OSTs Build Confidence in Knowing What to Do Next

As a product trio gains experience with opportunity solution trees, the shape of their tree will help guide their discovery work. The depth and breadth of the opportunity space reflects the team’s current understanding of their target customer. If our opportunity space is too shallow, it can guide us to do more customer interviews. A sprawling opportunity space, on the other hand, reminds us to narrow our focus. If we aren’t considering enough solutions for our target opportunity, we can hold an ideation session. If we don’t have enough assumption tests in flight, we can ramp up our testing.

While many teams work top-down, starting by defining a clear desired outcome, then mapping out the opportunity space, then considering solutions, and finally running assumption tests to evaluate those solutions, the best teams also work bottom-up. They use their assumption tests to help them evaluate their solutions and evolve the opportunity space. As they learn more about the opportunity space, their understanding of how they might reach their outcome (and how to best measure that outcome) will evolve. These teams work continuously, evolving the entire tree at once.

They interview week over week, continuing to explore the opportunity space, even after they’ve selected a target opportunity. They consider multiple solutions for their target opportunity, setting up good “compare and contrast” decisions. They run assumption tests across their solution set, in parallel, so that they don’t overcommit to less-than-optimal solutions. All along, they visualize their work on their opportunity solution tree, so that they can best assess what to do next.