The Discovery Space

Opportunity Cards are at the heart of Vistaly’s discovery process. They represent the voice of your customer by capturing their needs, pain points, and desires in a structured format that helps your team prioritize effectively.

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Opportunity Cards

Opportunity Cards document customer problems, needs, or desires worth solving. They are created based on:

• Customer conversations and interviews
• User feedback collection

Whereas product usage metrics in your Value Exchange Model tell you what’s happening, Opportunities tell you why it’s not happening more (or less, or faster, etc.)

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Opportunity Hierarchy

Opportunity Cards in Vistaly are typically child cards of:

• KPI cards – A product metric that would improve if you addressed the Opportunity. This allows you to keep a structured backlog.
• Goal cards – A time-bound Goal/Outcome/Key Result the team is actively working to achieve.
• Parent Opportunities – Larger opportunities that can be broken down into more specific sub-opportunities

This hierarchical structure allows for transforming complex problems into manageable component, showing a clear relationship between business goals and customer needs. Additionally, the hierarchy provides a structure that makes prioritization more impactful. Instead of priortizing a flat list of features, you move closer to the problems worth solving and prioritize those first.

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Opportunity Space Example

Imagine you’re working on a mobile app that delivers content to users. Your app includes a handful of ways for users to find the content they what watch, read, or listen to. You determine and set your primary outcome to be improving the number of searches that return a successful result. Then after some customer discovery, you:

• Identified two top-level opportunities
• Broken down one opportunity into multiple sub-opportunities

This breakdown transforms complex problems into manageable opportunity areas that are easier to evaluate and prioritize.

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Sizing Opportunities

Vistaly offers two primary methods to size and prioritize opportunities:

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Insight Count Method

When adding insights from customer interviews or feedback, an insight count will display on the face of each card. The insight count can be used as a proxy to frequency, reach, and impact potential.

Pro Tip 💡**:** Insight count will only display when is enabled in card settings

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Custom Fields Method

For more robust analysis, custom fields allow you to evaluate opportunities across multiple dimensions. Default custom fields for Opportunity Cards include:

Pro Tip 💡: Find the right balance with custom fields. Too many can slow down your process, while too few might not provide enough context for decision-making.

Pro Tip 💡: Custom fields will only display when they are enabled in card settings. Some custom fields will only display with data.

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Communicating Commitment

Once opportunities have been prioritized, use statuses to communicate when and if the team will address them. Opportunities support the following status:

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Opportunity Space Best Practices

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Avoid solutions disguised as outcomes (Binary Outcomes)

A common pitfall is creating “binary outcomes” that are actually solutions in disguise. For example, “Launch the AI Chatbot” is a solution, not an outcome. This matters because starting with solutions bypasses discovery and prevents finding the best ways to solve customer problems.

Pro Tip 💡: When you catch yourself proposing a solution as an outcome, ask “Why do we want this?” to uncover the underlying value you want to provide.

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Embrace Imperfect Measurement

When you’re working in a low data environment you may not have the data you need to even set a measurable outcome. You don’t need perfect metrics to get started:

• Begin with a directional outcome like “improve search discovery”
• Start customer conversations and analyze available data (but timebox it)
• Refine your measurement approach as you learn more

This approach works particularly well for new products with limited usage data, legacy systems without proper instrumentation, and novel customer workflows.

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Know When to Skip Discovery

Not every opportunity requires extensive discovery. Consider skipping or limiting discovery when:

• The solution is mandated (regulatory requirements)
• The problem space is well-understood with extensive prior research
• Making minor improvements to existing features with few assumptions

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Top-level Opportunities

Top-level Opportunities sit directly under an outcome in your opportunity space. They frame your discovery work and can be broken down into more specific sub-opportunities. Teams often apply segmentation techniques to these top-level opportunities, creating a structured layer that makes it easier to organize and prioritize customer problems. Customer Journey Step This approach segments opportunities according to the steps in your customer’s journey when using your product or service. How to implement:

• Map out the key steps in your customer journey from beginning to end
• Create a top-level opportunity for each significant step
• Validate your journey map with actual customer input

Job (Jobs To Be Done) The Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework focuses on understanding what “job” customers are trying to accomplish when they use your product. How to implement:

• Frame top-level opportunities around the core jobs your customers need to get done
• Focus on the progress the customer is trying to make in a particular circumstance

Actor / Role This approach organizes opportunities based on the different roles or personas that interact with your product. How to implement:

• Identify all key stakeholders who engage with your product
• Create top-level opportunities for each distinct role
• Consider both primary users and secondary stakeholders

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Solution Cards

Solutions are actions taken to address an Opportunity. This can be launching a new feature, improving an existing feature, improving documentation, and so on. Popular Terms:

• Solution (Default in Vistaly)
• Bet
• Feature

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Communicating Commitment

Once solutions have been ideated, use statuses to communicate when and if the team will implment them. Solutions support the following status: Note: Using “Later” for Solutions is generally discouraged. The “Later” status is more appropriate for Opportunities (problems) where you’ve committed to solving them but haven’t yet fully defined the problem space or solution approach.

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Assumption Cards

An assumption is a belief accepted as true without definitive proof. Every proposed idea inherently contains multiple assumptions that should be identified and validated. Below are common categories of assumptions that teams should consider: Additional Considerations:

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Experiment (Assumption Test) Cards

Experiments provide evidence to de-risk high-risk assumptions. As a result, they save time, money, and energy by preventing investment in a solution that will give little to no return on investment. Tip: Consider running experiments on assumptions with weak evidence AND would run a high risk of project failure if not correctly understood.

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Example Tests

The goal of assumption tests are to provide a lightweight way to derisk risky assumptions. Here are some common types of tests: Note: These test types can be combined or customized based on the specific assumption being tested and the required level of confidence.

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Communicating Status

Once solution assumptions have been identified, use experiment (assumption test) statuses to communicate how tests are progressing. Experiments support the following statuses:

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Common Questions

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Q: How many levels of opportunities should there be?

While there is no hard and fast rule on how many levels of opportunities should be in an opportunity space, we’ve found that between 2-4 is common.

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Q: How many opportunities should we have?

Once again, there is no hard and fast rule. At each level you should have more than one. If you have too many straight lines of opportunities, they are typically one opportunity and can be consolidated. Going broad with the opportunity space can help you see a fuller picture

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Q: Do opportunities change over time?

Yes. The opportunity space is dyanmic, customer needs are constantly changing. This is why it’s helpful to connect customer quotes and other insights to opporutnities. When it’s time to revisit them, those insight will bring you back to the original context. Use them to determine relevancy. Many times you may also find when looking at quotes that an opportunity is really two or more opportunities.

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Q: Should we test all of our assumptions?

No. Focus on testing assumptions that are both high-risk (would cause project failure if incorrect) and have weak existing evidence. Testing every assumption would be inefficient and delay progress. Prioritize experiments for assumptions where the cost of being wrong outweighs the cost of running the test.