- What is an OST, and how do teams use them today?
- What are the current challenges teams face when working with OSTs?
- What could it look like to get more out of an OST?
What is an OST?
An Opportunity Solution Tree (OST) is a visual framework for identifying higher quality solutions with a greater probability of generating business and customer value. And another way to look at them… OSTs are decision trees where the root is the desired outcome, the branches are discovery, and the output is better solutions.
How do teams build OSTs today?
Manual OSTs
Good ol’ fashion analog.- Pencil & Paper
- Whiteboard & Marker
- Sticky Notes
Digital OSTs
Digital OSTs are the most common form of OST and are likely a direct result of a global pandemic and the rise of remote work. The following is a list of digital whiteboarding tools teams use. If you use something different, let us know at [support@vistaly.com][support], and we’ll get this updated.- Miro
- Mural
- Lucidchats
- FigJam
- Jamboard
What are the current challenges when working with OSTs?
Metadata
It’s common when creating opportunities to want to add more information than would reasonably fit in the tree. Teams that value persisting additional information tend to add links to external systems better suited for documentation and place them within the body of the opportunity cards in the tree. This additional metadata supports the opportunity and can assist in prioritization and other efforts.- Who said what, when?
- How big of a pain point was it?
- What was the context?
- Quotes.
- How many users expressed the pain point or desire?
- Which opportunities matter to specific users or user groups?
- Is this opportunity duplicated elsewhere?
- Are there similar opportunities to this one but explored by another team or explored in the past?
- Which pain points do users express most?
Locating Information
After working with an OST for more than a few weeks, the chances are the tree will grow quite large. Teams tend to manage multiple separate trees to help reduce noise, often one per outcome. While partitioning can help, each “outcome” can still produce hundreds of opportunities, solutions, and assumptions, often resulting in time spent locating items within the tree. The next step? Most whiteboard tools offer some version of text search, but the potential for significant improvement is there. Say that you want to find something in the tree, but you’re unsure where it’s at or if it’s even there. You could scan it or use ctrl-f and search for specific text (depending on the whiteboarding tool). What if you wanted to search for only opportunities, ones you created in the past week or two, and perhaps you’d like to also search through supporting material as well. It would be helpful if searching could occur across multiple facets, not just text within the OST.Sharing Information
Creating a shared understanding of customer opportunities leads to better team alignment and more effective decisions. It helps generate buy-in and provides context for problems before designing or engineering solutions. Here are some methods teams use today to share that information.- Share screenshots of portions of a tree and any additional context (verbal or written).
- Synthesize the content into an easier-to-digest artifact for the audience.
- Synchronously walk team members through the tree and answer questions.
Unmoderated exploration
Imagine sharing an OST with a brand new team member, one new to the business and maybe even the industry. What questions would they have after reviewing it? This thought came from observing a few instances of an OST “cold read” from stakeholders, engineers, contractors, consultants, etc… Here are some questions that have come up in unmoderated settings.- Why was this opportunity prioritized this way?
- Why are these opportunities left unexplored?
- What is the difference between branches A vs B?
- What does this term or acronym mean?
Organization & Editing
It’s common to refine the opportunity space in an OST. Refinement happens when consolidating, refactoring, restructuring, or decoupling opportunities. These actions usually follow interviews and comparing new findings to the current opportunity space. The next step? When making changes, it’s helpful to have your tree redrawn to account for them, keeping everything clean and easy to follow. Some digital whiteboarding tools have made progress in helping trees stay organized, but most continue to lack the features that make organization easy and intuitive by default. We believe the correct solution to this problem prioritizes consistency over infinite flexibility.Change Management (OST Version Control?)
Each OST provides a snapshot in time of decisions and research that led to solutions built. Teams continuously build up their understanding of the opportunity space and make adjustments. How do teams communicate additions and changes to the OST? This question gets at the heart of collaboration and change management. The next step? Similar to how Git is a distributed version control system for managing source code for products (not just a single feature), we see a future where product teams can continuously manage discovery work and decisions in one system with higher integrity. Providing a way to be more aware of specific adjustments in the opportunity space can improve the overall collaboration in synchronously and asynchronously settings.Insights
Teams often export validated solutions from their OSTs into a project management system. Typically these solutions are viewed as “epics” or “projects” within those systems and are broken down into task level items. It’s not uncommon for teams to pull together some form of roadmap around the higher-level solutions. The next step? Simplifying the tree into actionable insights is an area where whiteboard OSTs (physical or digital) fail without tedious manual work. These tools can show relationships but fail to deliver on more complex tasks like:- Operationalizing and automating downstream work
- Highlighting areas of improvement
- Synthesizing discovery related insights
- Programmatically automating a next/now/later roadmap can happen
- Making best practice recommendations is possible
- Surfacing valuable and consolidated conclusions become something within reach
- Highlighting or preventing anti-patterns can be achieved