What is Opportunity Solution Tree?
An Opportunity Solution Tree (OST) is a tool that visualizes connections between business goals, customer needs, ideas, and solutions. It was introduced by Teresa Torres, a product discovery coach in 2016 as a way to manage the decision-making process through on-linear gap identification, ideation flows, and experimentation. In other words, an OST is a visual plan designed to build products based on customer needs and prioritize ideas so that the product could solve real customer pains.
How to build an OST
Creating an OST is a relatively straightforward process that covers four major steps:
Step 1: Define what you want to achieve
First of all, you need to choose an outcome you are planning to achieve. For this, you can rely on the North Star metric, OKRs or PKIs, but to select the one that is a game-changer, you need to look at the top of the product and the business model and try to understand what the customer lifetime value is. Then narrow it to a single metric that you are going to improve, such as customer satisfaction or annual revenue.
Step 2: Discover opportunities
When you set the goal, you can start identifying opportunities, i.e. features that customers find important but underdeveloped. This is done by researching customer needs and pains with the help of surveys, feedback, studying their personas and daily use cases.
Step 3: Brainstorm solution options
This is the critical point where you actually build your tree. Work together with the team and stakeholders to come up with multiple ideas on how to reach the desired outcome. If an idea seems too vague and far-fetched from the opportunity, it is likely to be a distraction. In this case, take a step back and start from the tree once again.
Step 4: Experiment
Experimenting is done to validate ideas by comparing the proposed solutions. When you select the most promising one, you can test it with a set of additional experiments.
OST Benefits
An OST is a valuable tool that helps zoom out and see a bigger picture so that you can assess the opportunities and decide which ideas can bring value to the customers. In particular, an OST can help:
- Stay organized at the product discovery phase
- Get a better understanding of the customers’ needs and contests before brainstorming ideas
- Be aware of the reasoning behind each solution
- Encourage outside input of ideas in the product discovery process
- Generate and prioritize ideas based on the identified user needs
An Opportunity Solution Tree helps teams structure their product discovery and prevent them from being distracted by a random bright idea presented during brainstorming. With an OST, you can go back and forth to experiment, evaluate key results, and better understand what you are planning to achieve and why.
