From Goals To Action (Part 3 of 4): Opportunity Solution Trees

Uncover and seize opportunities to drive impactful behavior change with Opportunity Solution Trees

With KPI Trees and Impact Mapping, we already discussed in the previous articles two powerful tools to break down high-level goals and complex challenges into actionable outcomes by focusing on system actor behaviors. This article will take a closer look at another great addition to your toolkit to create alignment across functions and teams and facilitate an outcome-led culture in your organization: The Opportunity Solution Tree (OST) is a visual framework developed and popularized in product management by internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and product coach Teresa Torres.

💡 You’ll Learn

• How the Opportunity Solution Tree (OST) is developed from a desired outcome, step by step.
• How it serves as a tool to structure and facilitate discovery and anchors the process in real customer needs.
• How the OST encourages the systematic exploration and validation of different opportunities to de-risk your investments.
• Where the OST sits within your circles of concern, influence, and control.

Let’s join Sarah, who hastily swallows the last bite of her lunch while she sinks back into the chair behind the desk in her home office. She opens her calendar and clicks the video conferencing link in the meeting scheduled to start in a minute. Sarah, holding a Ph.D. in counseling and psychotherapy, is one of the two founders of a young telemedicine startup that aims to provide comfortable, timely, and secure access to psychotherapy from the comfort of the patient’s own home. Tom, her co-founder, is already awaiting her on the call.

Last week, when reviewing their product metrics, Tom and she realized that, despite a stable growth in account numbers, the product usage was lagging behind significantly and negatively impacted their business growth. When they dug a little deeper into the numbers, they discovered that they had an issue with keeping their users engaged long-term. This turned out to be especially true for users who started but abandoned their weekly therapy session program before finishing their first set of 10 sessions. Because this measurable user behavior appeared to be a strong leading indicator for user retention, they considered it a good starting point for taking action and improving the situation.

For today’s call, Sarah and Tom invited their product designer, two of their engineers, as well as two of their therapists and their customer support lead to think about how to address that issue. Now that everyone has dialed in, Sarah shares the goal Tom and she had agreed on: They aim to increase the completion rate of the first set of 10 weekly therapy sessions to over 50% over the next six months.

Growing A Tree

Sarah notes their goal down on a sticky on a virtual whiteboard. She introduces the group to her intention to develop a so-called Opportunity Solution Tree (OST) to uncover and prioritize meaningful opportunities to tackle their goal. While their ultimate intent is achieving a specific change in business results, in this case: growth, they explicitly focused their goal on the change of a high-level behavior of a system actor, their user. This makes a lot of sense because:

💡 All business results are ultimately driven by human behaviors.

If behaviors drive Sarah and Tom’s business results, focusing on influencing and changing those behaviors is a reasonable as well as effective approach to achieve a lasting impact on how the business performs. Identifying strong leading indicators for the business metrics you seek to impact, is a good starting point for finding the actor behaviors that drive their future development.

As an outcome, the measurable change in actor behavior forms the root from which the group will grow their OST. Remember:

💡 An outcome is the measurable change in system actor behavior in a given system context.

Identifying Opportunities

With the outcome in place at the top of the team’s OST, they turn their first focus on identifying opportunities that could offer possible leverage points to affect their users’ behavior. But what exactly is an opportunity?

Most importantly: Opportunities are not solutions or features. Opportunities emerge from the gap between the status quo of current actor behavior and the desired state you seek to realize. Let’s define them as follows:

💡 An opportunity is an actor’s unmet need or issue at a specific point of their experience that holds the potential to create value and, by that, enable the desired outcome.

The definition emphasizes three core aspects of an opportunity: It always relates to a specific actor on a specific journey (context) at a specific point (time). For that reason, journey maps generally are a great starting point to create transparency about the context and discover the opportunities it holds.

The interdisciplinary group on Sarah’s call starts to talk through their users’ product journey while Joe, the product designer, documents each step in an experience map: from their decision to take action and search for a solution, to finding the product and onboarding, scheduling and completing their first set of therapy sessions, up to deciding to commit to the next set.

Joe had added lanes to the journey map for documenting the users’ thoughts and feelings at each step of the way, as well as any issues and unmet needs that impact the users’ experience at that point. Thanks to the cross-functional team, they can tap into first-hand observations of their therapists, qualitative and quantitative insights from customer support, and insights from user analytics and feedback to get a decent idea of what their users are missing or struggling with.

It is an intense session full of vivid conversations during which the group develops a shared and more holistic view of their users’ experience. One by one, they note down and cluster what their users wish for or struggle with and place those opportunities as virtual stickies below their outcome on the whiteboard. In the end, they boiled it all down to five high-level struggles that they linked to users not finishing their first set of therapy sessions. Now the group zooms in on each of those five and tries to add any related and more specific issues and user needs it had previously identified. Below their outcome, their OST now reads:

• “I miss the human touch or physical presence in my therapy.”
  ◦ “My to choose the therapist that seems like the best fit for me.”
  ◦ “I can’t tell if my therapist is any good before my first session.”
  ◦ “As soon as I started my therapy sessions, I’m stuck with the therapist”
• “I lack a sense of progress or improvement.”
• “I feel left alone in the time between my therapy sessions.”
• “I struggle to stick to my appointments.”
  ◦ “I lose track of my scheduled sessions due to my unpredictable life.”
  ◦ “I struggle with finding slots for the sessions that work for me.”

With their opportunities now in place, it is time for the team to decide which one to focus on first. Sarah grabs their five high-level opportunities and quickly discusses each with the team. They discuss estimates of how high everyone considers the opportunity’s potential to support the team’s goal and how challenging or complex it would be to address it. Based on the results of their discussion and a quick dot voting, they agreed to prioritize the opportunity branch of “My therapist isn’t a good fit for me”.

Ideating Solutions

Working on one opportunity branch at a time allows the group to start their ideation from a narrowly scoped problem space. Utilizing the various perspectives of the diverse group, they brainstorm potential solutions to directly address the users’ struggles or unmet needs. To spark creativity, Sarah employs “How Might We” (HMW) questions, explicitly phrasing each user challenge as an opportunity for innovation. Questions like, “How might we allow users to gauge user-therapist fit before the first session?” are a powerful means to fuel and direct the conversation.

The therapists suggest introducing detailed therapist profiles complemented with a “Meet the Therapist” video series. The engineers propose a “matching quiz” to allow the user to identify the most suitable therapist for them. Joe, the designer, suggests implementing a continuous feedback mechanism to monitor a user’s satisfaction throughout the therapy. Sarah meticulously maps each idea under the relevant opportunity in the OST.

By the end of the ideation session, a variety of solutions have been added to the OST, each visually linked to specific needs within the chosen opportunity branch.

Making Assumptions Explicit

Starting ideation from concrete customer needs is a great first step. However, Sarah knows that each idea in the group’s OST still is a guess with a high level of uncertainty. Thanks to the narrow problem space due to the team’s focus on one particular opportunity branch in their tree, they can now start to systematically explore each idea and evaluate it in view of its problem-solution fit.

To do so, the group starts to unearth the hidden assumptions underpinning their ideas. “What needs to be true for this idea to work?” Sarah asks when they start to delve into mapping out their assumptions.

Inspired by the framework suggested by David J. Bland, the group looks at each idea through the following three lenses:

• Desirability: Why do we think the customer would want to have this solution? How does this solution create value and address the customer’s struggles and unmet needs?
• Feasibility: How do we think we can reliably provide this solution at scale? What technical and operational capabilities and resources will need to be in place?
• Viability: How do we think this solution will impact the profitability and sustainability of our business?

After the team has mapped out its assumptions on a separate canvas, they sort them along two axes, from low to high impact and low to high risk. Impact, in this case, means how critical the assumption is for the overall idea to work. Would being wrong kill the idea? The level of risk is determined by the team’s confidence in being right based on evidence. The risk of being wrong is much higher for an assumption that is a pure guess compared to one that is backed by actual evidence. Such evidence could be user data or a relevant amount of explicit customer feedback that supports the assumption.

Designing Experiments

In the course of this exercise, the team has made all their implicit assumptions explicit and created a matrix that allows them to manage each idea’s main risks. When Sarah closes this intense but incredibly productive session, the team has made it from its circle of concern all the way to its circle of control where all those potential solutions live that they’ve come up with. It’s time to get hands-on.

Moving ahead, they will set focus on de-risking their ideas by addressing their high-impact and high-risk assumptions. Those, if proven incorrect, could significantly derail the success of the solution and render any effort invested useless. To reduce the risk and increase confidence in those critical assumptions, the team will design and execute experiments. The goal of such experiments is to generate the required evidence to support or refute an assumption as quickly and cheaply as possible.

Especially in the beginning, it is wise to test multiple solution ideas in parallel so you quickly filter out the ones least likely to succeed and channel your time and energy to the ones with the best odds. When doing so, it’s critical to acknowledge that:

💡 An experiment refuting an assumption or, in consequence, a complete solution idea is as much a success as one that creates supporting evidence.

For example, Sarah’s team has documented a few critical assumptions for one of their solution ideas, to “collect and show user feedback on therapists” in their product. Of those, the first assumptions they’d like to test are:

• “Users are willing to provide meaningful feedback.”
• “Other users’ feedback will significantly influence the users’ choice when selecting a therapist.”

Obviously, the idea would be dead the moment one of those two assumptions turned out to be invalid. So, a few days after their joint session, Sarah and Joe sit together to design experiments to test the two assumptions. First, they plan to start sending out a simple feedback survey via email after a user has completed their first three therapy sessions in the app. This will allow them to learn about their users’ willingness to provide feedback as well as the quality of feedback to expect.

To test their second assumption, they agree to prototype the UI for selecting a therapist including a link to a list of user feedback on each. They intend to test the prototype with existing users. Sarah and Joe are interested to see how many users will notice the feedback, how many will access it, and how many will confirm that they considered the feedback when choosing their therapist.

With these experiments, Sarah and her team embark on a journey of iterative learning. They not only incrementally narrow down on the best of their ideas and de-risk their investments but also evolve their understanding of the problem space and discover new solution ideas or even yet-unnoticed opportunities.

The team will revisit their Opportunity Solution Tree on a regular basis to track their progress and align on their next steps toward, in the end, achieving their desired outcome.

Conclusion

Like the other tools discussed in the previous articles of this series, the Opportunity Solution Tree is a great helper for navigating the complexities of the circles of concern, influence, and control. While, for example, Impact Mapping starts from the circle of concern with the desired business impact, the OST roots in the circle of influence and is developed from an already defined outcome. Its purpose is to structure and guide the process of identifying and prioritizing relevant opportunities as well as discovering solutions that effectively address them in order to realize the desired change in actor behavior.

When jointly developed, OSTs allow teams to align across functional or departmental silos and tap into often hidden organizational knowledge. To fully leverage them, it is crucial to treat them as a continuously evolving artifact and return to them throughout the discovery process to structure and direct conversations, create and maintain shared understanding, and inform the decisions and actions you take in your circle of control.

Of course, even the most diligently composed and maintained OST is only useful if the outcome it was developed from makes sense in view of the business impact it is meant to enable. To make sure you start your OST with a meaningful outcome, it is helpful to complement your process with other tools that allow you to discover actor behaviors with a relevant impact on your business results of concern. The KPI Tree, which we discussed in one of the previous articles, is such a tool. Any yet another powerful and versatile one will be the subject of the next and last article of the “From Goals To Action” series: Journey Mapping.

(This article was originally published in Decoding Product.)