INSPIRED, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 35Opportunity Assessment Technique

An opportunity assessment is an extremely simple technique but can save you a lot of time and grief.

The idea is to answer four key questions about the discovery work you are about to undertake:

1. What business objective is this work intended to address? (Objective)
2. How will you know if you've succeeded? (Key results)
3. What problem will this solve for our customers? (Customer problem)
4. What type of customer are we focused on? (Target market)

Business Objective

The first question should map to one or more of your team's assigned objectives. For example, if you've been asked to focus on the problem of growth, to reduce the time it takes for a new customer to onboard, or to reduce the percentage of customers that churn each month, then we want to be clear that this work will address at least one of our assigned problems.

Key Results

We want to know at the outset what the measure of success is. For example, if we're trying to reduce churn, would a 1 percent improvement be considered excellent or would be it be considered a waste of time? The second question should map to at least one of the key results assigned to our product team.

Customer Problem

We want to keep the focus on our customers.

Everything we do is, of course, intended to benefit our own company in some way or we wouldn't do it. But we want to keep the focus on our customers, and this question will clearly articulate the problem we want to solve for our customers. We ...