The Shared goal of Design Thinking and Opportunity-Solution-Tree: Building Products Users love
Both methods – Design Thinking and Opportunity-Solution-Tree – share one common goal: to create and build products that customers really love. Creating products that resonate deeply with customers is at the center of each product-led organisation as it is core to meeting customers needs and building customer relationships. Both approaches emphasize understanding the customer’s or user’s needs and wants as the foundation of product development.
Design thinking helps product teams to better understand users by placing themselves in their users’ situation. This enables them to find out customers’ real needs and develop solutions that solve their problems effectively.
Similarly, the Opportunity-Solution-Tree method focuses on identifying opportunities by carefully analyzing the problem space and tailoring solutions to meet customer needs.
By prioritizing customer-centricity and iterative problem-solving, both methods try to create and develop products that not only meet but exceed user expectations, fostering a deep connection and loyalty among customers. This way both methods are crucial for successful Product Discovery.
Ultimately, their shared objective lies in creating meaningful and impactful solutions that enhance the lives of users, driving success and sustainability in today’s competitive market landscape.
Now, let’s take a closer look at the core elements of Design Thinking and Opportunity-Solution-Tree.
Introduction to Design Thinking: A Human-Centered Approach
Design thinking is a human-centered approach to problem-solving. It focusses on empathy, creativity, and experimentation. It’s a method used to tackle complex issues and create innovative solutions. At its core, design thinking is all about understanding the needs, desires and behaviours of the people you want to adress with the solutions, products or services you are developing.
The design thinking process typically consists of five stages: empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test. These phases do not necessarily have to take place one after the other. Rather, the combination of all elements fosters an environment in which innovation can take place.
Stage 1 – Empathize: Dive into the experiences of our users to gain a deep understanding of their perspectives, needs and challenges by conducting interviews, observations and surveys.
Step 2 – Define: Consolidate the information collected to identify the core problems or opportunities that should be addressed. Focus is on collaboratively defining the problem statement or the design challenge to align a common goal.
Stage 3 – Ideate: Ideation is all about generating creative solutions to the defined problem. Through brainstorming sessions, workshops, other collaborative activities and out-of-the-box thinking, a wide range of ideas is generated.
Stage 4 – Prototype: After selecting the most promising ideas, first prototypes are created to visualize the possible solutions. Prototypes can be reach from sketches and wireframes to physical models and digital mock-ups and should be easily shareable and refinable.
Stage 5 – Test: The created prototypes are tested with real users to gather early feedback
and insights. Through testing the ideas and possible solutions, assumptions can be validated, potential issues uncovered and the solutions can be refinded further.
The iterative nature of design thinking allows teams to go through the process again and again and apply improvements based on the feedback they receive. The goal is not to immediately find the perfect solution but rather focus on continuously learning and evolving towards better outcomes. By keeping the needs of users at the center of the problem-solving process, design thinking enables teams to develop solutions, products and services that truly have meaning and impact.
Introduction to Opportunity-Solution-Tree: Prioritizing Opportunities and Identifying most promising Solutions
In essence, the “Opportunity-Solution-Tree” method is a visual map of your “why”, “what” and “how”. It helps, especially product teams, to develop their product in an objective-driven way and keep track of their path towards achieving a desired outcome for their product. It helps teams brainstorm and explore different opportunities in a structured way, finding promising solutions and testing them in experiments to validate their desirability, feasibility and viability.
In order to start mapping out your Opportunity-Solution-Tree (in short OST), follow these steps:
Step 1 – Define Your Desired Outcome: Define a clear and measurable goal that you want to reach, like for example increasing user engagement, improving customer satisfaction or reducing customer churn. Usually, the goal setting is done by Product Managers in coordination with business stakeholders and represents the “why” of your activities. The desired outcome is positioned at the top of the OTS and serves as root.
Step 2 – Identify Opportunities: Look for what data you already gathered in your company and analyze it to find hints about possible opportunities based on user needs, pain points or desires. If you figure that more data and insights is needed, start researching and broaden your knowledge to ensure adressing actual user needs.
Additional Tips:
During this step you might also find interessting sub-opportunities, map them simply as branches to your opportunities to not loose a thought.
If you have explored a high number of opportunities, it might be handy to go into opportunities prioritization to focus on the most promising ones based on research data.
Step 3 – Generate Solutions: For each opportunity, brainstorm potential solutions (features, enhancements or new product ideas) that could address the underlying need. Use common brainstorming techniques like Worst possible idea, Brainwriting or The 5 Whys.
Step 4 – Prioritize Solutions: After ideating a bunch of different solutions for various opportunities it is time to focus on the most promising ones. First, prioritize your solutions by using common methods like ICE Scoring oder RICE scoring.
Additional Tips:
Use the Confidence Meter by Itamar Gilad as value within the ICE or RICE score. By this you are taking into account what evidence you have already gained from research and base your estimate rather on data then on simple gut feeling.
Step 5 – Refine and Derive Assumptions: For the prioritized solutions, dive agin into already collected data to use insights for refining your idea and explore assumptions around them. Assumptions is something you believe to be true without having actual proof. In order to increase your level of confidence, those assumptions should be verified or falsified.
Step 6 – Test and Experiment: In the last step it’s all about getting evidence that your solution effectively approaches the objective. Set-up various experiments around your assumptions to test for feasibility, desireability or viability.
By mapping out these different paths, the OST fosters exploration and innovation. It allows teams to see the big picture, understand the “why” behind features, and make informed decisions about where to invest their time and resources. It embraces a dynamic, visual approach and encourages prioritizing opportunities based on potential impact. It also helps identify potential roadblocks and knowledge gaps that need to be addressed through research or testing.
Differences in steps and processes
Although, both methods – Design Thinking and Opportunity-Solution-Tree – are effective in creating impactful products, they vary in their approach and steps. The following 5 key aspects show where those differences lie.
1. Conceptual Foundation
Design Thinking
rooted in creativity and human-centered design principles
focusing on understanding user needs and behaviors to create solutions that are desirable, feasible, and viable
five phases – empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test
Opportunity-Solution-Tree
helping product teams maintaining their focus on desired outcomes while they explore various opportunities and solutions
structured approach to decision-making, starting from a desired outcome and branching out to opportunities and then to solutions.
2. Problem Framing
Design Thinking
starting with a broad focus on understanding the problem space
empathy work with users, followed by defining specific problems to solve
encouraging open-ended exploration and reframing of the problem based on insights gained.
Opportunity-Solution-Tree
starting with a clear, often user-centric and well-defined outcome
working backwards to identify multiple opportunities possibly leading to that outcome and finding suitable solutions
structured approach to problem exploration
3. User-Centricity
Design Thinking
Highly user-centric, emphasizing deep understanding of user experiences and needs
direct interaction with interviews, observations, and immersive empathy exercises
Opportunity-Solution-Tree
considering user needs, but more outcome-oriented
focusing on aligning potential solutions with business goals or desired results
user needs are integrated into the broader context of achieving specific outcomes.
4. Flexibility and Adaptability
Design Thinking
highly flexible and non-linear
allows for repeated iterations and pivots based on feedback and testing with users
adaptability is key to innovation and finding unexpected solutions.
Opportunity-Solution-Tree
rather systematic and hierarchical
focusing on logical progression from desired outcomes down to specific solutions
allows for exploring multiple paths, while emphasizing maintaining alignment with the overall goal
5. Visualization and Representation
Design Thinking
often a variety of visual and prototyping tools is used to ideate and test concepts, like sketches, storyboards and physical prototypes
prototypes are used to identify the most promising solution to build a truly loveable product
Opportunity-Solution-Tree
visual representation of the whole process by using a tree diagram to visually map out the relationships between outcomes, opportunities, and solutions
helps in keeping track of strategic alignment and ensuring alignment with the defined goal
Additionally, various kinds of visuals and prototypes can be used for idea testing to get closer to the actual lovable product
To sum up, the process and steps of the Design Thinking method are well suited for open-ended, exploratory projects where user experience and innovation are paramount. In contrast, the Opportunity-Solution Tree is ideal for scenarios where decisions need to be tightly aligned with specific business outcomes or goals.
When to best use Design Thinking and when Opportunity-Solution-Tree?
Choosing between the Design Thinking method and the Opportunity-Solution-Tree method depends on the specific needs of what you want to achieve, the nature of the problem being solved, and the goals of your organization. Here are some simple guidlines when to consider each approach:
When to use the Design Thinking Method?
Exploring New Innovations: Design Thinking is ideal when you’re looking to innovate or explore entirely new ideas, products, or services. It is particularly effective when the problem is not well-defined and needs creative exploration.
User-Centered Problems: If solving the problem in question is heavily dependent on deep user engagement and understanding, Design Thinking is essential. It helps uncover hidden needs and desires of users through empathy.
Complex Problems: For complex problems that require a multidisciplinary approach and where the problem space has different facets, design thinking encourages a broad exploration of potential solutions and allows the team to iterate ideas that better meet the needs of the users.
Need for Prototyping: Whenever it is inevitable to test and validate your ideas through prototpyes to get early user feedback, Design Thinking is the go to method, It is provides the tools and mindset for this iterative testing and refinement.
When Innovation is a Priority: In environments where innovation is more important than speed, Design Thinking enables a more thorough and potentially disruptive exploration of solutions.
When to use the Opportunity-Solution-Tree Method?
Goal-Oriented Initiatives: When you have a clear outcome or business goal, that you want to achieve, and need a structured path to keep track on your progress, the Opportunity-Solution-Tree can effectively help in visualising all efforts towards this target.
Decision-Making Framework: For situations where you need a clear decision-making framework that helps in evaluating different options systematically, this method provides a logical structure to explore various solutions for each identified opportunity.
Scaling Solutions: Whenever you need to systematically adress various opportunities or want to scale the process of explosring most promising solutions, the OST method helps in organizizing ans prioritizung your efforts effectively.
Aligning Teams: If you need to ensure that multiple teams or stakeholders are working towards a common goal, the visual and structured nature of this method can make it clear how each individual step contributes to achieving the overarching goal.
Efficiency in Problem-Solving: In cases where time and resources are limited and the problem requires direct and efficient resolution strategies aligned with defined outcomes, the Opportunity-Solution-Tree helps streamline the process.
The best approach often depends on the project stage and goals.Use design thinking when you’re in the early stages of product development and need to deeply understand user needs and explore a broad range of solutions.Use opportunity-solution trees when you have a good understanding of user needs and need to prioritize and communicate potential solutions.
Can both methods – Design Thinking and Opportunity-Solution-Tree – be combined?
Although both methods follow disting approaches, they can be powerful allies in the innovation process.
Design Thinking excels at uncovering user needs. Through empathy exercises like interviews and observations, it focusses on user pain points and motivations. This user-centric understanding can be used as the foundation for the Opportunity-Solution-Tree.
The OST then takes center stage, helping you translate those user needs into actionable opportunities. By systematically exploring different solutions, it maps a path towards a desired outcome, such as increased customer satisfaction or higher sales.
The user insights gleaned from Design Thinking further strengthen the OST. By understanding user needs, you can refine the desired outcome and ensure the opportunities explored are truly relevant to user pain points.
Finally, the two methods can be seamlessly integrated. Design Thinking’s brainstorming techniques can be used to generate a wide range of ideas. The OST then swoops in, organizing and prioritizing these ideas based on the opportunities they address. This focused exploration allows you to efficiently test and refine the most promising solutions through Design Thinking’s prototyping and user testing phases.
In essence, combining Design Thinking and the OST fosters a powerful innovation approach. You gain valuable user insights to inform your OST, while the OST helps you structure and prioritize your Design Thinking ideas for efficient exploration and testing.
Conclusion
Design Thinking and Opportunity-Solution Trees (OSTs) are two powerful methods that share a common goal: creating lovable products that resonate with customers. Both approaches emphasize understanding customer needs as the foundation of product development.
Design Thinking takes a human-centered approach, focusing on empathy, creativity, and experimentation. It involves a five-step process: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. This method is ideal for exploring entirely new ideas, tackling user-centered problems, and navigating complex issues.
Opportunity-Solution-Trees, on the other hand, take a more structured approach. They start with a desired outcome and then branch out to opportunities and solutions. This method is particularly useful for prioritizing opportunities based on their potential impact and identifying areas where more knowledge is needed. It shines in goal-oriented initiatives, decision-making processes, scaling solutions, and keeping teams aligned.
While they have distinct strengths, Design Thinking and OSTs can be effectively combined. Design Thinking can be used to uncover user needs that then inform the OST. The OST can then translate those needs into actionable opportunities and prioritize solutions that address them. Design Thinking’s brainstorming techniques can also be used to generate a wide range of ideas for the OST to consider. Finally, the OST can help prioritize which ideas to explore further through Design Thinking’s prototyping and user testing phases.
By combining these two methods, you can gain valuable user insights to inform your product development and structure and prioritize your ideas for efficient exploration and testing, ultimately fostering a powerful innovation approach.
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