Opportunity Solution Trees

Well, hi, everyone. I am Ed. I'm one of the co-founders of Hustle Badger. I've got Susanna, my co-founder, with me on the call. She's going to be helping out, moderating in the chat. And this whole session is going to be about opportunity solution trees. So I'm going to be talking through this whole template that you see being shared here. Susanna is going to share the link in the chat and we'll be sending you a follow up email as well. you can make your own version of this template and you can follow along in this session if you want to or you can follow up later on um just to give a shout out for for hustle badger our company we produce you know templates and learning materials like this one for product managers and other people in the tech industry and we're really working from our practical experience of having led product teams um you know led tech companies on the tools that we found have really worked for us and also for you know our colleagues and people we know in leadership positions as well um so if you like this session you're going to love our discovery course you're going to love our strategy course and all the content that we have on our wiki um for the bargain price of 29 pounds a month you too can be a hustle badger member um but with that i'll get on with the session of opportunity solution trees Now, what you see in this template, if I just zoom out a bit, you're going to see there's two sides to this template. So you're going to see, basically, for the opportunity solution tree, we've got one version here, which tells you, yeah, this is the template, what you could fill in. And then over here on the right-hand side, we've got an example, kind of like simple worked example, which you can go through. So those are the two things that I'm going to be talking through. But as I say, we're basically going to talk through each of the levels of an opportunity solution tree over the course of the next hour. And I'm hoping some of you will actually kind of go along and kind of think about what this would be in your teams. And we can get some examples from the group to talk over because you can read about opportunity solution trees lots of different places like on our wiki. What's going to be great about this session is if you've got questions, you can stick them in the chat and then I will try and answer those questions as best I can. With that, just to give you a quick, what is an opportunity solution tree? So an opportunity solution tree is a way of visualizing your product strategy and your discovery. This was really kind of designed and popularized by Teresa Torres a few years ago and has since become a really popular tool throughout. product and design communities and yeah a bit like kind of making you know spaghetti bolognese or something like this everyone's going to have a slightly different recipe for how they make it so this is sort of you know my my recipe but i'd encourage you to also have a think about how you apply it which bits you like which bits you don't like and kind of see our template as a kind of starting point you can build on not as like the perfect version that cannot be you know edited or changed in any way so opportunity solution trees there's two things that make them really good um the first thing is if you read them top to bottom they have these four levels sorry let me introduce the four levels first they've got four levels broadly they've got the outcome that you want at the top this is the results that might be called that we call that the objective as well so it's like what do you want to happen from all this work you're doing secondly If you go below that, you'll have a number of different opportunities you can tackle to reach that outcome. So what are the problems, what are the kind of business opportunities you can tackle to deliver the results that you want? And then each of your opportunities will have a number of solutions. So these are features, epics, things you can build that actually solve or address the opportunities and then deliver the outcomes. and then the assumptions these are the things yeah these are the kind of risks basically associated with your solution which you can test systematically to increase your confidence that the solution is going to deliver the impact you want so these are all basically linked together and what makes this a really powerful format is you can then read your opportunity solution tree both top to bottom vertically but also horizontally side to side So when you read it top to bottom, what you're doing is you're connecting your objective, your outcome at the top, through your opportunities and your solutions to your assumptions. And what that means is even the kind of smallest test or piece of discovery that you're doing on a day-to-day basis, you can link all the way back up to the results that you want to have. So that's the kind of golden thread of work. that is really powerful in making sure that everyone on the team recognizes why the work they're doing is valuable. The other thing you can do, as I mentioned, is read these side to side. So opportunity, if you look at, say, like the opportunity there, then you probably have like three, four different opportunities side by side here. And when you compare those side by side, then you start to get a sense of which ones are the most important, which ones are you going to prioritize? and by prioritizing your opportunities or prioritizing your solutions you're then developing your strategy because you're developing a sense of like what's the most important thing for me to focus on so that's why we like opportunity solution trees and with that i'm going to dive now in to this uh this template and just kind of as i say i'm going to run through a little bit on each level and basically explain what have we got there how is it structured why is it important then if you've got questions or if you want to share kind of what you think this is in your team, then I will answer those questions. I will give you some feedback before moving on to the next level. So top one here. So, yeah, we've called this the outcome or the objective. This is the results that you have at or you're trying to get to. It's like, why are you doing all this work? What is the business objective that you're trying to reach? And This objective, yeah, I always advise people to define it in two ways, a kind of qualitative way and a quantitative way. So your qualitative way, this is your mission. And this is some kind of hopefully inspiring statement. We want to do X. And your metric is then your objective measure of how well you've reached that mission. So the mission always comes first for me. And the metric then measures it. uh your progress and and i love this format it's kind of like move metric from baseline to target by deadline so if we come across here to the example you'll see what i mean so this is an example it's not the most inspiring mission i'll give you that like increase our user base okay so we want to be the biggest xyz app in the world um our metric is going to be grow mau so monthly active users from 80k to 120k by march 31st so you've got a really clear definition there of what that looks like. And, you know, you can then, on March 31st, look back and see, did you deliver that or not? And it's a very kind of objective answer. So I'd say, if you are following along, now is the time to spend like a couple of minutes having a think about, like, what does this look like for your team? And if possible, like, have a crack at your mission, have a crack at your metric. And I will also run through some of the questions as I see them appear. If you've got any questions, just dump them in the chat. So I got one from Dean. I'm very interested to understand how this is used in very early stage, zero to one product build versus more mature products. So I think the structure of the opportunity solution trees is going to look very similar. um in terms of you're still going to have these different layers what's going to be different is the the level of evidence you have at each each level and what you consider some sufficient evidence to act on so if you're in a an established company then you've probably got quite a lot of analytics in place existing user research you're going to have quite high bar for acting because also you've got quite a lot at stake whereas in a startup you're going to have a much you know much less information basically to hand a lot fewer insights and probably your you know your barrier to like making changes or building things is going to be a lot lower as a result you're just you know there's less at stake there so that answers your question Dean um see who else in Teresa Terry's book there's a lot of focus on ideation to establish the outcomes and opportunities found this to be quite messy compared to moving down the OST how do you establish the right outcome to work on Yeah, so I think the, you know, in a lot of product teams, if you're working at the individual product team level, so you're working yourself with designers and engineers and data analysts and so on, then you may well be set an objective or at least kind of set an objective, which you then need to kind of structure and define a bit tighter. So the objective is the results. that you want to have whereas the opportunities is really sort of the like what can you tackle to delivering those those results and i'd say with all of these tools frameworks you know um i'm going to run through this kind of in a quite sequential way i'm going to go objective and then i'm going to go opportunity and then i'm going to solution then assumptions in reality what's going to happen is you're going to do a first cut of this maybe in a workshop with your team or maybe just on your own in this session. And you're going to get kind of a sketchy outline. And then you're going to go and share with some more people and get their feedback and do some research and start kind of refining it and working it up. And it's going to be iterative over the whole, every level of the table. So in that sense, I wouldn't worry about having the perfect objective before moving down the tree. You get it sort of like, you know, 80 90 there that's fine then work out the opportunity of course if you completely change your objective your opportunities will follow but if this is a case of like you kind of know a little bit what your objective is and you kind of know a little bit what your opportunities are get them both down because showing what your opportunities are is also going to help you like define your objective okay um a few more of these questions where i've got there Alex, to what extent do you think this can be helpful as a product strategy tool? Any dependency on there already being a strategy in place or how might the inputs vary depending on there being a strategy or not? So this is a really, really valuable product strategy tool. And I'd say at this level, discovery and strategy is basically the same thing. So if you look at a strategy, what you'll find is it will have an objective at the top. and then it will have two, three, four pillars underneath that are the main themes of work that you can go and tackle. And an opportunity solution tree is a great way of visualizing that or thinking about that. And then under each of your pillars or opportunities, whatever you want to call them, you're going to have the things that you can build, which are called solutions. So I'd look at this as a way of defining your strategy. If you don't have a strategy, this is a great way of kind of like helping you think about what your strategy is as well. So next question, we've got one here on it. How would you go about prioritizing different opportunities? Probably a good time to move on to opportunities then. So let's a little bit about the outcomes at the top. These are the results you want. Define them with your mission, define them with your metrics. Great. So you then got both a qualitative and quantitative definition of what you're trying to achieve. Then you can go down to opportunities. So these are the areas you can focus on to deliver impact. Opportunities are often customer problems. They're not always. So if your goal, if your outcome you wanted was to boost revenue, then, for example, pricing. might be an opportunity yeah could we raise our prices right that's not solving a customer problem but it is a business opportunity you could exploit that would help you achieve your your customer outcome so that's why i could yeah and it's a razor as well because these you know opportunities rather than than problems um because they could be business related how do you work out what your opportunities are four great steps to doing these like go and speak some to some users right go and see what are the problems that your users have yeah have a look at the data do some behavior analysis see where people are getting stuck see what are the trends you can spot uh process mapping the third the kind of great way so um go and look at what internal teams are doing can you make them more efficient go and look at what your users are doing um go and look at kind of the wider context that you're working in uh especially if you're in a kind of b2b context and fourthly you know go and speak to subject matter experts Those people, effectively, they've done a lot of the user interviews or they've done the behavior analysis probably before. They've got just like a lot of experience of how things work. They'll probably have ideas as well of where you might go. So your opportunity, the way I've laid it out here in this version of the opportunity solution tree is the prompt is almost like a customer need as you might get in a use case as you might get in jobs to be done. It doesn't have to be. It's not always going to be a customer need, as we just discussed. But that's quite a good kind of prompt for me to think about. And then you can see that under the opportunity, I put evidence here. So how do you know this is a real opportunity? What are the insights that you have that support this? And again, that could be the customer interviews you've done. It could be the evidence. That's going to help you start to think about how you prioritize these. These little bars here, low, medium, high. I kind of added those on as the kind of like, once you've got more than one opportunity, and again, you should have more than one opportunity because otherwise you can't prioritize. As soon as you get multiple opportunities, then you can prioritize between them. And you can think, okay, which of these do we have the best evidence for and the best evidence that it's a big opportunity that is worth tackling? So just to give you an example of what this might look like in our kind of fictional example here. So we're going to say, okay, Our goal was to increase the number of MAU. Remember, that was our outcome up here. How do we increase MAU, monthly active users, by March 31st? One opportunity we think here is to help users recognize the value the product offers really quickly. And maybe we've got some kind of supporting evidence there. We've got some customer interviews where we've heard things like, I only realized the value after two weeks. Or we've got some... analysis that shows that people who start to engage with the product have a higher retention or we can see that you know three out of four of our major competitors have a highly polished onboarding experience so we're starting to get some signals here that you know competitors having a product is not a good signal in its own right but when you combine it with some of the other things you start to get a sense that okay maybe there's some value here maybe there's some something we want to look at making sure that users as they're onboarded they really kind of recognize the value that we offer like very quickly and they start engaging with the products and if we can do that our hypothesis is our hypothesis is they're gonna stick around they're gonna tell friends and colleagues and that's gonna drive up our user numbers okay so coming back then to the or the second step how do you actually prioritize these so once you've got some opportunities then you're going to think about prioritizing this and that there's different factors you can weigh um you can put into that prioritization and i've listed a few of them out here so you might do a kind of firstly an opportunity sizing so you might just model out the impact you expect you know if we completely solve this opportunity what would the difference in our numbers be that's one way of doing things that's often that sort of opportunity sizing is often driven by looking at kind of what I call customer factors, you know, incidents and severity being the ones I often think about. So incidents, how many of our customers does this affect? Does this affect everyone that's a potential customer or does this only affect a subset? So if you're thinking about, say, eBay as a marketplace, you know, does this affect like all of your buyers or all of your sellers or all of your users? It might affect, you know, just a subset of who you're going after. And severity is then for people that this issue affects, how big a deal is it? Is it like air on fire, really, really like a crazy big problem? Or is it sort of much more subtle? I'd be kind of nice if this wasn't a big deal, if this was solved, that actually we can kind of live with it. Those aren't the only things, though, because you might also factor in company factors. What is the wider business context? What is the wider business strategy? yeah are you trying to grow revenue are you trying to reduce costs are you trying to kind of expand into different segments or different markets these are all going to think about you know going to shape the opportunities you've got there and market factors so how do you position yourself against competitors what is the value proposition you're offering what is the value proposition of your competitors that's going to affect how you how you prioritize this as well so Because there's a lot of those different factors and they're not all quantitative factors, that's why I haven't put some kind of formula here that helps you prioritize these. I said like, hey, think about the evidence and you could maybe stick some more context stickies around here as well if say market positioning is important and then have a think about the priorities. Okay, so hopefully that answers the prioritization question. I'm going to go back to the questions in the links. So do you drill down into one opportunity only or can you drill down onto two opportunities of solutions experiments running in parallel? Yeah, so all throughout the street, there's three branches at every level. So you'll have multiple opportunities coming off one outcome, multiple solutions off one opportunity and all the way down. You want to be somewhat focused because. yeah if you had five opportunities and each of them had five solutions and each of them had you know five assumptions you know you quite quickly like have so many things you were looking into actually you wouldn't be able to be focused on any one particular thing and your time would be like very fragmented at the same time you don't want to focus down on like just one opportunity one solution one assumption because if you're doing that then you've got no capacity to choose like different approaches um and you're not there's no real strategy there right you're not making any decisions about you know is a or b a better choice right because you you've got no alternatives so you want to do a sort of what i'd recommend is like sketch this out at a high level kind of like you know very quickly and then do a kind of almost like a gut feel prioritization or a prioritization of what you know right now and then once you've you've narrowed it down to like two or three things at each level start to work those up in a bit more detail and be much more quantitative and much more evidence-based about do you refine it down further? And then you're gonna get the best kind of both worlds. You're not gonna kind of boil the ocean with all your analysis, but you're gonna be quantitative and data informed where it really counts. Okay, is a question here from Amit Jain. is preparing the tree a combined exercise a product manager needs to do with other stakeholders or how do you incorporate inputs from business stakeholders yeah uh great question so i i think this sort of thing you can very much do it as a workshop you know if you've got stakeholders who are who are really um you know paying a lot of attention who are really bought into the work you're doing who are very responsive doing this at least you know as a first draft with them can be a really powerful way of kind of pulling out insights and getting their sense of where you focus. That, depending on who you're dealing with, might be like too into the weeds for, I don't know, a CEO or another exec. So in that case, it might be something that you want to show them a high level version, a simplification. So you just show them the sort of. Yeah, your strategies could effectively be your objective and then, okay, this is what we're trying to achieve. And the key opportunities we're going after are A, B and C, and you just talk about the opportunities, right? So you're kind of, you're going to get their feedback, but you're going to do it at a high level, you know, maybe not even in a mirror board. But I think it really depends on what is the relationship you've got with your stakeholders and how much information they can handle. Like some people, this is going to be a working session. Some, you're going to show a, you know a draft version two and after feedback some you're going to kind of really just boil it down to the details okay uh ola's talking says okay i was an initiatives versus opportunity solution tree so guessing like you know how do you how do you combine those or how do you choose between them so yeah the way it depends a little bit okay ours is another topic right which companies put into practice in lots of different ways so in some companies your objective your o will be your mission here and your key results will be your your metric and you might have like multiple metrics that you're trying to go after in other companies your o will be your kind of objective here and your key results might be much more output focused and you might you might almost have your kind of solutions considered your your output so it depends a bit how you're thinking about okrs typically when i when i talk about okrs I will say like, hey, yeah, if I was asking a product team to ride that OKRs for the next quarter, I would say, have a mission for your team, have a single metric, a single key result that measures progress. That's going to be what you've defined here in your objective. And then I'm going to say, I also want to see the initiatives that they're thinking of building. And those initiatives are effectively going to be the solutions down here. And I want to see those groups by the different opportunities. So why are we focusing on the set of solutions? that's the opportunity and what are the solutions that you think you can fit into your your capacity for your team next quarter that's how i've generally done it in the past with the teams um sat is asking how is opportunity solution tree different from impact mapping so impact mapping i'm not as familiar with um as opportunity solution trees my i think my my main understanding is you you effectively have an actor at the top of the tree here so you basically say this is the business objective that we're trying to uh deliver and then you say okay there's different actors that could be players here so that could be um let's go back to that ebay example we could have we could affect our buyers we could affect our sellers and we could affect our customer service agents maybe an internal stakeholder right let's look at the opportunities and the needs for each of those actors so it's adding in another layer of kind of personas effectively i think i think something i'd stress is like there are lots of variations on doing these kinds of trees um you know impact mapping is one opportunity solution trees is another i wouldn't worry too much about you know oh we're doing it this way in our company or you've got to do it you know this way because a lot of them get to broadly the same answer through broadly the same techniques. So pick whichever one speaks to you or you've had explained best. And then, as I say, kind of like build on that yourself and adapt it to your company and your context, because that's how you're going to get most out of it. Opportunities. Those are opportunities. Again, if you've got any other questions about opportunities, then... I'll continue to to ask them, Ricardo, how much time do you spend on the tree versus actually compiling the evidence or testing assumptions? So, I mean, usually just writing up the tree should be like pretty, pretty quick. Right. Because it's this is something I think even if you've got no evidence, you can sketch out an opportunity solution tree based on what you know. at the time or what your kind of assumptions are or your hypothesis is and then you can go and look for the evidence. So the bulk of your time should be going and finding evidence and then you just need to come back to your opportunity solution tree and update it whenever you have new insights, new evidence that affects it, whether that's down at the bottom or in the middle. Okay, I'm going to go on to solutions now. and talk a little bit about them before coming back to some of these questions so we've done objectives we've done opportunities now getting on to the solutions side of things so the solutions are the features you might ship to generate impact and i kind of think yeah where do where do good solutions come from a really well-defined problem so you've got uh an objective which we have in our opportunity solution tree so that's great got a diagnosis so we know what's going wrong in that sense it's like we've got some opportunities here and context we understand the user and the business so we've got all of those things kind of like um making sure we know like what is the environment working in and then into that kind of well-defined problem we're adding great inspiration and great inspiration comes with like different levels of relevance and innovation. So you can get good inspiration from direct competitors. It'll be very relevant and it won't be very innovative. Obviously, if you're copying features from competitors, you're not going to come up with anything brand new. You might have inspiration from cross-industry references. So you have people solving similar problems, but in a very different vertical. That's going to be a bit more innovative. And you see people kind of, oh, actually, Love the way that Airbnb does search. And we're going to take that across into our B2B app. And that's going to inform how we think about search. And it's going to be innovative for our segments because we're not in the B2C travel space. So it's going to be a bit more innovative, a bit less relevant. And then, you know, really innovative, never seen before kind of interactions. These come from much more abstract inspiration, things like, you know, art, architecture, nature. these are things that are very difficult to sort of prompt in a workshop but a good reason to go and spend some time in art galleries so often you know solutions will come out of an ideation session whether that's like a formal workshop session or whether that's a kind of informal just the ideas the team have come up with or a you know long-running slack chat or something if you want more thoughts on how you come up with solutions then we've got a great article on running an ideation session, which I'd really suggest you check out. But basically what you're trying to get to is a range of solutions, so like a broad range of options to choose between each of which is kind of useful and creates user value, but also impactful. So it generates business value whilst it generates user value at the same time. So it's a win for both you and your customers. And these, yeah, in opportunity solution trees, I generally kind of frame these quite simply, which you could potentially do as a hypothesis, or you could just do it kind of like, hey, we're going to build X thing, and you might describe what it is. If you're going to do it as a hypothesis, you might do it something along the lines of, you know, we believe X feature will encourage user type to do this action. And therefore, we believe that action is going to solve this need, and that need is going to solve, is going to deliver this outcome. OK, so how does that translate into our example? Here, we believe adding motivational questions pre-sign up will encourage users to complete the onboarding process. So motivational questions are like, oh, you know, they're things like when you log into an app and as you're creating your account, they say, you know, what is the benefit you're hoping to get out of our service? So Calm, Headspace, Numosity, you know, a lot of these apps do these sorts of questions and they're very good at kind of increasing users. intrinsic motivation to complete sign up and go on to convert. So that could be the hypothesis here. OK, let's go back to the questions then and see what we've got. Dave, I like thinking of OSTs just as a set of principles that help us combat bias. We separate opportunities from solutions in the normal agile way to avoid leaving to solutioning. We also have to branch options at each stage. Yes, this isn't a question, but this is a great observation. Thank you, Dave. When is a tree created? Amit, is it created as part of quarterly planning? Yeah, it could be. I mean, it depends. Quarterly planning, I always think of, you know, shouldn't be a kind of wipe the slates clean and start again from scratch what we're building and what we're thinking about. It should really be a chance to reflect on how things are going and, you know, course correct if we need to. So it's a great time to come back to your opportunity solution tree and update it if you've kind of. forgotten about it for a month or two um it's also a great time to create one if you just don't have one so yes absolutely but equally well i think if you're in the middle of the quarter and you're like oh opportunity solution tree might be a useful way of doing things i wouldn't wait for quarterly planning i'd like just crack one out like you know sketch one out as soon as possible see if it adds value see if the team likes it and then roll it into your next planning cycle if it is providing you value and it's helping you think about what you're doing So Gina, are you able to produce features and user stories from this exercise? Yeah, absolutely. So solutions are effectively, that's synonymous with features. You know, solution, a feature, an epic, these are all sort of the same thing. So what are we building that we think is going to deliver impact? Another question here, how do you ladder up the impact of each solution back to the North Star metric? So you could... You've got your metric here saying, hey, we want to grow MAU in this case from 80K to 120. If you wanted to, you could size the opportunity at each level. So you could size the opportunity. If we do solve this problem, how much impact do we think that's going to have? How many more MAU do you think we're going to have? If we deliver the solution, how many more MAU do you think we're going to have? So you could do that at each level and help escalate it. back up. You can also, you know, if you don't want to get that granular, you know, you could just look at the solution, you can kind of size each solution. Or you could test it, you know, as you release these things with an A-B test. So there's different ways of doing it. I think it's worth having some sense of like, you know, given you've got these objectives, actually are the opportunities you're coming up with. big enough to satisfy the objective at the top and the solution is big enough to satisfy the opportunity. So you've got that sense of like, yeah, are we actually going to hit our objective if we do these things? Okay, Natalia, going back to the prioritization subject, you mentioned a possible approach for prioritizing the opportunities, sizing, customer, company factors, but it seems a bit generic. Do you have a suggested framework for this level of detail, perhaps using the RICE framework? could be helpful for that alliating opportunities. What do you think? Yeah, I think the way that I would think about opportunities, if this is a customer opportunity, then the framework I like to think about is severity, incidents, and confidence. So incidents, what percentage of our user base does this affect? Severity. how big a problem is this this is a kind of like you know acute pain problem or is this kind of like a minor annoyance and then confidence how much confidence do we have that this is a real opportunity how much confidence do we have about how many people this will will affect and how important it is to them um the reason i don't kind of roll that into rice or something like that yeah i think there are these other factors like customer factors or market factors which you could also add into the you know if you're creating your own scoring metric matrix you could also add a score to those but that's not going to be relevant for all people so you know could you use rice i mean yeah right rice is effectively that you know reaches is equivalent to incidents impact is equivalent to severity confidence is confidence you know an effort i think you're going to have trouble with the kind of effort to like assessing effort at the opportunity level um so you might do a kind of rick r-i-c um assessment of opportunities and then break that down into adding an effort at the solution level can someone recommend a source to dig into this or other techniques for product testing uh yes if you are interested in like discovery in general strategy in general then very much do kind of check out some of the other resources that susanna is posting in the chat or our discovery course on Hustle Badger. There's loads of testing techniques, both qualitative, quantitative, how you think about those and how you think about scoring the confidence they give you in different areas. Okay. Question from Philip. Would you also apply it to a very generic goal, e.g. finding product market fit for startup? I think you can apply this to a very generic goal, but I think... I think you need to have you need you probably need a little bit of structure to put it into. So I don't think you can start with a completely blank sheet of paper and say, right, our objective is to build a billion dollar business. What are some opportunities? That's a bit too high level. I think you're going to have to have a sense of, OK, what are the customers that we're customers, personas? What's the audience we're going after here and what are their pain points? yeah if you're doing a jobs to be done kind of approach then your your use cases as i say kind of like they're roughly going to map to your your opportunities here so that's probably how i'd approach it for a like very very early stage startup and then as you start to get some confidence about okay these are the use cases we're going after then i think um opportunity solution trees work very well for kind of working out which of those use cases you're going after and what are the right things to build for each of those use cases Okay, Emmanuel, sometimes an opportunity can be too broad and need refining. From your experience, what makes a good opportunity in terms of granularity versus specificity? Yeah, great question. I think what makes a great opportunity, it's going to be too broad if everyone's got a very different sense of what you're trying to build here or what the opportunity is that you're going after. And it's going to be too narrow if you've only got one solution that it can solve. That's quite a vague answer. I appreciate. But I think a lot of this is going to, again, like the there's not a kind of like right way of using the tool that will just solve all of your problems. This is a framework that you've got to inject your own thinking and judgment into. And so you're going to have to have that judgment being like, hey, you know, when I I've written down this opportunity. Is that the right level for me and my team and for us? Do we all feel aligned? Is this giving us like, you know, good creative constraints or is actually this not really helping our thinking? Because the end result of your opportunity solution tree should not be a beautiful tree. It should be that you make really great decisions and build very high impact things for your customers and for your business. So if your opportunity solution tree is facilitating those kinds of conversations. and that kind of impact it's doing the right job and you've probably got things at the right level and if it's not then you might want to kind of critique it and say okay have we got the right level of specificity have we got the right level of evidence here um i'm gonna go down another level so actually one more question i see here um do you ever use levels to your tree eg break one of those bigger bigger opportunities into sub opportunities yes absolutely so we're talking this through in a kind of very simple four levels like one layer of opportunity of objective one level for opportunities but you could break that out into kind of having a couple of different layers of you've got sub opportunities uh or you know phases of different solutions and that can also help you think about things and again like how many levels do you have it's like well how many levels is useful for your for your team okay Going on to assumptions then. So we've looked at solutions. We're coming down to assumptions. So assumptions, you know, you could do in a very kind of simple way, as we've done up here with opportunities. And then we've got some evidence. You could do solutions. And then we've just got some assumptions underneath it. Not going any further than that. I've kind of gone a bit more full fat on the assumptions. And I've kind of I've broken these out. in a few different ways so firstly i've said like okay for our assumptions we can really think about these as risks right so if we have an assumption that's that's a risk that we we want to you know we want to validate that assumption we want to kind of mitigate that risk just different way of phrasing it and our risks we can think about in kind of like classically kind of the four ways you know value risk does the customer really want this business risk can we operationally deliver it is it legal is it profitable technical risk can the engineers build this is it going to be scalable secure reliable and usability like to users understand what they're looking at can they you know when we put it in front of them are they going to understand the value and be able to engage with it so first you can you can write down all of your risks like in those ways and that framework can help you think through a few more of the assumptions you're making and a few of the risks that you might want to mitigate but also you can break out your evidence for this particular solution in those four buckets. So you can say, okay, what is the evidence that we've got that this is high value? What is the evidence that we've got this is kind of viable, you know, from a business and technical perspective, you can have, you know, you might have a prototype over here in terms of usability, and you might have an impact model for value, or you might have concept testing or, you know, stack rank survey for value, right? So you have different evidence points in different places. And The benefit of doing this, right, is that when you think through the risks, you're going to have a sense of, like, OK, some of these risks are going to be bigger risks than others. And you're going to want more evidence. And then this really helps you think through what is the discovery you should be doing next, because you're going to want to tackle the biggest risks. We have the least evidence first. So, again, just have a quick look at this. You know, in this case. Right. We're going to build some motivational screens for our onboarding. OK, super. And you can see here, you know, in some areas you might not have very many risks. OK, technical. I mean, we're building some very simple kind of screens here. So this doesn't feel like it's going to have any technical risks. Usability. Yeah, we're going to need to make those questions really easy to read. We're going to make sure, you know, do people want to be able to skip or do you want to prevent them from skipping? There are going to be a few kind of. usability questions there um maybe we can look at competitors as like an evidence point on how they're phrasing them or you know what's the interactions that they've got and you know next steps we might have a you know mock this up as a prototype and and use test that whole flow then or you know maybe test different versions or run banks of questions to rank readability um for these sorts of things yeah value on the other hand you've got over here yeah We might be concerned that adding questions to the flow doesn't have any impact or maybe even has a negative impact on conversion and retention of users. So that could be a real value risk. What evidence do we have? It's fairly well established as a tactic to increase motivation. So that gives us a bit of confidence. But we probably want to A-B test this, if that's possible, to check this is actually having the impact we hope it does. So that's quite a quick run through of just, let's say, kind of, you know, you would do, you could do this for every solution, right? But for every solution you've got, you then break out, okay, what are all the assumptions that we've got? How do we think about the evidence we've got behind each of those risks we identified? And what are the next steps? Okay, to the questions. Okay. Can we, Gina, can we walk through another example where an employee chatbot team that is competing with a new innovative solutions in the Gen.AI space? The desired outcome is to help answer any work-related questions. Gen.AI would help us get there, but technology is still being developed. How do you stay ready for that change? Okay, so I'll kind of run through this very briefly as another example. I think the first thing you need to do is... They say, OK, we're going to build an employee chatbot to an internal chatbot that people can use, presumably, to get information about what's in a company. What's our objective here? How are we defining success, both qualitatively and qualitatively? So objective might be quality. Our mission might be like help employees find whatever they want in a. at the click of a button type of thing or with a simple prompt and our metric might be let's say we use a engagement figure like what is the percentage of employers that engage with this chatbot on a monthly basis okay i'm not going to go into too much detail about whether those are the right metrics because that's not the session we're running but that you know you'd firstly define like what you're trying to achieve here with your chatbot example you then go down to your opportunity think about okay you know let's assume that we've got kind of a basic MVP. We've got like, okay, we've got a chat bot in place. That's kind of sort of what are the things that we can then do with that chat bot that can make it better? Or what are the features we need to add to that? So, or maybe you're thinking about the first version, right? So the first version opportunity is like, which data sources do we need to connect it to? Right, so we've got to think about the opportunity here is going to be connecting to more data sources, giving it more visibility over Google Drive and Jira and Dovetail and all these different services we use. And effectively, each one of those, by connecting to each one of those things, is going to be a solution, which we'll then have some assumptions about. OK, actually, we want to connect it to Jira tickets. Is that technically feasible? Do they have an API? What can we know about those tickets? So on. Another opportunity here might be effectively like what is the how much is the chatbot like trained on our own data or the employee you know the company data versus like generic um you know data from the from the internet okay that's going to be yeah is there something we can then we've got another opportunity there about saying like can we improve the training of our of our model and get better answers. OK, solutions, right. Well, we could retrain it on this data set or that data set. You might have some solutions down at that level then that you can go and attack. I'm hoping I'm kind of like doing this a little bit on the fly, Gina. So I'm hoping that gives you some ideas. But feel free to stick another question in or come off mute and ask me a question. Emma, you're asking, is there a minimum number of solutions you should aim for? I mean, I'd encourage you to have more than one. If you've got opportunities, I'd really kind of stretch the thing about, can we get at least two or three? So we've got a few different options here. That's not always practical. Like sometimes I think for the opportunities you identify, there's just one obvious thing that you should be building. So I would challenge yourself in that situation and be like, okay, can we think of two or three? But if after, you know, you've given it some thought, you've talked around with the team you're just like no no there's definitely just one clear answer here then you know just get on with building that thing right don't i don't think in a lot of a lot of cases you don't need to second guess yourself okay um i'm just going to check if i've answered all these questions if there's any others okay andrea is asking does ost work if product and design work mostly on outcomes opportunities and involve engineering solutions architects more at point of coming up with solutions. I think the, I mean, I always believe in the power of the product trio. And I think if you can get your engineers and your solution architects involved, like right from the start, right from this kind of like defining the objectives and then the opportunities and all the way through, that's going to make them much more bought in than just kind of going to them when you're starting to talk about solutions and viability. Yeah, the more that, you have a cross-functional team that really understands the business context and the user context, then the more that you're going to get really kind of amazing solutions because, you know, great solutions have that kind of, that sense of diversity and that, you know, they're diverse. You have lots of different solutions that look at things from different perspectives. And those perspectives come from having diverse viewpoints from people who have different backgrounds. Okay, Beatrice asking a question here. What do you think about checking data points as a factor to assess the potential of the opportunity? Or would you see this on the solution level as part of the feasibility? Yeah, so we've, you know, if you scan out a bit, you know, you're going to have your opportunities and you're going to have evidence at this level. And then you're going to have your solutions and you're going to have evidence sort of further down the tree. Those, like in a lot of cases, those evidence points might be the same. Right. And as I say, like this, an opportunity solution tree isn't something where you work kind of in a linear fashion, top to bottom. Right. It's really something where actually, as you start thinking about solutions and concept testing solutions and prototyping them, that is going to inform the opportunity much better because you're going to get better feedback from your customers. And that might also help you size the opportunity. which might even kind of give you an idea of like okay what is a plausible target you know for us to hit given we're working on these opportunities so all of this stuff sort of happens a little bit in parallel and iteratively you've just got to kind of you know get something down on paper and then and then it's rate um so what do i think about checking the data points um yeah i mean i i would definitely try and you know, as you think of opportunities, you know, sense check yourself. Do we have evidence or what evidence do we have for this? Is this just a gut feel or do we have some kind of real insights to back this behind? And then on the solution side, you know, again, I think you're going to ask the same question, but for a specific solution. So I would definitely do it as soon as you've got them and then kind of come back to them and iterate an update as well. Okay. I've just realized we've got a whole Q&A section here with other questions. Right. Let me come to some of these. How do you select an outcome if you're building a new product? So if you're building a new product, so up here, the objective outcome level, you're I'd say, like, let's say you're really doing zero for one. Like, yeah, that might be a kind of, oh, can we get 10? customers or you know can we get three customers to you know be retained for three months so you might set an objective at that level i think it's going to probably be around getting a certain number of trial customers very early on um and then partha asking like is the recording of this webinar going to be shared yes uh absolutely we're gonna we are recording this and we'll be sharing it um on our youtube channel And we'll send out an email with that link as soon as we've uploaded it. OK, I think that's most of the questions. We've got just a couple of minutes left. So if you have any final questions, please do drop them in the chat. I'd be happy to answer them. Yeah. So Varen is calling me out on my opportunities. I've rightly noticed that I've kind of put a prompt here. How do we word opportunities? I've put the prompt here as I want to or I need to. And then the example I've given is completely different. And I've just said, opportunity here is to help you recognize the value the product offers ASAP. I think, as I say, a good prompt, a good way to think about this is as a user need, which is why I've kind of set this. But again, if you're thinking about a pricing example, So let's take an example like eBay. Okay, we're working on a team at eBay, we're working on the buyer's team, we want to increase the number of transactions we're making. An opportunity here might be to say, you know, as a buyer, I want to find the item I'm looking for really easily. Okay, so that's going to be an opportunity that we can really state in a very kind of clear user need way. So I think that's quite a nice way of doing it. But you might have opportunities that are completely different, right? You might have opportunities that are like, oh, if we do this thing, then users get a benefit or that's just the business gets a benefit. So yeah, not all of them are going to fit this framework. So no, I kind of, beyond this, I don't have any kind of better ways of showing. I think you've, what's important to get right at this opportunity stage is you're, you've got this kind of, you're specific enough about what is it you're talking about. But you've also given yourself some leeway to have multiple solutions. So I think an opportunity that is like a sentence or two in plain language, plain English is going to be valuable. Omid, from your experience, what complexity, so number of opportunities, number of solutions per opportunity is actionable? So usually when I've done this with teams, we'll have a single kind of objective with a mission and a metric. They'll then be. I'd say three or four opportunities, but we'll prioritize one or two of those for a particular quarter. And then there will be anywhere from three to six solutions under each opportunity. And of those solutions, maybe one or two, we've really gone into this level of detail of mapping out the assumptions and the rest probably we haven't gone below the solution level into the assumptions. at that stage. So again, you don't need to flesh out all of the branches in full detail or at the same time. It's really kind of like going to the level that makes, you know, you probably do like one or two solutions all the way down to the assumptions. Other solutions stop at the solutions level, other opportunities stop at the opportunity level. With something like, how might we work at the opportunity level based on the evidence? Yeah, yeah, okay. That's a really good... Thank you, Varen. I think phrasing these opportunities as kind of like, how might we X, that's a great way to frame your opportunities, particularly when you're customer focused. So I think that's a good add or a good way of looking at it. Might even have that in right now. How might we? There we go. Okay. Is it common that one solution can tackle more than one opportunity? Yeah, that's not uncommon, actually. So depending on how you've defined your opportunities, you might say, oh, we want to do X, we want to do Y. Oh, and we're kind of thinking of building this thing, and it happens to solve both of them, at least to some degree. Again, these frameworks are just frameworks, and reality is a little bit more messy. So don't worry if that happens, right? You don't need to kind of force it under one or the other. OK, Gaby, do you recommend doing this for a totally new full product relaunch as opposed to a more mature product which needs improvement? So again, for a kind of brand new product relaunch, another framework might be a bit easier. So if you use like a Moscow framework or something like that, it's kind of like the classic ones you use for a launch. You probably could make an opportunity solution tree work. but it might not be the best one for organizing your thoughts. Again, I think that's kind of a key question, right? Is this the best tool that you could use to organize your thinking and to expose your thinking to other people? Or are there going to be other ways of doing that? Q&A, Q&A. Okay, so we are at time now. I'm going to stay on the call just for another couple of minutes, just if anyone does have any... uh final questions but as i mentioned you know you can get this uh ost template in um on miro um suzanna will share the link with you and we'll we'll add this onto the website as well in the next day or two um we'll be sharing the recording and if you've liked this session you will very much likely like the rest of the content we have on hustle badger you'll love our courses and you'll love our paid membership, which is exceedingly good value at £29 a month. So check it out and so on. If you've got any feedback on this session as well or any future questions, please do reach out to me, Susannah, drop us an email, contact at hustlebadger, or let me up on LinkedIn. happy to kind of give more tips and thoughts where I can. Thank you all. Thanks, everyone. Bye. Bye.

Want to tighten up your product strategy and discovery?

Watch this session on Opportunity Solution Trees

Ed Biden (Hustle Badger co-founder) runs through how Opportunity Solution Trees work and answers audience questions in this 60 mins session.

Template used in video: https://miro.com/miroverse/opportunity-solution-tree-canvas/
Full article on Opportunity Solution Trees: https://www.hustlebadger.com/what-do-product-teams-do/how-to-build-an-opportunity-solution-tree/
Discovery course on Hustle Badger: https://www.hustlebadger.com/courses/product-discovery-course/


​Opportunity Solution Trees (OSTs) map out:
• The business 𝗢𝗕𝗝𝗘𝗖𝗧𝗜𝗩𝗘𝗦 you’re aiming for
• The 𝗢𝗣𝗣𝗢𝗥𝗧𝗨𝗡𝗜𝗧𝗜𝗘𝗦 you can exploit to reach these objectives
• The 𝗦𝗢𝗟𝗨𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡𝗦 you might use to realize each opportunity
• The 𝗔𝗦𝗦𝗨𝗠𝗣𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡 𝗧𝗘𝗦𝗧𝗦 you can run to increase confidence in those solutions


MAJOR BENEFITS

𝗟𝗶𝗻𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗱𝗲𝗹𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗱𝗶𝘀𝗰𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝗯𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘀
When read up and down, OSTs draw a direct line between work the product team is doing (discovery and delivery) to the business outcome it supports. This helps everyone understand why a piece of work is important.

𝗣𝗿𝗶𝗼𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘇𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗯𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝗮𝗹𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲𝘀
When read side-to-side, OSTs help you prioritize between alternatives at the same level. E.g. which opportunities should we pursue first? Which solutions are most promising?


They also help you spot COMMON FLAWS IN LOGIC:

𝗦𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘀
You’re building things that won’t deliver the results you want.

𝗠𝘂𝗹𝘁𝗶𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘀
You’re splitting your efforts amongst competing priorities.

𝗟𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝗼𝗳 𝗮𝗹𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲𝘀
You’re committing to one course of action before considering any others.

𝗧𝗼𝗼 𝗺𝗮𝗻𝘆 𝘀𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 / 𝗮𝘀𝘀𝘂𝗺𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗲𝘀𝘁𝘀
You can’t decide what to do because there are too many options.

𝗠𝗶𝘅𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘀𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗼𝗽𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝘂𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗲𝘀
You are committing to a given solution rather than solving a problem.

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