Opportunity

What is an Opportunity?

Opportunities are customer needs, pain points, or desires that, if addressed, will help you to achieve an Outcome (aka Key Result).

Speaking directly with users through interviews is the best way to uncover Opportunities.

We’re here to help

Effectively conducting user interviews is an in-depth process with plenty of gotchas. Here are 10 tips to help improve your customer discovery process.

Examples

Good

• I feel like I’m stuck in my job, and there is no upward movement. I had a conversation with my manager last week about this and came away from it, still feeling stuck.
• When a new suspected threat is identified, a long manual process takes place to verify the threat, starting with a request to enter it in the threat database. This take upwards of 48 hours.

Bad

• Users need to be able to upload pictures to their personal albums.

Nesting Opportunities

You create nest Opportunities under “parent” Opportunities in order to group smaller, more specific customer problems together under a unifying problem theme.

Opportunity Statuses

Opportunity statuses communicate your commitment level to solving a customer problem. Here’s how to use the statuses:

• Identified - you’re aware that the Opportunity exists but have made no commitment to solving it. This is how all Opportunities start.
• Later - you’ve committed (for now) to solving the Opportunity. It might be months or even quarters until you start researching the Opportunity in any real way.
• Next - when you’re actively doing discovery work on an Opportunity.
• Now - we actually recommend that only Solutions get the Now status