(2019-02-24) Torres Prioritize Opportunities Not Solutions

Teresa Torres: Prioritize Opportunities, Not Solutions. I cringe every time I see product teams use a spreadsheet to rank the ideas in their, backlog based on some made-up math formula usually consisting of things like business value, user value, and technical difficulty.

You aren’t one or two or three features away from a better product. This is the fallacy of the feature factory or as Melissa Perri calls it “The Build Trap.”

when we are judged by what outcomes we drive, it’s less about what solutions we deliver and more about what problems we solve for our customers.

Collect Stories in Customer Interviews to Generate Opportunities

Opportunities are customer needs, pain points, desires, wants—they are chances for us to intervene in a way that makes our customers’ lives better. You can’t prioritize opportunities if you don’t know what they are.

we want to start with our desired outcome and ask which customer needs, pain points, desires, and wants—if addressed—would drive our desired outcome. The best way to answer this question is through customer interviews.

For example, if I work at Netflix and my desired outcome is to increase the number of viewing hours per viewer, I might interview Netflix users and ask, “Tell me about the last time you watched Netflix.”

I like to frame opportunities as something a customer might say

Even though we might want our customers to spend more money with us, no customer would say, “I wish I spent more money on groceries.” However, they might say, “I’m looking for new ideas for dinner,” which if we did a good job addressing this need, may very well lead to the customer spending more money.

Map out the Opportunity Space Using an Opportunity Solution Tree

It can be hard to prioritize a flat list of opportunities, because odds are your opportunities are of different shapes and sizes, some are interrelated, others are subsets of others

To simplify this process, start by grouping related opportunities using an opportunity solution tree. Reframe similar opportunities to make sure they are distinct from each other. That might look like this:

This isn’t a perfect science. There is more than one way to group the same set of opportunities.

The goal is to find the grouping that best reflects how your customers think about the opportunities. If your customers want to know what their friends are watching when they don’t have anything to watch, then it belongs under that branch. But if they also want to know what their friends are watching, because of a fear of missing out, then it might appear under both branches

Prioritize Opportunities Using the Tree Structure to Guide Your Decisions

We don’t need to assess every opportunity on our tree. We can simply assess the first row. We can start by assessing our four top-level opportunities:

Once we’ve identified our top priority in the first row, we can ignore the other branches of the tree, and move to prioritizing just that opportunity’s sub-opportunities.

Assess Opportunities Using Fast Two-Way Door Decisions