Chapter Six: Mapping the Opportunity Space

Ahmed Guijou, a product director at Seera Group, had his world turned upside down overnight. He wasn’t the only one. It was March 2020, and the COVID-19 pandemic had exploded around the world. Countries instituted stay-at-home orders, businesses shuttered, and travel ground to a halt. Before the pandemic, Guijou’s team was on a mission to help “customers book their dream vacation or their business-trip accommodations in the easiest way possible.” Once the pandemic hit, Saudi Arabia, home to most of Seera Group’s customers, closed its borders, and Guijou’s team saw their hotel-bookings business drop off overnight.

However, it wasn’t all bad news. They noticed that some of their customers started looking for alternative accommodations closer to home. Instead of booking hotels and apartments in foreign countries, their customers were starting to book Istrahas. Istraha means “resting place” in Arabic and generally refers to a large property with an outdoor area, barbecue, and a pool. Guijou’s team, in previous customer interviews, had already uncovered that these properties were often used as day rentals to host social gatherings near home. While customers were no longer booking hotel accommodations, demand for Istrahas grew. Customers were looking for a safe place to connect with friends and family in the midst of a pandemic.

If Guijou and his team were to react to this shift in customer behavior, they had a lot to learn and little time to do so. Their marketplace had little Istraha inventory, and the team needed to figure out how to entice hosts to share their properties and how to get guests to consider their platform as the place to book. Guijou’s team turned to their continuous discovery habits to guide them. They started interviewing Istraha hosts and guests. They uncovered countless opportunities on both sides of the marketplace. Rather than getting overwhelmed, they started mapping out the needs of each group on respective opportunity solution trees. They spent a few weeks collecting and sorting opportunities until patterns started to emerge. Guijou’s team started grouping similar opportunities together. They paid particular attention to the needs, pain points, and desires that were specific to Istraha rentals. With each interview, the structure of the opportunity space continued to evolve.

When they felt they had a good understanding of the opportunity space, they took a step back to assess where they were. They looked for overlap between what hosts and guests each needed. They considered what their competition did well and where they saw gaps where they could compete. They started to see how they could leverage their existing strengths to play in this space.

By mapping out the opportunity space, Guijou’s team was able to quickly assess where they could have an impact. In a few short weeks, they went from watching their business get disrupted overnight to identifying a new market opportunity and developing a product strategy for how they could tap into it.²⁷ That’s the power of opportunity mapping.