Taming Opportunity Backlogs

Some teams are already capturing opportunities in an opportunity backlog—a prioritized list of opportunities. They prioritize their list of customer needs, pain points, and desires the same way they prioritize their user stories in their development backlog.

This is a great place to start. It’s better than working with only one opportunity at a time. However, it can be hard to prioritize a flat list of opportunities, because opportunities come in different shapes and sizes. Some opportunities are interrelated, while others are subsets of others.

If we continue with our streaming-entertainment example, we might start with the following list of opportunities:

• I can’t find anything to watch.
• I’m out of episodes of my favorite shows.
• I can’t figure out how to search for a specific show.
• I don’t know when a new season is available.
• The show I was watching is no longer available.
• I fell asleep, and several episodes kept playing.
• I want to watch my shows on my flight.
• I want to skip the show intro.
• Is this show any good?
• I want to know what my friends are watching.
• Who is that actor?
• I want to watch my shows on my train commute.

I don’t know how to compare “I can’t find anything to watch” with “I’m out of episodes of my favorite shows.” These opportunities are not distinct. Running out of episodes of your favorite show is a reason why you might not have anything to watch. But it’s not the only reason, so these aren’t exactly the same, either.

“I want to watch my shows on my flight” and “I want to watch my shows on my train commute” sound similar. Are these really the same opportunity? Maybe they can be combined into, “I want to watch on the go.” That might be right. Unless planes and trains introduce different constraints. I may need to be completely offline on a plane, whereas, on a train, I may still have cell data. I might have access to a power outlet on a plane, but not on a train. If these context differences are important to the experience, these opportunities are similar, but not the same. But how do I prioritize them against each other? Can I address them both at the same time?

“Is this show any good?” feels like a big, hard problem. How do we evaluate “good” for each individual viewer? “Who is that actor?” feels much easier. Should we always prioritize easy over hard? If so, when do we ever get to the hard problems that have the potential to differentiate us from our competitors and really drive our outcomes?

It’s hard to answer these questions when prioritizing opportunities of different shapes and sizes against each other. The opportunity space is too complex to manage as a flat list. Let’s turn to a better alternative.