Are you ready to elevate your product team’s critical thinking and decision-making skills? Teresa Torres, author of Continuous Discovery Habits, presented a groundbreaking approach at Mind the Product London, focusing on a powerful concept: compare and contrast. This method, embodied in the Opportunity Solution Tree framework, helps teams move beyond subjective opinions and “whether or not” decisions, towards a more structured and effective product discovery process. Let’s delve into how embracing compare and contrast can transform your product strategy.
In her engaging talk at Mind the Product, Teresa Torres shared a relatable story that highlights a common pitfall in product development – jumping to solutions without thoroughly evaluating opportunities. This narrative perfectly sets the stage for understanding the importance of critical thinking and the compare and contrast approach.
The Google Maps Misconception: Why “Cool” Isn’t Always Effective
Back in 2008, as a product manager for online alumni communities, Torres faced the challenge of declining user engagement after the initial launch excitement. Alumni associations loved the product, but alumni, the end-users, weren’t sticking around. User research revealed that alumni enjoyed sending messages within their community, seeking advice and connections.
Image alt text: Frustrated alumni in Dallas receiving irrelevant spam emails about Chicago bikes, Boston rentals, and San Francisco internships, highlighting the need for targeted communication.
However, a critical issue emerged: message relevance. Alumni were inundated with irrelevant messages – job postings in different cities, items for sale far away. The system facilitated spamming entire alumni networks, leading to user frustration and decreased engagement. The team recognized the need to reduce unwanted messages to boost engagement.
When Torres initiated a brainstorming session to tackle this spam problem, an engineer named Seth proposed integrating Google Maps. His reasoning? It would be “cool” and drive engagement, despite not directly addressing the spam issue.
Image alt text: Humorous depiction of brainstorming gone wrong, emphasizing the challenge of evaluating ideas objectively and the pitfalls of brainstorming without critical comparison.
Torres was perplexed. How would Google Maps solve the spam problem? Seth admitted it wouldn’t, but argued its “coolness” factor would boost engagement. The team, swayed by the novelty, agreed. This experience highlighted a crucial lesson: building “cool stuff” isn’t enough. It’s about solving real user problems and making informed decisions by comparing and contrasting different approaches.
This story isn’t about right versus wrong ideas, but about the product development process itself. Torres, now a product discovery coach, realized this scenario reflects a widespread issue: teams struggle to effectively move from desired outcomes to impactful solutions. They often miss the critical step of comparing and contrasting both opportunities and solutions.
The Critical Thinking Gap: Why Product Teams Struggle
Torres deconstructs the common pitfalls that hinder effective product development and critical thinking, emphasizing the lack of compare and contrast in the process:
1. Falling in Love with Initial Ideas
It’s human nature to become attached to our own ideas. We generate a solution quickly upon identifying a need, and the satisfaction of closing that loop makes us biased. This emotional attachment prevents objective evaluation. We fail to pause and ask, “Is this idea truly good?” – especially when comparing and contrasting it with alternatives. Seth’s enthusiasm for Google Maps and the team’s quick agreement exemplify this. They loved the “cool” idea and didn’t critically assess its relevance to the core problem.
2. Neglecting to Consider a Range of Ideas
When teams fixate on a single idea, they fail to explore a diverse range of solutions. The team, captivated by Google Maps, was ready to implement it immediately. While it might have been a good idea in isolation, research shows that generating more ideas leads to better ideas. More importantly, considering multiple options sets the stage for compare and contrast decision-making, moving away from a simple “yes/no” evaluation.
Image alt text: Visual representation emphasizing the power of idea quantity for quality, highlighting the benefits of generating multiple ideas for effective comparison.
3. Lack of Alignment on Target Opportunities
Seth’s Google Maps idea frustrated Torres because it seemed irrelevant to the spam problem. This disconnect stemmed from a lack of shared understanding about the core opportunity. The team wasn’t aligned on the problem they were trying to solve before brainstorming solutions. Seth focused on engagement broadly, while Torres aimed to reduce spam. Effective product development requires aligning the team around a shared understanding of the opportunity space before jumping to solutions, allowing for a more focused compare and contrast of relevant ideas.
4. Insufficient Consideration of Multiple Opportunities
Both Torres and Seth entered the brainstorming session with a pre-defined opportunity in mind. Torres focused on reducing spam, while Seth wanted to facilitate connections between local alumni. They each considered only one opportunity. Just as with solutions, evaluating opportunities requires a compare and contrast approach. Instead of asking, “Is this opportunity worth pursuing?”, the question should be, “Which of these opportunities looks most promising when compared and contrasted?”. Without exploring multiple opportunities, teams risk solving unimportant problems.
Image alt text: Diagram contrasting “whether or not” opportunity evaluation with the more effective “compare and contrast” approach for opportunity prioritization.
The Opportunity Solution Tree: Visualizing Critical Thinking and Compare and Contrast
To overcome these critical thinking challenges, Torres introduces the Opportunity Solution Tree. Inspired by Anders Ericsson’s research on expertise and mental representations, this tool helps teams externalize their thinking and align on a shared understanding. Ericsson argues that experts use sophisticated mental representations – pre-existing patterns of information – to make quick and effective decisions. The Opportunity Solution Tree acts as a visual representation, allowing teams to compare and contrast information, organize it, and make better product decisions collectively.
Image alt text: Opportunity Solution Tree diagram illustrating the hierarchical structure: Desired Outcome branching into Opportunities, then Solutions, and finally Experiments, emphasizing visual comparison across levels.
The Opportunity Solution Tree provides a framework for compare and contrast at each level of product discovery:
1. Start with a Clearly Defined Desired Outcome
The foundation of the tree is a clear desired outcome. For Torres’ alumni community, the goal was to “increase alumni engagement.” However, a desired outcome alone isn’t enough. The next step is to explore the “opportunity space” – the various avenues to achieve that outcome.
2. Opportunities Emerge from User Research: Compare and Contrast User Needs
Opportunities should be rooted in generative user research – customer interviews and observations. Framing opportunities as customer statements ensures a user-centered approach. Torres’ team, after conducting alumni interviews, could have identified opportunities like:
- “I get too much email.”
- “I’m moving to a new city and want to know who lives there.”
- “I need help finding a job.”
Instead of immediately prioritizing this list, the Opportunity Solution Tree encourages grouping similar opportunities for effective compare and contrast.
3. Simplifying Prioritization through Grouping: Compare and Contrast Opportunity Groups
Grouping similar opportunities simplifies prioritization. Torres groups the alumni needs into three categories:
- “I need help.”
- “I want to stay connected to my alma mater.”
- “I want to give back to the community.”
This higher-level grouping allows for a more strategic compare and contrast of broader opportunity areas. Prioritizing these groups becomes more manageable than comparing a long, disparate list. In this case, “I need help” emerged as the most prevalent opportunity.
Image alt text: Opportunity Solution Tree diagram showing grouped opportunities, enabling comparison of broader categories like “I need help,” “Stay Connected,” and “Give Back.”
4. Structuring Opportunities for Deeper Insights: Compare and Contrast Sub-Opportunities
The initial opportunity structure might not always be optimal. Torres realized that “I get too much email” was linked to “I need help” – overwhelming emails could deter alumni from offering help. Restructuring opportunities to reflect these connections is crucial. She merged “I want help” and “I want to give back” into “I want to connect with other alumni,” branching into:
- “I want to connect with alumni professionally.”
- “I want to connect with people near me.”
- “I don’t know who to connect with.”
This revised structure facilitates compare and contrast within a more cohesive framework, bringing both sides of the alumni network – help-seekers and help-providers – closer together. It allows for prioritizing different connection types (professional, location-based) without favoring one group over the other.
5. Focused Ideation on a Target Opportunity: Compare and Contrast Solutions
Once a target opportunity is selected (e.g., “I want to connect with people near me”), the focus shifts to generating solutions specifically for that opportunity. Instead of brainstorming solutions across the entire tree, which leads to shallow ideas, deep ideation for a single opportunity is key. This allows for generating a range of solutions to compare and contrast, setting up a “compare and contrast” decision for the best approach.
6. From Many to Few: Dot Voting for Initial Comparison
When faced with numerous solutions, dot voting helps narrow down the options to a manageable set of 3-5. This collaborative approach leverages the collective wisdom of the team for initial compare and contrast, quickly identifying the most promising ideas.
Image alt text: Diagram illustrating dot voting as a method to compare and select top solutions from a larger set, visually representing the selection process.
7. Experimentation for Solution Validation: Compare and Contrast with Data
The final stage involves using experiments to compare and contrast the top solutions. Instead of experimenting to validate a single idea (“whether or not” decision), experiments should help choose between a set of promising solutions. This involves identifying key assumptions for each solution and designing experiments to test those assumptions.
For example, solutions for connecting local alumni could be:
- Recommending recipients based on location.
- Auto-matching messages with relevant recipients.
- Sending messages to friends of friends.
Experiments would then test assumptions like:
- Will users trust location-based recommendations? (Prototype testing)
- Can the system accurately predict message recipients? (Feasibility experiments)
- Are friends-of-friends more likely to help? (Data analysis)
This comparative experimentation provides data-driven insights to compare and contrast solution effectiveness, moving beyond subjective opinions.
The Power of Compare and Contrast: Benefits of the Opportunity Solution Tree
The Opportunity Solution Tree, with its emphasis on compare and contrast, offers numerous benefits:
- Navigating Opinion Battles: Provides a structured framework for objective evaluation, moving beyond subjective opinions.
- Framing Decisions Effectively: Shifts from “whether or not” decisions to “compare and contrast” decisions, leading to more informed choices.
- Discovery Roadmap: Acts as a visual roadmap for product discovery, aligning teams and communicating strategy.
- Improved Critical Thinking: Encourages a systematic approach to problem-solving, reducing cognitive biases.
Image alt text: Summary slide highlighting the key benefits of Opportunity Solution Trees: navigating opinions, framing decisions, serving as a roadmap, and fostering team alignment.
Getting Started: Embrace Compare and Contrast in Your Product Discovery
To implement the Opportunity Solution Tree and leverage the power of compare and contrast, follow these steps:
- Define a clear desired outcome.
- Map the opportunity space through user research.
- Structure opportunities for meaningful comparison.
- Prioritize a target opportunity through row-by-row comparison.
- Focus ideation on the target opportunity.
- Use dot voting for initial solution comparison.
- Employ experiments to compare and contrast solutions with data.
By embracing the compare and contrast approach and utilizing the Opportunity Solution Tree, product teams can make more informed, data-driven decisions, ultimately leading to more successful and impactful products. Start building your tree today and transform your product discovery process.
For further reading and research sources mentioned in Teresa Torres’ talk, you can find a comprehensive list here.
Image alt text: Teresa Torres inviting audience engagement and feedback on using Opportunity Solution Trees, fostering a community of practice and continuous learning.
