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Opportunity Solution Trees: Visualize Your Thinking - Product Talk %

The Evolution of Modern Product Discovery - Product Talk

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From https://www.producttalk.org/2017/02/evolution-product-discovery/

  1. Define a really clear desired outcome.
  2. discover the opportunities that are going to drive that desired outcome
    1. Opportunity = either a blocker to outcome or for where outcome is being met, what job does our product do for them?
    2. what I mean by opportunities is a little bit of jargon. It’s because I am trying to appease people who have problems with the word “problem.” If I think about this from a problem-solving lens, we have to define the problem before we can solve it.
    3. But as product teams, we often skip this step. Somebody says to us, “Your goal is to go increase engagement” and we start brainstorming solutions.
    4. We start generating solutions and the challenge is we have no way of evaluating solutions if we don’t know what problem we’re trying to solve.
    5. Now the reason why I call them opportunities and not problems is because “problems” encourages to us to fix things, and sometimes things aren’t broken and we can just make them better, right, so think of an opportunity as a pain point, it’s a need, sometimes it’s just a want or a desire.
    6. So if my desired outcome is to increase engagement, I want to know two things.
      1. One, what prevents people from engaging today? This is the problem mindset, what are the obstacles, what are the barriers, I have opportunities to remove them.
      2. And the other side of it is the really positive, appreciative inquiry question, which is, for my customers who are engaging today, why are they doing it? What problems am I solving for them? Or in the Jobs-to-be-Done language, what job does my service or product do for them?
    7. Differentiation through choosing an opportunity
      1. I believe that the opportunity space is where product strategy happens. The opportunities we choose to go after are what differentiate us in our market.
      2. Two companies in the exact same space are going to pick different opportunities. I really encourage teams to take time to explore the opportunity space, to assess which opportunities are most likely going to drive their desired outcomes, and to use their company’s mission, vision, and strategy as a filter.
      3. Because Google is going to choose one opportunity, and Apple is going to choose a different opportunity. It’s not because one opportunity is bigger than the other, it’s that those companies have completely different DNA, and so they are going to filter opportunities differently. This is where I think the heart of the product strategy lives, and most of us are skipping it.
  3. Discover solutions that deliver on opportunities
    1. And it’s the links between the two which help us evaluate our thinking, it’s how this tool acts as a critical thinking aid.
    2. We really want to ask this question, in fact our experiments  should help us ask,
      1. one, is this solution viable, but then it should help us test the link.
      2. Does this solution deliver on the opportunity? And again, that sounds so obvious, but we have built all sorts of solutions that don’t actually deliver on the opportunity we’re targeting.
      3. And then finally, we have to ask, does the solution deliver on the opportunity in a way that drives our desired outcome? Because even if we solved the problem for the customer, but it doesn’t increase their engagement, we didn’t actually create value for our business.
  4. Summary
    1. So what this structure does, is it helps teams remember,
      1. what is our goal,
      2. what is the outcome we are driving,
      3. and as they do all these research activities, they can track it.
    2. This becomes their discovery roadmap. This is how they communicate to the rest of their company,
      1. I have no idea if I’m going to increase engagement, that’s scary I know,
      2. but here are the opportunities that I see,
      3. these are the solutions that I’m exploring if they will deliver on those opportunities,
      4. and these are the sets of experiments that I am running that will tell me if I am going to reach my desired outcome.
  5. Giving context to research and UX frameworks and activities
    1. And what’s great about this is that it helps us put all of our tools into context, so if I think about this,
    2. Desired outcome: OKRs are helping me set a desired outcome, and my whole team knows what our end goal is, what we’re trying to accomplish together.
    3. Opportunities:
      1. Whereas Jobs-to- be-Done, or even design thinking is really good at helping us with opportunity finding, because we are doing empathy interviews and we are doing observations, and we are co-creating with our customers, we are learning how to live in their world.
      2. And that is helping us see, for example, why they are engaging, or what’s keeping them from engaging.
    4. Test solutions: And if we go down one level and we look at usability testing and look at The Lean Startup and we look at MVPs, what is this helping us do? It’s helping us test if our solutions deliver on our desired outcomes.