Take an Inventory of the Opportunity Space

With your distinct branches in place, we now want to take an inventory of the opportunities you have heard in your customer interviews. If you’ve been creating interview snapshots for each interview (as recommended in Chapter 5), you can simply review each interview snapshot. However, you don’t want to add every opportunity to your tree. Instead, for each opportunity, ask the following questions:

• Is this opportunity framed as a customer need, pain point, or desire and not a solution?
• Is this opportunity unique to this customer, or have we seen it in more than one interview?
• If we address this opportunity, will it drive our desired outcome?

If the answer to all three of these questions is “Yes,” you’ll want to add it to your opportunity solution tree. For now, simply group it under the branch in which it occurs. If it seems like it could live under more than one branch, reframe the opportunity to be more specific. You may even need to split it into multiple opportunities, one for each moment in which it occurs, so that each can be grouped under their respective branches.

For example, “The interface is hard to use” is way too broad of an opportunity. We could boil the ocean trying to address every usability issue in our product. Instead, we want to get more specific. Where did this pain point show up in your customer’s story? This may turn into several opportunities: “I can’t figure out how to find a specific show that I have in mind,” “I don’t like entering a show name using the remote,” or “I can’t remember what episode I watched last.” Each of these are more specific. They are easier problems to solve, and they now each live in only one spot on the tree.