Product development is fraught with decisions. From prioritizing features to choosing the right opportunities, product teams are constantly making choices that shape the future of their products. However, not all decision-making approaches are created equal. This article will compare and contrast three common, yet often flawed, decision-making approaches and introduce a more effective alternative: the Opportunity Solution Tree. By understanding the pitfalls of these traditional methods, product teams can adopt better strategies to drive product success.
The Pitfalls of Common Decision-Making Approaches
Many product teams stumble into ineffective decision-making patterns. These approaches, while seemingly intuitive, can lead to wasted resources, misaligned teams, and products that miss the mark. Let’s examine three of these problematic approaches:
1. The Idea-Driven Approach: Falling in Love with the First Solution
It’s human nature to get excited about ideas, especially our own. In product development, this can manifest as the idea-driven approach. Teams using this approach often jump directly to solutions as soon as a problem or need is identified. They brainstorm, generate ideas, and quickly latch onto the first one that seems promising or exciting, often without thoroughly evaluating its merits or considering alternatives.
As Teresa Torres, a product discovery coach, illustrates in a story from her time as a product manager:
In her experience with an alumni community startup, when faced with declining user engagement, an engineer enthusiastically suggested integrating Google Maps. While the engineer believed it would be “cool” and drive engagement, the idea was not directly related to the core problem of spam messages that was hindering user experience. The team, caught up in the novelty of the idea, risked pursuing a solution that didn’t address the real issue.
This example highlights a key weakness of the idea-driven approach: it prioritizes excitement and novelty over problem-solving and strategic alignment. Teams become enamored with an idea, neglecting to ask crucial questions like: “Does this idea actually solve the user problem?” or “Is this the best way to achieve our desired outcome?”. This can lead to building features that are technically interesting but ultimately fail to deliver value to users or the business.
2. The Single Opportunity Focus Approach: Limiting the Scope of Exploration
Another common pitfall is the single opportunity focus approach. This occurs when teams fixate on a single perceived opportunity or problem without exploring a broader range of possibilities. They might conduct user research or analyze data, but interpret the findings narrowly, leading them to believe there is only one path forward.
In the same alumni community example, Torres and her engineer, Seth, both entered a brainstorming session with pre-conceived notions of the primary opportunity. Torres was focused on reducing spam to increase engagement, while Seth was interested in helping alumni connect locally.
Both were focused on improving alumni engagement, but they had different underlying assumptions about the most critical opportunity to address. Torres believed reducing spam was paramount, while Seth saw value in fostering local connections. By narrowly focusing on their individual perspectives, they risked missing other potentially more impactful opportunities to increase engagement.
The single opportunity focus approach limits creativity and can result in teams solving the wrong problems. By not considering a diverse set of opportunities, teams may miss out on identifying more significant user needs or more strategic pathways to achieve their desired outcomes. It’s crucial to broaden the scope and explore multiple opportunities before committing to a specific direction.
3. The “Whether or Not” Decision Approach: Evaluating Ideas in Isolation
Finally, many teams fall into the trap of “whether or not” decision-making. This approach involves evaluating ideas or opportunities in isolation, asking questions like “Is this a good idea?” or “Is this opportunity worth pursuing?”. While seemingly straightforward, this method lacks the comparative context needed for effective prioritization.
Judging an idea as “good” or “bad” in isolation is subjective and difficult. “Good” is a relative term. Is a feature “good”? It depends on the alternatives, the user needs, and the overall product strategy. Asking “whether or not” questions makes it challenging to objectively assess the true potential of an idea or opportunity.
To illustrate this, consider the question: “Is integrating Google Maps a good idea for our alumni community platform?”. It’s hard to answer this question definitively without comparing it to other potential solutions. Is it better than, say, improving message filtering, or creating interest-based groups? The “whether or not” approach doesn’t provide the framework for this crucial comparison.
Shifting to a “Compare and Contrast” Approach with the Opportunity Solution Tree
To overcome the limitations of these flawed decision-making approaches, product teams need to adopt a more structured and comparative method. The Opportunity Solution Tree offers a powerful framework for shifting from “whether or not” decisions to “compare and contrast” decisions.
The Opportunity Solution Tree is a visual tool that helps teams:
- Start with a Desired Outcome: Clearly define the objective the team is trying to achieve.
- Explore the Opportunity Space: Identify and map out various opportunities (user needs, pain points, desires) that could contribute to the desired outcome.
- Generate and Evaluate Solutions: Brainstorm a range of solutions for a chosen target opportunity and compare their potential effectiveness.
- Prioritize and Experiment: Use experiments to compare and contrast the most promising solutions and validate assumptions.
Instead of asking “Is Google Maps integration a good idea?”, the Opportunity Solution Tree encourages asking: “Which of these potential solutions for reducing spam will be most effective in increasing alumni engagement?“. This shift to a comparative question forces teams to consider multiple options and evaluate them against each other.
Similarly, when exploring opportunities, instead of asking “Is reducing spam a worthwhile opportunity?”, the framework promotes asking: “Which of these opportunities – reducing spam, improving local connections, or enhancing professional networking – offers the greatest potential to boost alumni engagement?“. This comparative approach ensures that teams are focusing on the most impactful problems and exploring a wider range of strategic options.
By visualizing the relationship between desired outcomes, opportunities, and solutions, the Opportunity Solution Tree facilitates a more strategic and less biased decision-making process. It encourages teams to:
- Consider Multiple Options: Generate and evaluate a diverse set of opportunities and solutions.
- Prioritize Based on Comparison: Make decisions by comparing and contrasting alternatives rather than evaluating them in isolation.
- Align Around Shared Understanding: Create a shared visual representation of the problem space and potential solutions, fostering team alignment and communication.
- Use Data to Validate Decisions: Employ experiments to gather data and objectively compare the effectiveness of different solutions.
The Opportunity Solution Tree helps teams move away from subjective opinions and gut feelings towards data-informed, comparative decision-making. It provides a roadmap for product discovery, guiding teams to explore the problem space systematically, generate creative solutions, and make strategic choices based on evidence and comparison.
Conclusion: Embracing Comparative Decision-Making for Product Success
The idea-driven, single opportunity focus, and “whether or not” decision-making approaches, while common, often lead to suboptimal product outcomes. By contrast, adopting a “compare and contrast” approach, exemplified by the Opportunity Solution Tree, empowers product teams to make more informed, strategic, and user-centered decisions.
By consciously shifting from evaluating ideas and opportunities in isolation to comparing and contrasting them within a structured framework, product teams can unlock greater creativity, improve prioritization, and ultimately build more successful products that truly meet user needs and achieve business goals. Embracing comparative decision-making is a crucial step towards building a more effective and impactful product strategy.
