Opportunity Planning
What is it?
Opportunity Planning is the proactive and strategic process of identifying, evaluating, and selecting the most promising opportunities for product development. It's about shifting from a reactive approach – simply building what's asked – to a more forward-thinking strategy. Instead of just fulfilling feature requests, Opportunity Planning encourages us to actively seek out areas where we can create significant value for our users and achieve meaningful mission impact.
Think of it as intentionally scanning the horizon for the best problems to solve, not just the most obvious ones. It's about asking: "Where can we make the biggest difference?" and "What unmet needs can we address that will truly move the needle?"
To bring structure and focus to this process, we can leverage a few helpful approaches and tools. In this article, we'll explore some practical ways to implement Opportunity Planning, and introduce some frameworks that can be particularly valuable in guiding your efforts.
By using Opportunity Planning, we can move beyond simply building features and start strategically crafting solutions that truly resonate with our users and drive significant positive outcomes.
Why do it?
Stop building features that might be valuable, and start focusing on opportunities that are guaranteed to be impactful. Opportunity Planning is not just a "nice-to-have" – it's a must-have for any team serious about creating products that truly matter. When you do this right, you'll find you will:
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Focus on Building the Right Things: Opportunity Planning forces us to deeply understand user needs before we jump to solutions. This drastically reduces the risk of building features that no one actually wants or needs. By focusing on understanding user needs, we ensure we are solving real problems and creating genuine value, not just building features that seem like a good idea.
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Make Strategic Decisions and Maximize Impact: Opportunity Planning provides a framework for evaluating different paths and choosing the ones that align best with our overall mission and strategic goals. By visualizing the broader impact of our choices, we can prioritize opportunities that will have the greatest positive effect. This strategic focus is crucial for making the most of limited resources and ensuring we're working on things that truly matter.
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Reduce Waste and Improve Efficiency: By rigorously evaluating opportunities upfront, we can avoid the costly mistake of building features that ultimately don't deliver value. Opportunity Planning helps us identify and discard less promising ideas early in the process, saving significant time, effort, and resources that can then be focused on higher-impact opportunities.
In essence, Opportunity Planning is about being deliberate and strategic. It's about taking the time to understand the landscape of opportunities, prioritize based on user needs and mission impact, and ultimately, build products that are both valuable and effective, while minimizing wasted effort.
How to do it?
Opportunity Planning is about putting some structure around the often messy process of identifying and selecting what to build. Instead of just relying on intuition or reacting to the loudest voices, we can use practical approaches to guide our planning.
One powerful starting point is to deeply understand your users. Frameworks like Jobs to be Done (JTBD) (Learn More) help us shift our focus from features to understanding the fundamental "jobs" users are trying to accomplish. By asking "What job is the user hiring our product to do?", we can uncover unmet needs and identify truly valuable opportunities. User research methods, as discussed in our article on User Research, are also crucial here, allowing us to gather direct insights and build empathy for our users.
Once we have a better grasp of potential opportunities, we need ways to explore and structure our thinking. Opportunity Solution Trees (Learn More) provide a visual approach to break down broad opportunities into smaller, more manageable chunks, and then brainstorm potential solutions for each. This helps us map out the opportunity space and efficiently evaluate different paths forward.
To ensure our opportunity planning is strategically aligned and focused on delivering real impact, Impact Mapping (Learn More) is a valuable collaborative technique. Impact Mapping helps us connect our product roadmap to broader strategic goals by visualizing the actors involved, the impacts we want to create on those actors, and the deliverables (solutions) that will drive those impacts. This ensures we are always considering the bigger picture and prioritizing opportunities that contribute to meaningful outcomes.
Approaches like the Lean Startup methodology (Learn More) also encourage an iterative and efficient approach to opportunity planning and validation. By embracing build-measure-learn cycles, we can quickly test assumptions, gather feedback, and adapt our plans based on real-world data, ensuring we are continuously refining our understanding of the best opportunities to pursue.
Ultimately, "How to do it?" for Opportunity Planning is about thoughtfully combining user understanding, structured exploration, strategic alignment, and iterative validation. By incorporating these principles and leveraging frameworks like JTBD, Opportunity Solution Trees, and Impact Mapping (among others), we can move towards a more proactive, user-centric, and impactful approach to product development.