Get to understand your product backlog with Opportunity solution tree (a practical guide)

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

I joined a new team a few months ago and I’ve started learning about our product. The learning time also contained a few exercises. As a product team, we signed a contract to know each other better and clarify mutual expectations. We refreshed our product vision board (credit to Roman Pichler) to know customers and their needs and reformulate our mission in this way. We reviewed our metrics and definition of done. For the first time, I tried to use Opportunity solution tree approach to get to know product backlog. We organized a team workshop and I want to describe our experience in the following lines.

Teresa Torres and Opportunity solution tree

Opportunity solution tree is detailed described in Teresa Torres’s article Why This Opportunity Solution Tree is Changing the Way Product Teams Work.

Torres’s Opportunity solution tree is “a simple way of visually representing how you plan to reach the desired outcome. It helps you to make your implicit assumptions explicit.”

Opportunity solution tree exercise is based on the Bernie Roth coaching powerful question. Torres explains Bernie’s question on a non-IT example. Firstly, identify something that you’ve always wanted in your life; for example, a house, a better job, more leisure time. Secondly, if you had whatever you wrote down, what would that do for you?

How else might you feel grounded in your community?

“The power of questions is that they help us move from a solution (buying a house) to the implicit opportunity (feeling grounded in your community), through to generating new ideas.”

Bernie teaches a simple structure for expanding your options.

Using opportunity solution tree different way

While reading Torres’s article I got the idea, how to use her approach in a different way, particularly — to understand product backlog in our team better.

As a product manager in the new place, I inherited a product backlog that contained around 40 features which titles and descriptions I found hard to understand. Features were like chaotic electrons without gravitation.

These features are solutions which are connected to invisible opportunities. The real magic is to reveal these opportunities together with the product team. As a bonus, you will get the tool that helps you with “strategic decisions about which opportunities to pursue what helps you prioritize solutions.”

It is much easier to prioritize opportunities than features because they are directly linked to business goals.

How to (workshop step by step)

1. I explained the Opportunity solution tree (what is it; purpose and goal, powerful coaching question, etc.)
2. I provided an example by asking everyone Bernie’s non-IT powerful question — 1. identify something that you wanted in your life; for example a house, a better job, more leisure time. 2. if you had whatever you wrote down, what would that do for you? — teammates wrote their answers on sticky-notes.
3. I asked for a volunteer to reveal his/her answers; then I revealed my case/answers and explained the theory in practice again.
4. I printed product backlog to the cards before the workshop and split our team into 3 pairs
5. Each pair worked on 13 cards and should answer the question: if we will deliver this feature, what would that do for our users?
6. Each pair wrote opportunities and each pair connected features to opportunities, if possible.
7. Finally, we made a big picture: each pair presented their features and opportunities, we discussed and mapped similar things, removed duplicates etc.

I especially enjoyed the vibrate and valuable discussions which filled up the room.

Summary

Opportunity solution tree approach helped us understand several aspects of the product backlog and offer unique occasions:

• We got a valuable debate about features and their possible outcomes. We moved from feature-thinking to opportunity-thinking way.
• We anchored chaotic features to their orbits — opportunities in the product backlog.
• We identified the gravitational field of particular opportunity and so we got the occasion to compare and decide which feature we can do first and which later.
• We got a map of opportunities which were linked to the business goals and we got a room for easier decision making and we could focus on what matters.

In the next post, I will describe how our opportunities respond to our product metrics.