Chapter Seven: Prioritizing Opportunities, Not Solutions
“The build trap is when organizations become stuck measuring their success by outputs rather than outcomes. It’s when they focus more on shipping and developing features rather than on the actual value those things produce.”
— Melissa Perri
“When people create maps of an unknowable, unpredictable world, they face strong temptations toward either overconfident knowing or overly cautious doubt. Wisdom consists of an attitude toward one’s beliefs, values, knowledge, and information that resists these temptations through an ongoing balance between knowing and doubt.”
— Karl Weick
I’m standing on the stage at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, looking out at a sea of product people. I’m wrapping up a talk about how product teams can manage stakeholders throughout the discovery process. It’s the last talk of the day at Mind the Product. All we have left is the after-party, and I want to leave the crowd with an important takeaway. “You are never one feature away from success…” The crowd erupts with cheers. But I’m not done. I wait patiently for the crowd to quiet down. I continue, “…and you never will be.” The energy in the room is electric. I know people need to hear it, but I also know that saying it isn’t enough.
For too long, product teams have defined their work as shipping the next release. When we engage with stakeholders, we talk about our roadmaps and our backlogs. During our performance reviews, we highlight all the great features we implemented. The vast majority of our conversations take place in the solution space. We assume that success comes from launching features. This is what product thought leader Melissa Perri calls “the build trap.”28
This obsession with producing outputs is strangling us. It’s why we spend countless hours prioritizing features, grooming backlogs, and micro-managing releases. The hard reality is that product strategy doesn’t happen in the solution space. Our customers don’t care about the majority of our feature releases. A solution-first mindset is good at producing output, but it rarely produces outcomes.
Instead, our customers care about solving their needs, pain points, and desires. Product strategy happens in the opportunity space. Strategy emerges from the decisions we make about which outcomes to pursue, customers to serve, and opportunities to address. Sadly, the vast majority of product teams rush past these decisions and jump straight to prioritizing features. We obsess about the competition instead of about our customers. Our strategy consists of playing catch-up, and, no matter how hard we work, we always seem to fall further and further behind.
Fortunately, there’s a better way. With a well-structured opportunity space (see Chapter 6), a product trio is now well positioned to make strategic decisions about which opportunities to address, which customers to serve, and which path to take toward their desired outcome. This chapter will show you how.