Opportunity Assessment: Do We Want to Invest in Discovering This Idea?

When you’re working in product, there’s generally no shortage of ideas. And that is a good thing. But it can sometimes be overwhelming to collect and qualify all these ideas to see which ones have the potential to add value to your product.

We’ve all been in a situation where we’re flooded with ideas. Our sales colleagues get them from talking to customers, senior executives get inspired by looking at competitors’ products, and developers get excited about trying out a new technology. And, of course, you have your own ideas as well.

So how do you filter all these ideas and prioritize what to pursue? I will try to provide a pragmatic, hands-on answer to that question with this article, through a process I refer to as “opportunity assessment.” But before we start, let’s talk about some prerequisites and the basic process.

Some Prerequisites

You already need to have a defined product strategy and goals or OKRs in order to provide a framework for assessing ideas. If you don’t have these things, focus on them first since you won’t be able to properly assess ideas without them.

The Basic Process

Successful companies are good at working on the ideas with the biggest potential and focusing on them 100%. They solve meaningful problems with their products and therefore upgrade the life of their users so much that users are happy to pay for this experience.

One of the ways that they achieve this is by avoiding working on stuff. By “stuff,” I mean everything that’s crammed into your backlog. Especially when no one really knows why it’s there and what difference it will make once it’s finished.

So how do we avoid that?

Here’s the unpleasant truth:

• You have to be good at generating (by listening to your users and immersing yourself in all the data these users are leaving while using your product) and collecting ideas (from stakeholders, colleagues, customers, competitors, etc.)
• You have to be good at assessing them. What are the ideas that have the biggest potential to make a difference (in other words, adding value to the product while making money for the company)?
• You have to have a way to say, “We don’t know anything about this idea yet, so we need to learn more about it before we can prioritize it.”
• You have to have ways to kill ideas once and forever if they aren’t good.

We could write an entire blog post on each of these points, but for now we’ll focus on the second point, assessing ideas.

Idea Board and Opportunity Assessment

An idea board visualizes the flow of an idea or assumption from the point that someone has it to the point when the idea becomes a qualified opportunity to the point where it is assigned to a PM or team for next steps. You can think of it like a task board where things move from the “open” column to the “doing” column to the “done” column. The image below shows the flow of this board.

An idea board — do we see enough potential?

Here are the questions I like to ask if someone comes up with an idea to see if it’s worth investing some additional discovery time for it. If the answers to all these questions are promising, I call it an opportunity and I’m happy to add it to the discovery backlogs. If it’s hard to answer these questions, you know it’s not the right time to prioritize this idea.

• What are the underlying assumptions of this idea and have we understood the underlying customer problem?
• Are you currently in the right position to validate these assumptions and what would it roughly take to validate them? (Massive experimentation or just a little bit more desk research?)
• How dangerous are the underlying assumptions? (Would it be devastating if we think we are right, then we build the thing and learn we were not right?)
• Is there any business potential and how big might it be? (If not, this idea should be killed now!)
• Can we think about a possible solution to this customer problem and an implementation for the solution, and do we think the effort-to-impact ratio is promising?
• What is the opportunity cost of doing nothing?
• Can we generate incremental value?
• Can we partner to reduce cost or maximize impact?

Next, I’d like to share how the idea board can fit into the larger work that a product organization is doing. In the image below, each row represents a task board.

A task board is simply a way to visually depict work at various stages of a process using cards to represent work items and columns to represent each stage of the process. Cards are moved from left to right on the board to show progress and help teams coordinate their work with one another.

Task boards can be simple or complex. Simple boards have columns for open, in progress, and completed — or to do, doing, and done. Complex boards start there but subdivide in-progress work into multiple columns so that work across an entire value stream can be more easily visualized. Each board usually also comes with its own standup meeting where team members update one another on progress — and obstacles that are blocking progress — and move the cards. These standup meetings are usually conducted weekly.

Depending on the size of the organization, it’s useful to create task boards with different levels of detail and focus. These range from a high-level idea board, to an overall product board, down to a product discovery board, to a development team board. You can see an example of what this looks like below.

Four Taskboards in a simple illustration: Idea Board, Product Overview Board, Product Discovery Board and Development Team Board

Product leaders will tend to focus on the top two boards (the idea board and the overall product board) while product managers will focus on the bottom two (the product discovery board and the development team board). However, in empowered product organizations, product managers will focus on all four boards and can share them with the product leader for a high-level overview of what their team is working on.

As always with task boards, you will want to inspect and adapt. You can change columns and lines to meet your specific needs. Plan for regular retrospectives to ask, “Are we as efficient as we would like to be with these boards and what could be optimized?”

Every task board should be accompanied by its respective standup meeting. Try various cadences to see what works best. This could be daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or quarterly.

Alternatives and More Inspiration

As is often the case, I’m sharing tools that I find to be especially useful and effective (because I created them!). But I’m far from the only one. Here are a few other alternatives and resources to check out if you’d like different ways of exploring this topic.

• On Product Talk, Teresa Torres has written extensively about opportunity solution trees.
• Gabrielle Bufrem has a great podcast and presentation on the art of saying no (note that you need a membership to the Turing Fest community in order to watch the presentation).
• Marty Cagan wrote about assessing product opportunities on the SVPG blog.
• Marc Abraham has a blog post on assessing product opportunities.

Originally published at https://www.petra-wille.com on February 1, 2022.