The Power of Opportunity Mapping

As you collect customers’ stories, you are going to hear about countless needs, pain points, and desires. Our customers’ stories are rife with gaps between what they expect and how the world works. Each gap represents an opportunity to serve your customer. However, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and not know where to start. Even if you worked tirelessly in addressing opportunity after opportunity for the rest of your career, you would never fully satisfy your customers’ desires. This is why digital products are never complete. How do we decide which opportunities are more important than others? How do we know which should be addressed now and which can be pushed to tomorrow? It’s hard to answer either of these questions if we don’t first take an inventory of the opportunity space.

A single customer story might elicit dozens of opportunities. If you interview continuously, your opportunity space will always be evolving—expanding as you learn about new needs, contracting as you address known problems, and gaining clarity as you learn more about specific pain points. Mapping the opportunity space is a critical activity. Finding the best path to your desired outcome is an ill-structured problem (introduced in Chapter 2) and requires that we first structure or frame the problem space before we can dive into solving it. Mapping the opportunity space is how we give structure to the ill-structured problem of reaching our desired outcome.

It’s easy, however, to bounce from one opportunity to the next, reacting to every need or pain point we hear about. Most product teams are devoted to serving their customers, and, when they hear about a need or a pain point, they want to solve it. But our job is not to address every customer opportunity. Our job is to address customer opportunities that drive our desired outcome. This is how we create value for our business while creating value for our customers. Limiting our work to only the opportunities that might drive our desired outcome is what ensures that our products are viable over the long run and not just desirable in the moment.

Our goal should be to address the customer opportunities that will have the biggest impact on our outcome first. To do this, we need to start by taking an inventory of the possibilities. In the first quote that opens this chapter, John Dewey, an American educational philosopher, encourages us to “carry on systematic and protracted inquiry.” Rather than jumping to the first need that we might address, Dewey argues, good thinking requires that we explore our options—that we carry out a systematic search for longer than we feel comfortable. We should compare and contrast the impact of addressing one opportunity against the impact of addressing another opportunity. We want to be deliberate and systematic in our search for the highest-impact opportunity.

In the second quote that opens this chapter, cognitive psychologist Barbara Tversky reminds us that structure “gets done, undone, and redone.” As the opportunity space grows and evolves, we’ll have to give structure to it again and again. As we continue to learn from our customers, we’ll reframe known opportunities to better match what we are hearing. As we better understand how our customers think about their world, we’ll move opportunities from one branch of the tree to another. We’ll rephrase opportunities that aren’t specific enough. We’ll group similar opportunities together. These tasks will require rigorous critical thinking, but the effort will help to ensure that we are always addressing the most impactful opportunity.

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to take an inventory of the opportunities that you are hearing in your interviews, and you’ll learn how to give structure to the opportunity space in a way that ensures that you are always marching toward your desired outcome.