How to deliver better products using the opportunity tree

What is the ‘opportunity tree’?

The opportunity tree method improves the way that you explore ideas and solutions to drive your desired product outcome. This method was first brought to me by Teresa Torres, a must-follow for anyone interested in product discovery methods.

The essence of this methodology is that you:

• Start by outlining a clear, desired outcome: Increase the sales of dog leads on your website
• Explore opportunities that can help you to meet this outcome: Increase the prominence of this category on your site
• Generate multiple ideas to meet this opportunity: Place dog lead category on home page
• Create solutions for these ideas: Add a dog lead widget, where you can add a dog lead straight to the basket

You use the tree to visualise each step of your process.

All can be explained in much more detail here.

How can this help you deliver better products?

This methodology really helps to address a few of the main pitfalls that I often see when it comes down to product discovery thinking.

1. It is outcome focussed.

Many product organisations focus on ideas and solutions, as opposed to understanding the problem they want to solve. The first focus of the opportunity tree is understanding the outcome that you want to achieve. This prevents you from going straight to solutions and trying to back this up with data, and instead start with insight and data to highlight a desired outcome.

2. You can generate multiple ideas and solutions

Sometimes, as a discovery team, you can fall into narrow thinking and focus only on the obvious ideas. Sometimes, you forget to explore multiple avenues to achieve the same outcome and trade off these opportunities. As the opportunity tree can branch out to be as big as you desire, it allows you to challenge yourself to come up with more than one way of solving the same problem, and to think about which one is the best way to do so.

3. Working with stakeholders

Often, it can be hard to work with teams and stakeholders from all over the business to generate ideas that all meet the same goals. This tool is a great way of visualising each step of the product discovery thinking process. It is therefore great to use with a wider audience so that everyone agrees on the outcome and can think through the problem in the same manner.

When should you use the opportunity tree?

1. When you are working on a fairly large problem that is not straightforward to solve.

For any outcome that does not have a direct and straightforward solution, you can benefit from an opportunity tree. Whether it is a new outcome to explore, or one that you’ve been working on for a while, the opportunity tree helps you to structure your thinking and focus on the most important areas.

2. When you can’t think of enough ideas.

If you have an outcome in mind, but you can’t quite work out how to get there — this really helps to give a structure to your thinking.

3. When you have too many ideas

If you have multiple ideas for a problem, the opportunity tree works as a great tool to keep you in check and make sure that your concepts always link back to the outcome you’re trying to meet. As soon as these don’t match, you should remove these opportunities or ideas from your list. The visualisation of the tree also allows you to aggregate themes and think about which opportunity and therefore set of ideas, are most likely to help you achieve your desired outcome.

Key tips for using this in practise:

1. Agree on your outcome

It is crucial that you agree on your outcome and this is understood by everyone, without this it will be hard to progress and generate opportunities and ideas that align with what you want to achieve.

2. Understand the difference between ideas and solutions

When we started using the opportunity tree, this was the biggest source of contention. An idea could be a solution. The best way to describe it is that an idea is one concept that can meet the opportunity, but could have several different variations of implementation. Solutions are where you get specific as to how you would implement this. This example might help:

You could implement a dog lead category on the home page in many different ways, and some solutions will require more effort than others.

3. Use a key on the opportunity tree to highlight evidence based opportunities and ideas vs. ones that need validating.

Teresa recommends that everything you place on the opportunity tree comes from product discovery (evidence). However, I know from working with several stakeholders, that people sometimes can’t help but come up with new and exciting ideas that might not match the research. If this is the case, mark these up with a key, and if your discovery brings you to evidence that supports them, great — if not, you can put in a box of ‘nice ideas that might not work’ :)

4. Time box the exercise so that you only focus on the most important ideas

If you already have a lot of research and have started thinking about how you can achieve a desired outcome, you can run a session with your team to map out your current thoughts using the opportunity tree.

I recommend time boxing this, so that you only write down the most important opportunities and ideas. If you carry on the exercise for too long, you can be overwhelmed with concepts and start scraping the barrel for additional ideas. It is likely that you will come up with your best thinking in the first hour. Yes, you might stumble on something genius if you try to work through this for 3 hours, but… you can always add other great ideas at a later stage.

5. This should be a working document

A nice segway from point 4… the opportunity tree should be updated on a regular basis. Every time you get some new insight, or try to implement a solution, go back to the opportunity tree and assess if what you wrote down is still valid and if you should reprioritise your focus.

6. Have criteria that allow you to decide which ideas to take forwards

When we first ran this concept, we came up with so many ideas and we hadn’t agreed on criteria to narrow these down and prioritise. This could be things like:

• Most evidence (quant and qual)
• Most likely to move primary or secondary metrics
• Ease of some of the ideas to implement

Whatever it is, make sure it’s agreed by the team so you can dot vote / collectively prioritise.

Let me know in the comments if you try using the opportunity tree and how you get on. If you have any other tips or advice from your own experience, I would love to hear it.