ICE Scoring and Opportunity Solution Tree comparison for prioritization - Seas.2 Ep.7

Welcome everybody to yet another episode of Two Facet Podcast, the podcast where we talk about building digital products. I am Juncal González, I'm a product designer and I am here with my co-host Mateusz Mikulski, a product manager. Hello, welcome everybody. So, as usual, we have a topic for today. Yes, and what we're going to do today, we're going to compare two tools. or two methods that we use in product development to make product decisions, to prioritize what we're going to do next. And these are, we actually talked about them on other episodes, so maybe we can link them somewhere here. I don't know how this linking on YouTube never works, but we will link them somewhere. We will figure it out and we will link it somewhere. what are the tools we want to talk about? So the tools we want to talk about are the ICE scoring and also the opportunity solution tree that actually it was from from last episode we talked about that one and the reason why we want to compare these two tools it's because well a lot of times you listen that we talk about a lot of tools there are a lot of tools on the internet in the market and it's like okay which one shall I pick which one is the good one which one is for me and I don't think there's like a good one no? Yeah, so the worst thing you can do is take like opportunity solution tree and then see only opportunities from tomorrow because it's similar to like I bought myself a hammer and from now on everything's a nail, no? It's like, woo, I will be nailing everything. Not really true. So usually some of those tools are better in different moments or heavily depends on the... mind model you have or maybe stakeholders you're working with have. So we'll try to show those differences here too. And for me the most important thing as well is to learn the principles behind this tool or these methods and then you can just adapt it for your team, for your situation, for yourself. As you know from our previous episodes we also mix and match a lot of methods and tools that we found out during the... careers. This sounds important during the time, working in different places. So yeah, let's see how you can pick between the idea bank or I scored list versus the opportunity solution tree. Or maybe you can combine them. Watch the full video to know. Yes. So maybe for the ones who didn't saw the other episodes, we can super briefly refresh what they are. So the I scoring? I will go for ice scoring, you will explain just the trees. So ice scoring or how we call them idea banks here. The idea about idea banks is if you put on one list all of the ideas, opportunities or experiments you have in your mind about certain topic or metric or one common thing, you should be able to compare them, right? So the idea is to be build comparable list of ideas, opportunities, whatever you work with. And then to prioritize them or to be able to compare, we use an ice scoring, which is impact, confidence and effort. So for each idea, we try to add to it mathematical value of like how big impact we see and then definitions of what's impact may be different we have another video where you can check it confidence so how sure we are about this idea hypothesis or anything else and then the effort or ease so how hard or how easy it is for us to build and then this gives us a score that helps us prioritizing and seeing In theory, what should we build first? But then it's more direction driven and things like this. But you end up with a spreadsheet ordered list, something that some people may really like. Cool. On the other hand, we have this opportunity solution tree, which basically would be more like a digital artboard. I mean, I think you could do it physical, but digital is the most... better for today, where you would have the opportunities that you're finding in your customers. So you will represent there the needs of your customers or the problems they have or the desires and you would represent them from and group them. So you would have a need that has some sort of sub-needs or desires and basically you have all the context of everything that you could do for your user that can also help you impact your business. What's important on the top of this opportunity solution tree there is an outcome yes so opportunity solution trees are built by design built towards the outcome so when you're working with them you are focused forced to work towards the outcome i would say the difference with the idea bank, it's super easy to get output driven with idea banks because I'm saying ideas or opportunities to be prioritized, but it's super easy to land down to solutions and you end up with, you know, a list of tasks which we know. both of us does not prefer working on outputs we do prefer working on outcomes and we believe it's better so yes this outcome is it's important so we have the both sides right and we don't get lost to only the user and then we forget about how we can impact the business why we are here what we want to do in the end So these are the two tools that we are going to discuss today and they have things in common like as we said the purpose of it so the goal is to help us define what's the next thing we are going to do right as a team or in the product. Define this and I'm gonna be a big advocate of Opportunity Solution 3 stands out in this episode but what Opportunity Solution 3 can help you with also I would say similar to idea bank is also showing what you're not going to be working on. Yes, exactly. So it is also a tool used with stakeholders to show in time on like how this changes in time because both idea bank and opportunity solution trees are ever living documents. So they never end. There is not finished moment. So it's not like you set up the idea bank, you have purities and it's like job done let's start developing this is the wrong way it's actually okay so this is how we see the words can we validate if this is the truth no and then we go deeper yeah so prospect decisions and understanding where the unknowns and where we can go next right Exactly. And as you said as well, another thing is that it's continuous. Both have in common this thing that they are continuous. So in the Idea Bank, you would be doing continuous experimentation to change these scorings, right? And in the Opportunity Solution Tree, you will be, as you say, keep learning about the user to remove opportunities or to add new ones. And sometimes you also experiment, no? So sometimes you go to Opportunity, you believe it's fine. We will run an experiment and we will fail or succeed. super similar to what we do with idea banks and then this source is back basically so sometimes in idea bank the score gonna change in opportunity solution 3 maybe the whole opportunity gonna disappear now we will just trim the branch exactly so yeah so basically both of them help us work collaboratively in a continuous fashion and then what is important for me both are tasked with you derisking stuff if you work this way. So if you take all of what you have written as an assumption, so this is just opportunity that we need to validate or this is an idea with hypothesis that we need to experiment on top, you work in this derisking mode. So you invest as little as possible to see if this makes sense and then you go for it. So there is much less waste produced than if you would be doing that with just a list of tasks. Nice one. Yes. And both of them need to have this outcome very well defined, right? As a guide to help us score or organize the opportunities or whatever we need. And this is super common to both. And this is the main problem I see usually when implementing one or another is... you will have like five goals we did it with opportunity solution trees now we have opportunity solution tree with five goals and then trying to map them didn't work you will build idea bank with five ideas that are spread across your backlog but they're not from the same domain and you cannot really compare them but you will say oh this have impact for its own project and then has other impact for another goal and then no it's just a random list of tasks so you're not driving one clear goal for you. So it is important to have clear outcome that you want to build. Drive, not build. Building outputs. And especially to compare the ideas of the opportunities, this that you say is what I find the most valuable as well. Yeah. So these are the things that they have in common. Maybe we can get into the details of what are the things they have in common or differences. And how they differ really. Because so far I'm... we are trying to say it's the same thing, but there are differences. There are differences. The first one I would say is how you visualize these ideas or these opportunities or this. So on the eyes scoring, you would basically have a spreadsheet with your lines and with your formula and all the numbers. And in the opportunity solution tree, you would have like a visual tree. And basically this kind of visualization will guide you to analyze information in a different way. because the tree for me gives you a lot of context so you can compare one opportunity against the other with the context of how the parts relate from which desire they came and things like this so there is a bit more I mean it is much more visual heavy way so you can go with all of the tricks that visual heavy ways have so you can have infographics links and things like this idea banks usually as you said are super small spreadsheets, rather flat structure. Nowadays with tools like Airboard etc. you can get a bit more fancy so you click and you have another spreadsheet of experiments. But yeah, they're much less visual, but I would say they are much more organized and less organic. So what I had as an experience is, of course, you will find two executives and one will say, oh, this visual opportunity solution tree is amazing, understand what you're working finally. And then the other one will say like, oh, this Excel spreadsheet with 10 rows is... I understand now it's clean, thank you. So it differs, but probably when you want to go strategical level, I would say flatly is always going to be easier. But don't get into the trap of output. So never build a short list of prioritized outputs of features I want to build because that's what's the stakeholders love the most, but we are not for this, we are for output, so outcomes. focused list of possible hypotheses for an outcome usually works very well while opportunity solution trees are amazing tactically. I mean having a team of deep domain knowledge I believe it's just much faster and you have everything there and it's faster than hey okay so we have this idea we all have context but then now let's bring figmas mirrors and all of the context here to look at this one line in the excel spreadsheet so And I believe the conversations are different, right? So all these things that you're explaining of how they are different in visualization makes the conversation about them different as well, right? So for me, the good thing about the ice scoring is that it gets very tangible and very much to the point. So the discussion is very much bounded and you are... Yes, very much specific because you need to give a number, you need to evaluate the different aspects, impact, confidence and effort of each idea, so it goes much more to the point. Whereas the tree sometimes can get more vague and maybe the discussion can be more broad, more open and you may lose a bit of focus sometimes. You may, but then maybe that's fine. Maybe that's fine. I mean, as long as you're focused on one output. outcome? Damn, you know, you see how hard it is to rewrite your brain. So if you're focused on one outcome, maybe it is okay sometimes to diverge a bit more. No, not in every situation. It depends on the stage where you are, right? Sometimes it's more needed to be open and then explore a bit more the conversation and then at other times you need to be more specific. Or sometimes you just, you know, you see like clear opportunity and we want to go there and then it's just... hey we have a lot of ideas how to go there what to do now no so experiments and things like this exactly and what else the items that we are comparing on each of the on each of the tools right i would say from my experience that in ice scoring maybe they are more in the solution space yes they're gonna tend to be much more concrete uh because you want to assign them mathematical value no yeah so you need to have some anchor in reality i do believe you can make them like no stick enough that abstract that they're not solution uh it's a lot of phrasing and it's a bit fancy but you can get them abstract but i would say majority of the time they're gonna be much more to the point or like okay um I would say it's even more like hypothesis list. So a lot of times you're just going to have long periodized lists about hypothesis towards your outcome. Yeah, and then hypothesis will assume already some stuff, right? So what behavior we're gonna see there, what's the success metric, things like this. Yes, but it's more closer to the solution space in a way. Whereas when you are working with opportunities, you are a bit closer to the problem space, right? Because we are talking about needs of the customer and desires of the customer. So yes. It's, yeah, it is probably like, I would not drive the discovery on top of idea bank. Because this is actually when you said it, I believe it's a second step. I mean, this is not that they need to come one after another, but this is like after you pick the opportunity and you want to go there, maybe this is the moment when you could use it because the periodic hypothesis list gonna limit you, no? Because it's already narrowed to the hypothesis you have. So here, Opportunity Solution 3 gonna be much better for you too. actually go out and discover. And on the other hand the outcome relating to this what you said it would be more actionable the outcome of the eye scoring maybe than the outcome of a session evaluating opportunities or something like that no? Yeah that's true. But both of them actually end up list of experiments. So this is the moment where I would say idea bank can kick in even when it comes to opportunity solution trees. Right? So when we think about which one to use when. Yes. Actually, this is what we've been talking about. So now, I don't know what we have in a script, but this is always a freestyle. It feels like... The discovery part, like I need to find and go wild, probably it's much better in opportunity solution. Yes, yes. But a lot of times it feels like, okay, so we have this opportunity. We did a lot of research with customers. Maybe we have even some behavioral data and then we'll have ideas. We'll have a lot of experiments or hypothesis what to run next to go deeper. And some of them are going to be, let's build the full feature. we all agree we should not do that. We start with something small and trying to iterate from there and validate constantly if it's still true. And then idea bank can kick in for you. So how to prioritize this list of experiments. I would say when it comes to continuous discovery habits, the general idea is pick the best one. You just compare one to another towards the goal and then you pick the best one. Yeah, but what's the best one? That's the thing for which I like the ice scoring or other prioritization techniques. They add to you a bit more complexity, of course, with this. I'm going to be splitting your best into three different buckets of impact, confidence and effort. But it gives you like... I do believe it is a bit more fair to some ideas this way because sometimes you're going to be much more confident about something less impactful and this may end up okay so let's start from this one and for the other one we'll dig a bit deeper and IdeaBank gives you structure over it when you don't have it we do have meetings like this you have this discussion but the discussion is close with those four or five people that are in the room once you leave that discussion, this discussion disappeared. So it's like you made the decision, but there is no documentation. So I'm not a fan of documenting every decision, but if you want to come back to this, you need to recreate in your mind that meeting with those five people. While Idea Bank, if you work on it constantly and continuously, it's just going to show you that, hey, this... stuff jumped five times the purity already because we found out something and then we run an experiment and then we see this hypothesis is the strongest one with this opportunity. I like what you said of being more fair to some ideas because it is true that when you're having conversations about opportunities you may forget to evaluate some aspects of it right and maybe one of them is very shiny on I don't know impact. but low in confidence, but we forget a little bit to talk about confidence. So you're right. The other one, it's a bit more fair with all of the ideas. Or, you know, numbers can bias you big time, but they're usually not that emotional. So it's harder for you to get biased once you compare your own emotions with some numbers and some assumptions or some calculations you need to do. So an example may be from our own. So we have doctors, some of them are going to work in clinics. As you know, a lot of doctors don't work with only one clinic, which means they're going to need to put a lot of hours into the work. It's well paid working a lot of times, but... still it is it is hard so if you need to empathize with them anything that's gonna seem that helps them regain time or have more time for family or whatever we're gonna believe us is good for them gonna be amazing no it's like oh this is scalable for us because we believe yes if you're tired and overwhelmed this feature gonna unlock you let's let's just go with it it's so amazing because it would work But yeah, then question is how many of those doctors really feel overwhelmed? Do they really work in a country that you have or your customers are actually this type of customer? You don't attack them or maybe opportunities fairly small and actually you would like make super happy when total percent of your customers. But then it would be like whatever. No, I know you can validate that during the user research, etc. But having this retrospective at the end of like, okay, so we validated this exists and then, okay, so this exists, but let's sit down and try to add mathematics to this, removes this bias of like, I am so empathizing with the customer or the user. You need to, but then we need to make it also big enough to make it. change no yes and also the effort as well it's easy to forget when you're only working in opportunity solution tree but in ice scoring it forced you to think like hey i will i will have to build it so let's have a look if i will be able to and how much difficult it will be exactly yeah i mean this so this discussion should be there with the technical engineering part in the opportunity solution tree but it's more tangible, again, as we were speaking. This is the moment when you need to generate an artifact. I would say this is going to be easier to understand. Cool. So from what you were saying, probably depending on the stage of the project or the type of project, we can use one or another. But I think we can combine them as well. What do you think? Yeah, yeah. I mean, for sure, it's like, yeah, we can combine them. Because if we take this assumption from, where we were saying right now when to pick one just to sum up i would say if you have like clear direction yes so you're after ideation you did like a design sprint or you already validated your opportunity idea bank seems like or eye scoring seems like a nice activity to do to have this discussion we're talking right yes but then if you don't have this direction just when you are start exploring that your user exploring your opportunities, then you really don't have a list of ideas to work on, right? And even if you add them, it would be... I would say it is much more... prone for you to focus again on outputs and just forget about the outcome. If you do tests with the customers and keep adding on the list and prioritizing, you may forget that you're, oh, I'm in solutions now, I forgot about what I'm doing here. Yes, so opportunity solution tree would be better when you don't have that direction so much clearer. And I believe they can also be combined, like from what we were saying, maybe there's one stage where you don't have this direction very clear and you're working a lot on opportunities, so you're discovering the context and you're finding which is your direction opportunity-wise. And then after that you can start doing ideation and experimentation and then when you gain this direction, maybe you can do a design sprint or some ideation session, something like that. Then you can have the eye scoring that will help you maybe slice it to decide where to start building it. So yeah. Yeah, for sure. Or you can do it even sometimes as a one-time activity in the continuous cycle. So the thing is both things we are speaking about are continuous. always happening. So it's like one week you meet and maybe we'll just say hey this opportunity is super big, we understand it, let's list our experiments, let's prioritize them, fine we'll launch one then we should come back to this periodized list after the experiment, update it, see it and then maybe we'll say like hey this whole opportunity let's just drop it and stop thinking about it. it should be collaborating, especially if it's continuous, then it's just sourcing back from these experiments. I like it, yeah. So this is how we see the differences between the opportunity solution trees and ice scoring or idea banks. If you see it differently, we will love to hear from you. If you see it the same as well, don't. Don't hesitate to leave us feedbacks on YouTube or send us email or tweet to us or write to us on LinkedIn. You can find us everywhere. And yeah, thank you very much. And hopefully you're going to tune in for the next episode soon. Yes. See you soon. Thank you. Thank you. Bye.

There are many prioritization strategies available for choosing the next features/experiments for our product… but how do you decide which one to use?

In this episode we talk about the two tools we use the most in our team: ICE (Impact Confidence Effort) scoring and OST (Opportunity Solution Tree), from the book Continuous Discovery Habits from Teresa Torres.

We compare them and discuss the similarities they have, like being collaborative and continuous tools, as well as always having a well defined goal to guide us in the process.

We also talk about what makes them different: the way they are visualized, the type of discussion they prompt and the output we get when using them.

And when to use each one of them? ICE score is more useful when we have a clear direction of the project, whereas OST is stronger when the direction is not defined. And they can be combined too! In this episode we explain how.

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Chapters in this video 👇

00:00 Introduction
00:56 Comparting ICE Scoring vs. Opportuntity Soluton Tree (OST)
02:38 What is ICE (Impact Confident Effort) Scoring or Idea Bank
04:00 What is Opportunity Solution Tree (OST)
05:40 Understanding where we can go next
06:44 Working collaboratively in a continuous fashion
07:38 Reducing risk and waste
09:31 ICE Scoring for strategy and OST for tactics
13:20 OST for discovery and problem space and ICE scoring for solution space and prioritising
16:43 Which one is the best experiment or idea?
18:43 Reducing biases towards an idea with numbers
21:07 Using ICE scoring when you have a clear direction and OST when you don’t
22:11 Combining OST and ICE scoring
23:50 See you soon!

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We invite you to continue the conversation and give us feedback!

Twitter: @TwoFacetPodcast
Email:  twofacetpodcast@gmail.com
Hosts: Juncal González, Matt Mikulski
Music: Sunlight by Lightblow