Opportunity Solution Tree - Iyasu Ghirmai

Thank you, Jelmy. And I mean, it's super nice seeing everyone here. And thank you again, Markus. I think it was really nice hearing what Markus had to say. And of course, Thomas as well before that. I think this fits in very nice to what I'm going to talk about. And thank everybody for joining. So quick intro to me. This is a very big picture of myself. As you can see, I'm wearing a white shirt again. It's a different shirt, so I'm not wearing the same shirt every time. Don't worry about it. I got more shirts, even though they look the same. I don't have the green background as my colleagues. Unfortunately, Zoom thought that the shirt was my background, so he turned my shirt green every time instead of my background. But yeah. So today I'll be talking about opportunity solution tree. I don't know if anybody have heard about this before, but I really like this framework. It's very much what Marcus was talking about previously about how you focus on the outcome. A few takeaways from today's session will be how you do idea generation together. how you stay outcome focused and how you continue to do continuous discovery i think you know marcus always has like the best inspirational video and we just saw how you know this super big bet raising 120 million that's enormous and you know failing after a two-minute video so i think these even even the best can fail at it so i think this for me at least why i've liked opportunity solution trees because it's visualizes something very basic and simple. All right, let's kick it off. I want to start by looking at this because, you know, this is how it's supposed to be, right? This is Henley Kniebeck's picture. I just thought it was really funny to start with this because we all know it. We've all seen it so many times in different variations. You know, we all think that, obviously, we're going to do the user testing. We're going to, you know, do all the right stuff to get to here, not start off with wheel number one and then wheel number two so you know this is the base i don't know how many times i've seen this before a new product that i've been a part of or new project whatever it might be and you know the atmosphere of the team the group is like yay you know you start doing this you're like i got so many great ideas we're going to do testing we're going to be awesome but very quickly you end up being stressed you have time constraints budget, whatever it might not be, you have your stakeholders. It's quite tough dealing with stakeholders when you're at PM, actually. That's one of your main tasks. And then all of a sudden, you start doing checklists and you present a roadmap, which is the solution to all of your problems and especially all of your stakeholders problems. And then you end up doing this. instead of this and some people actually love this because it's a long checklist of tasks and they know what's ahead of them so even though we've been talking about waterfall for ages i think large part of our stakeholders prefer this they want a list that they can touch they want predictability so why is the opportunity solution tree so good and What's the whole idea? Why is it the thing that's going to solve everything? Well, I'm going to give you guys a quick intro to it. I don't want to spend too much time talking about this. I want to spend more time discussing some of the solution trees that I've done myself with different teams, the outcomes of them. And hopefully, if you guys have any questions that we can focus on as well. All right. The big thing about Opportunity Solution Tree is that you focus on the outcome. exactly what Marcus said previously and Thomas as well. All right. We want to focus on what we want to achieve. Now, after that, you kind of move your way down to opportunities. That's basically the user pain point or need. So you start off with what you want to achieve and then like, how do we do it? Well, via this opportunity. the way to solve it is the solution so you don't start off with this or you don't you know start randomly doing user testing try to understand what the user wants and then you kind of want to validate this quite easily so you want to you know then move down towards how you do an experiment based on the solution you've chosen or an iteration based off of that then so i mean so far so good fairly simple fairly basic right I hope so, at least. Now, why is this good? Well, a lot of times when you do, as I showed you previously with the chainsaws, you know, when you present ideas or whenever you're going to idea, like, are we going to do an app or, you know, what's the proposed solution, whatnot, you end up in these thinking matches. I think this is great. I think this. And, you know, as a PM, you have to be zen in the center. Because you know it's like who screams the loudest or has long as title that you know gets the most authority or whatever it might be, but the thing is, there is no right answer. One plus one doesn't equal to. If we you know focus all our bets on on one solution and then we launch it it doesn't automatically make it successful. I think Thomas mentioned that as well as like, you know, you work your way all the way up to release and then like, so what? And this is why people have been talking about the death of the roadmap for quite some time as well. I love to talk about this. So let me know if anyone wants to grab a coffee and chat about that. So basically, Teresa Torres loves mentioning an example of Netflix. She hasn't worked on Netflix. She just chose it because it's a fairly easy thing. to discuss and everyone knows and has ideas on how to improve netflix right we've all spent quite a lot of time on that platform so she gives an example on like for example increase minutes watched right that's one of their main goals so what's the pain point or the user opportunities that we see here well as a user i can't find anything to watch I don't want to be distracted by anything. I like to binge watch my favorite show. When you start breaking that down into different solutions or further opportunities that you see, the tree grows basically. As a team, you can then vote and say, well, this is what we want to focus on because we think this is most return on investment just to validate quickly. So for example, I don't like commercials. I don't want to watch the intro over and over. So these two we can focus on. That's what she's trying to show us. For me, what it's given really good benefit is that it visualizes what you're doing. It visualizes very easily from like, why did we choose to skip intro? Well, it was related to this opportunity, which was related to this overall outcome or the goal that we were trying to achieve. This works from a developer to a director to whoever it might be. There's another example that is fairly simple. There's a lady who has a recording studio. She has issues of getting recording artists to come back. She looks at the opportunity, the solutions. She says, well, you know, expensive recording sessions. So if I give out discounts, her experience is 10% for 100 hours and 20%. So you should try these two to get to this. Now, I want to... then move on to some real world examples and why this is relevant because the whole idea is that you're supposed to keep trying again again to get back to your goal and one of the reasons why i really like opportunity solution tree so much is because it's also a perfect combination to okrs or other types of goal-oriented frameworks so today my customer one of my customers are readly i don't know if you know them but it's Europe's largest all-you-can-read service with about 6,000 titles. I am in charge of the team that drives growth. So we have pretty high ambitions on growth. And I'm also coaching the product team and some of the product trios on how to become autonomous teams. And this is also a great way to become an autonomous team because it involves everyone from a developer to the PM and so forth. All right. So this is a real example that we had. And as a PM, I think it's super important to have hard targets that you try to achieve. So your target isn't released this app because that's how you end up in some sort of waterfall situation again. So, you know, for us, for example, our target was increased visit to trial conversion rate by 5%. This is a pretty common goal. for any type of company or any type of startup whatever it might be so this is what we wanted to achieve and we looked at the different user pain points and needs and one of them actually super interesting was i don't trust it too good to be true so i had about i think 22 people in workshops. First I had smaller workshops and then one large workshop. But basically we did a bunch of user insights and gatherings and what we saw was one of the most common reason for people to dial into customer support was, especially in our growth markets and UK being one of them, was that people were like, this is too good to be true. It's only 99 kroners for my favorite magazines that I pay much more for. So... They would dial up customer service to make sure it wasn't a scam. Another opportunity was that users can't find relevant content because through analytics, we found out that users that had 1.8 clicks had a high propensity to convert. So we all gave ideas, et cetera, et cetera. We ended up choosing create trust in Readly. That would be a perfect thing to do or not perfect, but that was the bet that we chose. and the proposed solution and then we said experiment well a small simple experiment would to add trust pile reviews because it had trust a high trust and we also said we could combine this with another experiment which was to improve or and add features that were that created interaction because we thought that if they could click on different magazines, open them up, etc. that would drive conversion as well. And those are the two experiences basically that we chose. Now, this looks fairly simple, right? But this obviously weren't the exercises. These were the exercises. So, in fact, we even started off a lot further back. So, what I like about Opportunity Solution Trees is that we are supposed to have the same information. You're not supposed to end up in a situation where a director shows up or someone else and be like, look, I have much more information than you because I was part of these meetings that you're excluded from. So we're going to do an app. You don't really know why you're doing an app. You're just like, okay, and then you proceed. Now, I try to be as transparent as possible. So basically everything from like what's the team mission to goal down to breakdown of the different product pages. And then I also think it's super important to try to relate it to, you know, all the way up to what's the mission of the company? What's the overall goal? How is related to our objective in this particular exercise? Just, you know, make it into kids play, make it super transparent. And then obviously we have insights from tracking data analytics. We have a very advanced churn model. And then we had multiple workshops. try to understand why was it too good for users? How did we reach that users didn't trust it? Afterwards, obviously we did try to come up with solutions. So we did a number of different workshops and then I grouped them and then we voted on it and we thought Create Trust was an awesome way. Finally, what we did was this. So this is how you reach the different experiments because everyone from a developer to the director gives insights on like how can we solve it? We look at peers, we look at competitors and then you finally vote and you say, you know what, this is perfect because it's fairly simple. Developer will give input and say, this is super easy to validate for me. I can just like integrate with it. And it's fairly simple instead of doing a very big project. The best thing is, of course, is also that this will give you really good input to your OKRs or what to do next. It's not a roadmap. You still have the same goal. You can have the same goal the full year and then you go by, well, this didn't work. Can we do another experiment on Crate Trust? Should we try a different solution or should we then question the whole opportunity? One last thing that I would like to show as well that you can do it on different levels. So for a different company, I've had about four different companies that have been trying to introduce opportunity solution trees or how to work much more around goal oriented. So for a different company, I involved the CEO in this. It was a company that had about 80 people and he was very engaged and also senior management. One objective that we had was increased revenue from a department by developing a commercialized product portfolio. The key result then became grow revenue from that particular user group to excess millions. Now, all this was written out. I've been asked to anonymize it, but they were owned by a VC company with very, very hard targets on how much they had to grow in order for the VC company to... have a good return on investment. Now, relating this to what Marcus said, for example, instead of spending overly amount of money to try to spend a full year to build it, whatever it might be, you want to, first of all, try to prove before you build. So that was what we did. We had a yearly OKR. So we said, OK, in the first quarter, we need to prove it to make sure. In order to reach this at the end of the year, should we build it the entire year and then ship it? No, that's not going to work. So we had to prove the hypothesis, first of all. That meant also to include early adopters and evangelists in the idea generation. Because our metric wasn't like click-throughs. It was would people actually want to pay this? So that was the absolutely first thing we had to check. do you want to spend your money on this and then that of course became our success metric of course as well number paying customers now in the actual experiment obviously we had kpis and we had counter metrics to um to make sure that this was successful and that it didn't mess up the rest of the site or cannibalize on it so before i end i just want to go back to the start and the takeaways here. The whole idea of why I like this framework is because it is idea generation together. It doesn't exclude anyone. It creates a more autonomous team and you'll be able to get very quick feedback from developers to everyone else immediately. It doesn't create any excluded rooms and for everyone outside of the rooms, it's very easy to follow up to understand like, why are we doing this well okay it's related to this which is related to the team like company mission whatever it might be it's always outcome focused not project not like we're going to release this it's like what do we want to achieve so you continuously discover and evolve on that great that was it for me

Experiences from using the Opportunity Tree model presented by Iyasu Ghirmai at the Crisp-Day Conference 2022.