Sample frameDay 236·Product · Discovery

Morning. Your roadmap lists what you'll build. It doesn't say what any of it is a bet on.

Product.

The Opportunity Solution Tree

5 min read·Apply by lunch

The question

Pick any item on the roadmap you're working to right now and say out loud which outcome it's meant to move and which customer need it addresses — then work down the list item by item, and how far do you get before the honest answer becomes 'because it was already on the roadmap'?

The idea

Teresa Torres is a product discovery coach who has spent a decade teaching teams to interview customers on a weekly rhythm rather than in occasional bursts. She introduced the opportunity solution tree on her site Product Talk in 2016 and built her 2021 book, Continuous Discovery Habits, around it. The tree has four layers. At the root sits one desired outcome — a change in customer behaviour you're trying to produce, not a feature you're trying to ship. Beneath it hangs the opportunity space: the needs, pain points and desires you've actually heard in interviews, structured so that broad ones branch into narrower ones. Under a chosen opportunity sit the solutions that might address it, and under those the assumption tests that would tell you whether any of them holds. Read upwards, every item can now answer the question a feature list never can — what is this a bet on. The trap is prioritising in the solution space. Teams rank features against each other when the features serve different customers, different problems and wildly different sizes of prize; the comparison that carries information is between opportunities first, and only then between several solutions to the same one.

The framework

01
Start with an outcome, not a wish list.
The root of the tree is a single outcome, and it has to be something customers do rather than something you build — the output-versus-outcome distinction Day 12 already made. What the tree adds is a test of its own: whether you could plausibly reach that outcome by more than one route. If only one exists, someone has already decided, and everything hanging beneath is decoration — a diagram drawn to justify the thing that was always going to happen.
02
The opportunity space is built from transcripts, not from a workshop.
Opportunities are needs, pain points and desires you have heard a named person say. Torres's method is a weekly cadence of interviews, each mined for the moments where something was hard or slow, and what she listens for is a story about a specific occasion — the day it happened, what they tried instead — because that is the detail an opportunity has to carry to be solvable. Then you structure them, letting broad needs branch into narrower ones until the smallest are small enough to act on. A tree built from what the room believes looks identical to one built from evidence, and nothing tells you which you're holding.
03
Which opportunity, before which feature?
Prioritisation happens between opportunities, before anyone costs a feature. Torres weighs four things: how many customers the opportunity touches and how often; what addressing it would do to your position against rivals; how well it fits the company's strategy; and how much customers care relative to how satisfied they already are by the alternatives. Effort is deliberately absent, because you haven't chosen a solution yet and can't know what one costs. Compare siblings on the same branch rather than trying to rank the whole tree at once.
04
Three solutions to one opportunity — never one.
For the opportunity you've chosen, generate at least three genuinely different solutions and evaluate them against each other. Paul Nutt, who spent years at Ohio State studying how organisations actually decide, found that most business decisions were framed as whether-or-not questions about a single option, and that those failed markedly more often than decisions weighing two or more alternatives. A lone idea gets judged on whether it sounds good. Three ideas get judged on which best serves the opportunity, and that second question is the one with an answer in it.

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