The OPPA — Leaderless Peer Review of Problems and Opportunities
A recurring PM-only forum to spar on problems and opportunities — with the CPO deliberately absent.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 92%
OPPA (Opportunity/Problem Assessment) is a standing Calendly meeting where product managers debate with each other, either before investigating an opportunity or after data comes back, to decide whether to pursue a solution. The defining design choice is that Annie Pearl, the CPO, does not attend — her presence would make people perform rather than think. The result is a forum PMs actively want to bring work to, rather than a shark tank they dread.
Origin
A Calendly product-team ritual described by Annie Pearl. She contrasts it explicitly with the more common anti-pattern (cited from a friend at Zynga) of PM plan-review meetings that turn into a shark tank where everyone attacks the presenter.
Core principles
- 01Peer sparring produces better thinking than leader review — but only when the leader is not in the room.
- 02The presence of the decision-maker converts a debate into a performance.
- 03The forum should be one people pull work into ('I need to take this to OPPA'), not one they are pushed into.
- 04It sits at a specific point in the product life cycle: before committing to a solution, not after.
How to run it
- 1
Schedule a frequent, PM-only slot
Set a recurring meeting whose attendee list is product managers and no product leadership. Frequency should be high enough that a PM can always bring a live problem to the next one.
Watch out Do not let executives 'just sit in this once'. One attendance resets the room's psychological safety.
- 2
Bring one of two item types
Either (a) an area or problem you want to go investigate, seeking a challenge on whether it is worth the effort, or (b) the data and research you got back from evaluating an opportunity, seeking a decision on whether to develop a solution.
Pro tip Standardize the OPPA document template so the target-customer and target-user questions are always answered up front.
- 3
Debate and spar, do not present and defend
The format is peer discussion, not a stage. The goal is that the presenting PM leaves with better thinking — they came to bounce ideas off people, not to survive a review.
Watch out Watch for the shark-tank drift where the room's implicit job becomes finding flaws. If PMs start dreading it, the norm has flipped.
- 4
Feed the outcome into the phase gate
The OPPA decision is what promotes a problem space from Discovery into Solutioning — connecting the ritual directly to the commit-only-to-dates-you-control life cycle.
In the wild
Lenny raises a friend's experience at Zynga where PMs presented plans to all the other PMs and everyone came to destroy them. Pearl says Calendly's OPPA is the opposite — PMs say things like 'I really need to take this to OPPA because I'm working through these problems and want to bounce it off other people.' She attributes much of that to intentionally not attending.
→ PMs pull work into the forum voluntarily and report getting a lot of value out of it, rather than avoiding it.
Common mistakes
The leader attending 'just to listen'
Pearl deliberately stays out so people can be open and transparent without feeling judged or needing to act a certain way. A senior leader in the room changes what people are willing to say, regardless of intent.
Letting it become a plan-approval meeting
OPPA is for problems and opportunities — the pre-solution stage. Once it becomes a place where finished plans are approved, it converts into a review board and the sparring dies.
Is it for you?
Best for
Heads of product with a team of 10+ PMs who want higher-quality opportunity decisions without every judgment call escalating to them.
Not ideal for
Very small product teams (2-3 PMs) where a peer forum is just the normal team meeting, or cultures where PMs already avoid candid disagreement.
From the transcript
“we have a meeting called oppa which stands for opportunity problem opportunity slash problem uh assessment and so what this is is a meeting where…”
“to the meeting is that I really want everyone to be able to be open and transparent and provide feedback and not feel like there's…”
From the episode
Behind the scenes of Calendly’s rapid growth
Annie Pearl (CPO)