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:
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.
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.
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 occasionally do something to help internal users, so if that's the case we can call that out here. But even then, we try to tie it back to the benefits to our end customers.
So much product work fails because it tries to please everyone and ends up pleasing no one. This question is intended to make it very clear to the product team who the primary intended beneficiary of this work is. Normally, this is a particular type of user or customer. It might be described as a user or customer persona, a specific target market, or a specific job to be done.
There are other factors you may want to consider when assessing an opportunity, depending on the nature of the opportunity, but I consider these four questions to be the bare minimum. You need to ensure that every member of your product team knows and understands the answers to these four questions before you jump into your product discovery work.
Answering these questions is the responsibility of the product manager, and it normally takes a few minutes to prepare these answers. But then the product manager needs to share them with her product team and with key stakeholders to ensure you are on the same page.
One important caveat: Sometimes the CEO or another senior leader will explain that there's something beyond normal product work that needs to be done. Realize that there are sometimes strategic reasons for doing specific product work, such as support a partnership. If it happens a lot, then that's a different issue, but it's usually infrequent. If that's the case, don't stress over it. Just give the team as much context as you can—these four questions may still be relevant.