Opportunity Solution Trees

Many organisations find themselves lost in the gap between strategy and practical implementation. The Opportunity Solution Tree (OST) framework provides a powerful bridge between strategy and the day-to-day work, offering a structured methodology for discovering, organising, and prioritising product opportunities.

Understanding the Opportunity Solution Tree

Developed by product discovery coach Teresa Torres, the Opportunity Solution Tree is a visual thinking tool that connects desired outcomes to potential solutions through customer-focused opportunities. At its core, the OST helps teams make the critical distinction between outcomes (what we want to achieve), opportunities (customer needs or problems that, if addressed, would help achieve those outcomes), and solutions (specific ideas for addressing those opportunities).

The most common product management mistake I see is jumping directly from outcomes to solutions, skipping the crucial opportunity space entirely. This leap bypasses the rich territory of customer problems and needs where the most valuable innovation typically resides.

The Anatomy of an Opportunity Solution Tree

An Opportunity Solution Tree has a hierarchical structure with four key elements:

1. Outcome: The measurable business result you want to achieve, typically aligned with your North Star Metric or a key performance indicator.
2. Opportunities: Customer needs, problems, or desires that, if addressed, would contribute to achieving your outcome.
3. Solutions: Specific ideas for addressing the identified opportunities.
4. Experiments: Methods for testing solutions before full implementation.

This structure creates a clear line of sight from strategic goals to experimental validation, with each level answering a different question in the product development process.

Building Your First Opportunity Solution Tree: A Step-by-Step Guide

Creating an effective Opportunity Solution Tree requires discipline and customer focus. Here's a structured approach:

Step 1: Define Your Desired Outcome

The foundation of any OST is a clearly defined, measurable outcome. This should be specific enough to provide direction but not so prescriptive that it assumes a particular solution path.

Your outcome should include a measurement framework. For example: "Increase new user activation from 23% to 35% by the end of Q3." This specificity helps teams evaluate whether their work is moving the needle on what matters.

Step 2: Discover Customer Opportunities

With a clear outcome established, the next step is identifying the customer opportunities that could help achieve it. This is fundamentally a research-driven process, not a brainstorming exercise.

Methods for discovering opportunities include:

• Customer Interviews: Speaking directly with users about their experiences, challenges, and goals provides rich qualitative insights. Focus these conversations on understanding problems rather than validating potential solutions.
• Behavioural Analysis: Examining how users actually use your product often reveals pain points and opportunities that users themselves might not articulate. Duolingo discovered through behavioural analysis that many users would start language lessons but abandon them midway through—revealing an opportunity to adjust difficulty progression.
• Support and Feedback Analysis: Systematically analysing support tickets, feature requests, and user feedback can identify patterns of pain points and desired improvements. Notion's team regularly reviews their support database to identify clusters of related issues that might indicate bigger opportunity areas.
• Field Studies: Observing users in their natural environment can reveal contextual needs that might not emerge in direct interviews. Square discovered important opportunities for their retail point-of-sale system by observing actual transaction workflows in busy shops during peak hours.

The goal is to generate a comprehensive map of customer needs and problems related to your outcome. These become the opportunities in your tree.

Step 3: Structure Your Opportunity Space

As you identify opportunities, you'll need to organise them into a coherent structure. Opportunities typically exist at different levels of granularity and often have relationships to each other.

Some approaches to structuring opportunities include:

• User Journey Mapping: Organising opportunities by the stage of the user journey where they occur. This helps teams understand how opportunities relate to the overall user experience.
• Job Stories: Framing opportunities around specific "jobs to be done" that users are trying to accomplish. This approach focuses on user motivations and contexts.
• Problem Clustering: Grouping related problems and needs into broader opportunity areas. This helps manage complexity when you've identified many specific issues.

The key is creating a structure that helps your team navigate the opportunity space and see connections between related needs.

Step 4: Explore Potential Solutions

With a structured view of opportunities, teams can now explore potential solutions. For each opportunity, brainstorm multiple ways it might be addressed.

This divergent thinking at the solution level is crucial. By generating multiple solutions for each opportunity, teams increase their chances of finding optimal approaches and avoid becoming fixated on a single implementation path.

Techniques for solution exploration include:

• Collaborative Sketching: Having team members independently sketch potential solutions before coming together for discussion promotes diverse thinking.
• Analogous Inspiration: Looking at how similar problems are solved in other products or domains can spark creative solutions.
• Constraint-Based Ideation: Intentionally adding constraints to brainstorming (e.g., "How would we solve this without adding any UI?") can lead to innovative approaches.
• Story Mapping: Mapping potential user flows through different solution concepts helps visualise how solutions might work in practice.

At this stage, solutions should be considered directional concepts rather than fully specified features. The goal is to identify promising approaches that warrant further exploration.

Step 5: Design Experiments

The final level of the Opportunity Solution Tree focuses on experiments—ways to test solution ideas before committing significant resources to building them.

Effective experiments share several characteristics:

• Focused Learning Objective: Each experiment should answer a specific question about a solution's viability or effectiveness.
• Minimum Viable Scope: Experiments should use the smallest possible implementation that can generate reliable learning.
• Clear Success Criteria: Before running an experiment, define what results would indicate success or failure.
• Reasonable Timeframe: Design experiments that can generate meaningful results within a timeframe that supports decision-making needs.

Experiment types might include:

• Prototyping and User Testing: Creating interactive mockups to test usability and value perception.
• Wizard of Oz Testing: Manually simulating functionality to test user response before building automated systems.
• A/B Testing: Releasing variations to different user segments to compare performance.
• Concierge Approach: Manually delivering service to early users to learn what would be valuable to automate.

The experiments level completes the tree, creating a path from strategic outcomes through customer opportunities and potential solutions to practical validation.

Common Pitfalls and Anti-Patterns

Several common mistakes can undermine the effectiveness of Opportunity Solution Trees:

1. The Solution-First Fallacy
   Many teams start with predetermined solutions and work backward, trying to justify them within the OST framework. This fundamentally undermines the discovery process and perpetuates confirmation bias.
   
2. The Assumption-Based Tree
   Building an Opportunity Solution Tree based on internal assumptions rather than customer research creates a house of cards that cannot support effective decision-making.
   
3. The Premature Convergence Trap
   Some teams identify opportunities but then immediately fixate on a single solution rather than exploring multiple approaches. This premature convergence limits innovation and increases the risk of pursuing suboptimal paths.
   
4. The Disconnected Experiment
   When experiments aren't directly tied to validating specific solutions and opportunities, they can produce data that doesn't support meaningful decisions.

Evolving Your Opportunity Solution Tree

Opportunity Solution Trees aren't static documents—they should evolve as you learn more about your customers and test solutions. Several practices support effective evolution:

1. Regular Tree Reviews
   Schedule periodic reviews of your Opportunity Solution Tree to incorporate new learnings and adjust your approach. Basecamp conducts "tree reviews" after each six-week development cycle, updating their understanding of opportunities based on what they've learned.
   
2. Opportunity Depth Over Breadth
   Rather than trying to address every possible opportunity, focus on developing deep understanding of a few high-potential areas. Intercom deliberately limits their active opportunity exploration to 3-5 key areas at any time, ensuring each receives sufficient research attention.
   
3. Continuous Customer Connection
   Maintain ongoing customer research even as you develop solutions, using insights to refine your understanding of opportunities. Figma's product teams spend 15-20% of their time in continuous discovery activities regardless of their current development phase, ensuring their opportunity understanding remains current.
   
4. Outcome-Based Evaluation
   Regularly assess how work emerging from your Opportunity Solution Tree is influencing your desired outcome. This creates accountability for the framework itself. Buffer conducts monthly reviews connecting their product work to outcome metrics, using this data to refine their opportunity selection.

Case Study: Connecting North Star to Opportunities at Duolingo

Duolingo's journey with Opportunity Solution Trees demonstrates how this framework can connect high-level metrics to practical product work.

When Duolingo defined their North Star Metric as "daily active users completing at least one lesson," they needed a structured approach to identify which aspects of their product most needed improvement. They implemented Opportunity Solution Trees to create this structure.

Their initial customer research revealed numerous potential opportunities, which they organised into several broad areas:

• Motivation and habit formation
• Learning effectiveness perception
• Accessibility for different learning styles
• Social reinforcement

For each area, they developed more specific opportunity statements based on user research. Under "motivation and habit formation," they identified that "new users struggle to build language learning habits because they don't see immediate progress" and "experienced users lose motivation when they hit learning plateaus."

These specific opportunities provided clear focus for solution exploration. For the "learning plateau" opportunity, they examined multiple potential solutions, including personalised challenges, intermediate achievement milestones, and a system showing real-world language capability improvements.

After exploring solutions, they designed experiments to validate promising directions. For their "intermediate milestones" solution, they created a limited implementation that introduced celebration moments for vocabulary mastery and tested its impact on retention with a segment of plateau-stage users.

The Opportunity Solution Tree approach transformed Duolingo's product development process. Rather than debating feature ideas disconnected from user needs, teams focused on addressing well-defined opportunities with clear connections to their North Star. The framework also created cross-functional alignment, as design, research, and engineering teams shared a common understanding of why certain work took priority.

"Before implementing Opportunity Solution Trees, we had endless debates about which features to build next," explains Jorge Mazal, former VP of Product at Duolingo. "With OSTs, those debates transformed into more productive discussions about which user opportunities had the greatest potential impact on our goals. It changed both our decision-making and our team dynamics."

Implementing Opportunity Solution Trees in Your Organisation

Introducing the Opportunity Solution Tree framework requires both methodological skills and cultural adaptation. Here are steps to get started:

1. Begin with Education
   Ensure your team understands the framework's purpose and structure. Share resources, provide examples, and consider training from experienced practitioners.
   
2. Start Small and Focused
   Begin with a single important outcome and build a tree for it, rather than attempting to map your entire product landscape at once. This focused approach helps teams learn the methodology without becoming overwhelmed.
   
3. Invest in Research Capabilities
   The quality of your Opportunity Solution Tree depends directly on the quality of your customer research. Invest in developing these capabilities before attempting to build comprehensive trees.
   
4. Create Visual Artifacts
   The power of the Opportunity Solution Tree comes partly from its visual nature. Create physical or digital visualisations that can be easily referenced and updated. Tools like Miro, Figjam, or even dedicated OST software can support this visualisation.
   
5. Establish Regular Reviews
   Implement regular reviews that examine each level of your tree, from experiments back to outcomes. These reviews should explicitly question whether the work is addressing the right opportunities and influencing your desired outcomes.

Conclusion

The Opportunity Solution Tree framework transforms how product teams connect strategic objectives to tactical execution. By creating a structured approach to discovering, organising, and addressing customer opportunities, OSTs help teams avoid the common pitfall of solution-first thinking while maintaining clear focus on desired outcomes.

When implemented well, this framework addresses fundamental challenges that plague many product organisations: it provides clarity on why certain work takes priority, creates alignment across functions without requiring constant management oversight, and balances strategic direction with customer-centred discovery.

Most importantly, the Opportunity Solution Tree creates a continuous thread connecting your North Star Metric to the day-to-day work of product development, ensuring that every experiment, feature, and release contributes to the outcomes that matter most for your business and your customers