Assessing a Set of Opportunities

I recommend that teams assess opportunities using the following criteria: opportunity sizing, market factors, company factors, and customer factors.

Opportunity sizing helps us answer the questions: How many customers are affected and how often? However, we don’t need to size each opportunity precisely. This can quickly turn into a never-ending data-gathering mission. Instead, we want to size a set of siblings against each other. For each set that we are considering, we want to ask, “Which of these opportunities affects the most customers?” and “the most often?” We can and should make rough estimates here. You can use behavioral data (e.g., site analytics, sales-funnel analytics), support tickets, sample surveys, or even your interview snapshots, to quickly evaluate which opportunities are impacting the most customers.

It’s important, however, to distinguish how many customers from how often. Every customer might be impacted by an opportunity, but the need or pain point might arise only occasionally. Addressing this opportunity will have a different impact than addressing an opportunity that impacts some customers all the time.

Market factors help us evaluate how addressing each opportunity might affect our position in the market. Depending on the competitive landscape, some opportunities might be table stakes, while others might be strategic differentiators. Choosing one over the other will depend on your current position in the market. A missing table stake could torpedo sales, while a strategic differentiator could open up new customer segments. The key is to consider how addressing each opportunity positions you against your competitors. With market factors, we also want to consider any external trends (both opportunities and threats) that might impact which opportunity we might choose.³⁰ For example, our streaming-entertainment company might want to consider the impact of “cord-cutters” (i.e., the growing trend of cable subscribers canceling their service) on different opportunities. They might prioritize an opportunity like “I want to watch live sports” to grab some of this market.

Company factors help us evaluate the strategic impact of each opportunity for our company, business group, or team. Each organizational context is unique. Google might choose to address an opportunity that Apple would never touch. We need to consider our organizational context when assessing and prioritizing opportunities. We want to prioritize opportunities that support our company vision, mission, and strategic objectives over opportunities that don’t. We want to de-prioritize opportunities that conflict with our company values. We also want to consider the company’s political climate. We might need to spend a lot of political capital to gain support for a more controversial opportunity. If we aren’t willing to do that, we’ll want to choose another opportunity.

Company factors also apply at the business-group and team level. A business group might be your business unit, your department, your tribe, or even your product line. Your business group’s vision, mission, and strategic objectives might add additional constraints on what you may or may not choose. These same factors might apply at your team or squad level as well.

Across all three levels—company, business group, and team—you’ll also want to consider strengths and weaknesses. Some companies will be better positioned to tackle some opportunities over others. Some teams may have unique skills that give them an unfair advantage when tackling a specific opportunity. We want to take all of this into account when assessing and prioritizing opportunities.

Customer factors help us evaluate how important each opportunity is to our customers. If we interviewed and opportunity mapped well, every opportunity on our tree will represent a real customer need, pain point, or desire. However, not all opportunities are equally important to customers. We’ll want to assess how important each opportunity is to our customers and how satisfied they are with existing solutions.³¹ We want to prioritize important opportunities where satisfaction with the current solution is low, over opportunities that are less important or where satisfaction with current opportunities is high.