Avoid These Common Anti-Patterns

As you assess and prioritize the opportunity space, be sure to avoid these common anti-patterns.

Delaying a decision until there is more data. Even when I remind teams that choosing a target opportunity is a two-way door decision and that, if all of the opportunities on your tree emerged from customer interviews, there are no wrong decisions, some teams still get bogged down in the data. They want to look into one more thing. Wait for one more data report. Ask one more person for input. The intent is good. We do want to be data-informed. But we also want to move forward. We’ll learn more from testing our decisions than we will from trying to make perfect decisions. The best way to prevent this type of analysis paralysis is to time-box your decision. Give yourself an hour or two or, at most, a day or two. Then decide, based on what you know today, and move on. Trust that you’ll course-correct if you get data down the road that tells you that you made a less-than-optimal decision.

Over-relying on one set of factors at the cost of the others. Some teams are all about opportunity sizing. Others focus exclusively on what’s most important to their customers. Many teams forget to consider company factors and choose opportunities that will never get organizational buy-in. The four sets of factors (opportunity sizing, market factors, company factors, and customer factors) are designed to be lenses to give you a different perspective on the decision. Use them all.

Working backwards from your expected conclusion. Some teams go into this exercise with a conclusion in mind. As a result, they don’t use the lenses to explore the possibilities and instead use them to justify their foregone conclusion. This is a waste of time. Go into this exercise with an open mind. You’ll be surprised by how often you come away from it with a new perspective.