Opportunity Mapping

There's a million bad ways to prioritize what ideas to pursue. The worst—that is, least effective—involve some made-up formula usually consisting of things like business value, user value, and technical difficulty.

Just because this method is pervasive doesn't make it meaningful. It misses the point of prioritization entirely.

The job of a product company—and specifically product teams—is not to prioritize solutions. It's to create value for the cusotmer in a way that creates value for the business. Rarely does the business accomplish this goal through ranked ideas lists.

No matter how much you may believe it, your company is not a feature (or two or three) away from a radically better product. When we are output focused, we judge success based on what we deliver, and the emphasis is on what to build when.

But when we judge success based on what outcomes we drive for customers, it's less about what we deliver and more about how much of a customer problem we solve.

Opportunity maps provide a method for organizing our understanding of customer needs (e.g., users, admins, and buyers) and opportunities to deliver value to the customer and aligning those elements with the needs of the business.

• Create alignment across teams on what's most important now, next, and later:
  By focusing on outcomes, everyone knows what success looks like. Sales can talk confidently with customers about the future, knowing the business will be behind them. Product can do proper discovery to learn what will work. Operations can map gaps they'll need to fill to support customers. The focus on outcomes enables the business to forecast where it's going to go without making flawed commitments for what specifically it will build to get there.

• Enable clearer prioritization and greater focus:
  When your teams know what's most important, it's easy to avoid the overhead of investing in ideas that don't line up to that. There will always be some degree of work that falls outside the top priority, but creating structures and cultures that respect and reinforce the top priority are an unlock for everyone's contributions and productivity.
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• Generate faster speed-to-value for customers and the business:
  Opportunity maps make it much easier for your product teams and business to hone in on ideas that optimize customer value and speed to market. The ability to manage a portfolio of opportunities that enable both incremental and transformational value to customers is what creates a competitive advantage in the market.
  

• Identify the target users and buyers for your product
• Define what outcomes matter most for those entities
• Gather relevant product ideas into a common repository
• Categorize product ideas by outcome
• Assess the scope of impact and degree of pain for each outcome
• Assess the range of speed to value and the range of complexity to build and implement for the ideas aligned to the outcome
• Prioritize the most important user and buyer outcome to focus on
• Evaluate and prioritize the most valuable and viable opportunities within that outcome for design and development

The ROI calculation is variable to the pricing model of the product—subscription or transaction based, tier licensing, etc.

You can expect the following benefits from adopting an opportunity map in your product prioritization workflow:

• Improved customer retention: from more consistent delivery of customer value
• Increased NRR: from increasing pricing due to greater value delivery over time
• Higher sales win rates: from clearer messaging and evidence of customer value for your product
• Wider sales pipeline: from greater referrals and word of mouth about your business being able to solve customer problems better than competitors

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