Before I dive into opportunity discovery, here’s a quick update on my current discovery efforts to find my next adventure.

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Many thanks to all of you who responded to my email with suggestions. I got a few significant leads out of those connections that I’m pursuing. There were certainly some very interesting opportunities you helped me find.

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And a word of advice to everyone - the best time to nurture your network is when you’re not looking for your next gig. With one interesting exception, all the opportunities I’m pursuing came about because of a recommendation or reference from my network.

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Blindly applying to job ads rarely works. Getting help from and giving help to your network almost always does.

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Now on to the topic at hand…

Why opportunity discovery is important

If you work on internal products or in an IT setting, you may think of discovery as a cooler term for eliciting requirements.

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I know I was guilty of that line of thinking in the past. And I’m pretty sure I came to that conclusion because I worked in contexts where my product team was assigned a solution to deliver.

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But as I found myself in situations where my product team had to achieve an outcome, we needed to figure out how to make that happen.

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We were in a position where we could make a more informed decision. In order to do that, we needed to gather information about our customers, their problems, and constraints we faced. We also needed to organize all the information we collected and the ideas we generated.

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This is where opportunity discovery comes into play. When you have an intentional approach to opportunity discovery, you’re able to focus your research efforts so you’re collecting information that will guide you in the right direction.

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Once you have that information and need to identify your actions, you need some ways to organize those thoughts. I’m aware of two different tools to help you do that - opportunity solution trees, and impact maps.

Read on to find out an approach to opportunity discovery and to find out more about those two tools.

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Product Opportunity Discovery

Opportunity discovery is an often misunderstood concept – an enigma even within the product management community. Without a ubiquitous definition, Product professionals seem to sense a need to figure out what to build and we eventually end up with a roadmap, but Neal Cabage hasn’t seen a clear articulation of exactly what’s required or how to get from strategy to planning. To that end, Neal came up with this approach to opportunity discovery.

Opportunity Solution Trees

As Teresa Torres worked with teams to encourage them to do continuous discovery, she kept running into teams that understood the techniques involved in discovery, but had trouble tying all the activities together. She eventually realized that product discovery has two dimensions - discovering opportunities and discovering solutions.

To help teams organize their thoughts around discovering opportunities, Teresa created the opportunity solution tree. In this article she explains why she came up with the opportunity solution tree and how you can use it to guide your opportunity discovery efforts.

If you’d like an idea of how teams use opportunity solution trees Melissa Suzuno shares three stories of people using opportunity solution trees in a variety of contexts.

Impact Mapping

A primary way of making progress toward a particular outcome is influencing the behaviors that drive progress toward (or prevent progress toward) that outcome. Impact mapping combines mind mapping and strategic planning to help you do that. I put together an overview of Impact Mapping to introduce you to what it is and how you can use impact maps to guide your discovery efforts.

Isabelle Andrews shared her experiences using impact mapping to meet policy intent and user needs at the same time in the UK Department for Education.

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Thanks for Reading

Thanks again for reading InsideProduct.

If you have any comments or questions about the newsletter, or there’s anything you’d like me to cover, just reply to this email.

Talk to you in a couple of weeks,

Kent J. McDonald
Founder | KBP.Media