on the other side, user. And I was reading about it, and it says that basically, if you really have such different target audiences that have different needs, usually you can start again from the top, and then you can make a layer where you say, okay customer support or user or let me give an example you have some needs related to browsing the internet and you might have a user that is using chrome user that is using brave user that is using internet explorer and they might have different needs so you can just make a layer in different color that is just connected like okay for these users then we branch out these and then they they can even connect back into the same need Like maybe Brave browser user and Firefox have the same need again, so you can connect them back. But if you see that most of them are connected to the same opportunity, you might say, okay, maybe we don't really need this layer of different users. Again, it's a decision with the team. Should you separate it or not? Should you create this additional complexity or not? So it's again like... I don't know, guessing. Guessing what's the best option with a team. Cool. It does sound inspiring and I have a desire to improvise with it a little. And the second one is super short. You said that it's messy and you were working with the whiteboard, but do you link or track what is the source of truth so you can come back to it and dive deeper? Yeah, we do try to link as much as possible from the sources. So it's mainly from user research, right? But it's going to be coming also from our data analytics team. It adds, you know, a layer of, again, additional time to do this. But I think, as you said, it's important to be able to to come back to the sources. Yeah, but still constantly updating and we're definitely always working on this. Yeah. I mean, it's not perfect. We have a research repository and sometimes they just pick out the opportunities from there. I trust myself. You know, I know where to find it if I need this information. We're keeping a very nice organized research repository. Yeah, I think also because the fact that we are doing this within crypto, you know, at the end, it's a small team. But for sure, if, you know, people from like other domains, product domains are coming to our file, like they might find it messy. But it's like our own logical organization and structure. But for sure, there is always improvement to do. And yeah, it's not perfect. Cool. This was a really inspirational meetup and your experience is inspiring. And this is no surprise that so many people uploaded the question about UX research position in Berlin. Because really what you said about the culture that allows you to fail and to try and test and to show your best and to shine. This is really cool. We are happy in our community that we... had a chance to talk to you to connect to you uh i think we will send also on our we will post your contacts linkedin contacts if are you okay with this in our social media and i just dropped in the chat link to our telegram community because mostly all the action is happening there so who are if you are new to the community please join And thank you very much for the questions. I just, I remember how this meetup started and I can feel how more mature is our UX community now. So yeah, cool. Thank you very much. And see you on our next meetups. And we will record this meetup and it will be out on YouTube, but maybe. sometimes some days later okay this is time to say goodbye bye bye thank you bye

This R9 Meetup features an introduction to the Opportunity Solution Tree by N26, a German fintech.

Emilie Guillon, a User Researcher, and Aleksandra Lazović, a Product Designer, from N26, share their insights on utilizing the Opportunity Solution Tree to map out user needs during the discovery process, driving impactful business outcomes.

Connect with Emilie 👉 https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilie-guillon/
Connect with Aleksandra 👉 https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexlazovic/

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