OSTs Resolve the Tension Between Business Needs and Customer Needs

Opportunity solution trees help you resolve the tension between business needs and customer needs. You start by prioritizing your business need—creating value for your business is what ensures that your team can serve your customer over time. Next, the team should explore the customer needs, pain points, and desires that, if addressed, would drive that outcome. The key here is that the team is filtering the opportunity space by considering only the opportunities that have the potential to drive the business need. By mapping the opportunity space, the team is adopting a customer-centric framing for how they might reach their outcome.

The outcome and the opportunity space constrain the types of solutions the product trio might consider. This is what helps us avoid Wells Fargo’s fate and sets us up to create value for our customers and our business.