Opportunity Solution Tree
It was developed by Teresa Torres and presented in her book Continuous Discovery Habits (2021). Torres had previously introduced it on her blog, Product Talk, from where it spread to product teams around the world.
Structure of the tree
The tree has four levels:
- Desired outcome: the business objective the team wants to achieve. It should be expressed as a measurable outcome, not as a feature.
- Opportunities: user problems, needs, or desires that, if addressed, would contribute to achieving the outcome. Each opportunity can contain more specific sub-opportunities.
- Solutions: specific ideas for addressing a particular opportunity. They only appear when the opportunity cannot be broken down into smaller sub-opportunities.
- Experiments: tests designed to validate or rule out the assumptions that make each solution viable, before building it.
How to use it
The OST is a living document that is updated as the team learns:
- Opportunities are identified through continuous research with users: interviews, observation, and data analysis. It is recommended to combine its use with interview snapshots, interview summaries that help identify recurring patterns.
- Before moving on to the solution, the team experiments to validate that it has properly understood the opportunity and that the proposed solution actually solves it.
Experiments are not complete prototypes: they are minimal tests designed to rule out flawed assumptions with the least possible effort.
Differences from the Impact Map
Both the OST and the Impact Map start from a desired outcome or goal. The main difference lies in their focus:
- The OST focuses on identifying opportunities (user problems or needs) and on experimenting with solutions for those opportunities before building them. It is especially useful for teams that practice continuous product discovery.
- The Impact Map focuses on identifying actors (who can contribute to the outcome), their possible actions, and the deliverables that would facilitate those actions. It is more useful for communicating product strategy to stakeholders.
Common mistake
Jumping from opportunities straight to solutions without experimenting. The value of the OST lies in explicitly separating the opportunity identification phase from the solution generation phase, and in validating solutions before building them. If the team uses the tree only to organize feature ideas without validating them, it loses the most valuable part of the method: reducing the risk of building the wrong thing.
References
- Torres, Teresa. (2021). Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value. Product Talk LLC.
See also
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