Opportunity Solution Tree

Teresa Torres tool for Agile Product Development framing: connecting big desired-outcomes to specific pains/opportunities, to solutions/hypotheses, to experiments.... aka OST

Summary: rank Opportunities, then focus Solution/Experiment ideation and prioritization on just the #1 Opportunity, until you feel l like Solution1 for Opportunity2 is more promising in impact than SolutionN for Opportunity1.

Context: you have many product improvement ideas to consider/prioritize, and there might be more promising ideas to generate. You also already have

• coherent strategic context and a north-star metric
• problem interviews with ideal customers

Forces

• you have too many ideas, a growing backlog
• to rank all the ideas, or even pick the best 5, would be very difficult, esp if multiple people are involved (which they should be)

Solution

• ?

This smells like a promising framework to define a Product Strategy-based Development Queue instead of a classic RoadMap.

• cf strategic context, north-star metric, bottleneck, (2022-12-27) Cutler TBM-55/52 Making A Model Step By Step

The pro-active process is to prioritize your problems/opportunities, and only spend time generating/refining solution ideas/candidates for the top 1-2 problems/opportunities.

She notes it's also a good reactive process, taking an "idea" (solution) and

• defining a problem/opportunity it addresses
• prioritizing of that problem/opportunity
• generating/prioritizing other possible solutions to that problem/opportunity

see (2016-08-31) Torres OpportunitySolutionTree