Getting started with Opportunity Solution Trees

A practical step by step guide

When you’re faced with a complex product space an Opportunity Solution Tree can help you to structure your thinking, align and collaborate with your team effectively. It’s a great technique, created by Teresa Torres in her book Continuous Discovery Habits:

So, how do you get started? 

I’ve used an Opportunity Solution Tree in several product situations, from large-scale new product launches to optimizing existing journeys.  I love this way of visualising product thinking, but it can be complex and I haven’t always landed it successfully. There are pitfalls to avoid. 

Here’s my step-by-step guide to getting started and nailing a successful Opportunity Solution Tree:

1. Open-Minded Immersion

2. Where’s The Value?

3. Structure the Opportunity Space

4. Prioritise Opportunities

5. Working with Solutions

Step 1: Open-Minded Immersion

This may be counter-intuitive, but don’t start this process with the Opportunity Solution Tree itself.  

Go too early on creating your tree and it will be based on pre-loaded assumptions from either you or your stakeholders.   Instead, start with an open mind and immerse yourself in the product first.  

Study the analytics, review customer feedback, use the product yourself, hold customer interviews to understand how they’re feeling and why they’re using it.  Map out the customer journey (Product Breaks has a great article on that part of the process here).  

The goal for this stage is to build a deep understanding of the product and an objective view of the user needs and challenges it seeks to solve.  

Step 2: Where’s the Value?

Time now for intelligence gathering.  Look at your organisation’s strategy and your business goals. What is it looking to achieve? Often, we’ll be given a business outcome like ‘Increase Retention’ or ‘Grow Market Share’. Those are important of course, but are too high-level to power your Opportunity Solution Tree.  

You need to define the product outcome. That will be the top box on your diagram.

A good product outcome describes the change we’re trying to deliver. It’s specific, measurable and realistic.  Think about which elements of the business goal the product can actually impact, and which areas of the user journey the product team has influence over. 

For example, a business goal might be to ‘Increase Customer Retention by 25% next year’. A product team’s target outcome which ladders up to that could be ‘Increase weekly regular users by 10%’.  They don’t have control of overall retention, but they can influence how often customers choose to use their product.

At this stage, make sure you’re checking in with your stakeholders. How do they see your product contributing to the business goal? Is the product outcome you’ve chosen in line with the organisation’s strategy?

Step 3: Structure the Opportunity Space

You’ve done the preparation. By now, we have a good level of understanding of the product and user journeys, and we’re clear on the top-level outcome.  We’re finally ready to start that Opportunity Solution Tree. 

Any tool where you can write in boxes, connect them, add notes to them, and move them around works for this. Miro is the usual option but any other whiteboard (even a real-life one!) would be ideal.

Place your overall product outcome at the top.  Underneath it the branches of the tree will cascade downwards in a visualisation of the problem and solution spaces.  

The most important thing to remember is the structure within the Opportunity Solution Tree.  Stick to the layers in the right order and keep them separate, because they represent different concepts. I always colour code them and include a definition key on the board:

Start at the top with the Opportunities. Write down the user needs and challenges that could affect the product outcome.  

Go wide before going deep. Aim to capture all the potential opportunities in a comprehensive horizontal band at this stage and park solution ideas for later. You don’t want to think about them yet. Stay in the problem space.   

The number one issue I come across is sneaky solutions which masquerade as opportunities. Here’s a handy test. There should always be multiple solutions to an opportunity. If you can only think of one, it’s probably a solution. Bring it up a level.

It might make sense to group related opportunities together under sub-outcomes.  It’s a tree… draw branches!

Top Tip: Take a copy of your Opportunity Solution Tree on a regular basis and keep it version controlled.  This is a living diagram and you want to encourage the team to make changes to it.  People feel more comfortable doing that if they know there’s a back-up copy.  Also, it’s good to be able to refer back to earlier thinking.  Why did we do that again…? 

4. Prioritise Opportunities

Now do an initial prioritisation. There's no science to this, but some factors they consider are:

• Size of the opportunity (i.e. how many users are impacted by it, how often)

• Importance to Customers

• Alignment with Strategic Vision

• Impact on Competitive Position in the market

• Estimated impact on target Product Outcome

As a team, agree on the prioritisation factors that are important to you and then assess each opportunity against them.  Look to identify the evidence available for each opportunity, and the knowledge gaps which need to be filled to make an objective priority decision. 

Make the prioritisation decision based on the factors agreed and the evidence gathered. Don’t worry, this is a reversible decision. As more insight becomes available you can revisit it. But you've learned quickly and prioritised effort.

Agree a measure of the priority opportunities so you can track progress.

Top Tip: draw boxes beside your Opportunity statements to note down questions, data and evidence directly onto the diagram of the Opportunity Solution Tree.  That way, you can keep track of the information and the whole team is able to review the same insight - which makes it easier to make collaborative decisions.

5. Working with Solutions

You’ve narrowed down your opportunities, with measurable problems that ladder up into your product outcome and business goal.

Now, it’s time to move into the solution space and explore ideas for ways to address these opportunities.

There are many ways to generate solution ideas. A simple and effective way is the ‘How might we…?’ technique.  You’ll probably already have quite a few parked solution ideas that emerged during earlier stages to bring into play now too.

Add your solution ideas to the Opportunity Solution Tree in branches underneath the opportunities they can address.  Remember, keep the layers separate.

Next, pick the top solutions you think are worth pursuing, and identify the assumptions that underpin them.  Teresa Torres outlines 5 types of assumption for product teams to be aware of:

1. Desirability: Why do we think our customers want this solution and why do we think they’ll be willing to do what we need them to do to get value from it?

2. Viability: Why do we think this solution will be good for our business?

3. Feasibility: Why do we think we can build this solution?

4. Usability: Why do we think the customer will be able to use this solution?

5. Ethical: Is there any potential harm in building this solution?

A good way to identify assumptions is to user story map the potential solution and consider it step by step:

Work out an approach to test the assumptions you’ve uncovered, using the quickest way to learn. There are many ways to do this - prototype testing, product analytics and tech spikes are some examples - to understand the inherent risks in your assumptions. 

The final step is to prioritise the solutions which have the lowest overall risk, and take them into validation and build.

And there you have it - a step-by-step guide to getting started with Opportunity Solution Trees.