🌳Opportunity solution tree

A drawing that keeps four things apart which product teams habitually mix. It is Teresa Torres's, from 📕 Continuous Discovery Habits. In my own words, top to bottom:

1. Outcome: one measurable change the team is responsible for.
2. Opportunities: customer needs, pains and wishes, in the customer's words, taken from interviews.
3. Solutions: things we could build. Several under each opportunity, never one.
4. Assumption tests: the cheapest way to find out whether a solution rests on something true.

Its use is comparison. With one outcome and a spread of opportunities you choose where to work before arguing about what to build, and each solution has siblings to be compared with.

Example from work: 📌 Draw the opportunity tree for scorecards, the first one I have drawn for real, on a whiteboard with Tomasz Wilk. The branches were easy. Writing the outcome so that a customer would recognise it took most of the time.

Often confused with: a roadmap or a feature tree. If the second level reads needs a dashboard, it is a solution in a false moustache.

Notes: 📖 Torres on opportunity trees. Claim: 💎 An opportunity is a customer problem and not a feature in disguise.