Opportunity Solution Tree
Trace an outcome through customer opportunities to solutions and assumption tests.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- 99%
The Opportunity Solution Tree turns the open-ended question of what to build into a visual decision structure. Put the desired outcome at the root, organize the customer experience into a small number of top-level moments, and place the unmet needs, pain points, and desires found in customer stories beneath them. Moving down the tree should make opportunities progressively smaller and more actionable. The team can then choose where to play, generate solutions for a selected opportunity, and connect those solutions to assumption tests. The tree preserves the link between daily product choices and the outcome while forcing a clean distinction between the problem space and solution space. It also exposes alternative branches, helping the team make a strategic choice rather than jump to its first idea.
Origin
Teresa Torres created the tree as scaffolding for product teams shifting from being told which features to build to owning an outcome and deciding what to build.
Core principles
- 01Start with the outcome instead of a prescribed feature.
- 02Treat opportunities as unmet needs, pain points, or desires, not solutions.
- 03Use customer stories to ground the opportunity space.
- 04Break broad opportunities into smaller opportunities the team can address.
- 05Keep the full tree visible so local choices remain connected to strategy.
How to run it
- 1
Set the outcome
Place the product or business outcome at the root of the tree. Make it the result the team is trying to influence, not a feature it has been told to ship.
Pro tip Trace the outcome back to the business model when the team has not been explicitly assigned one.
Watch out An output at the root turns the tree into a disguised feature plan.
- 2
Map the experience
Lay out the distinct moments in the customer's experience that relate to the outcome. Keep the top level cognitively manageable, typically around three to seven branches.
Pro tip Map the broader human experience, not only the steps inside your own product.
Watch out Too many top-level branches make the tree hard to process and use.
- 3
Collect customer stories
Interview customers about recent, specific experiences. Use the stories to uncover context, friction, needs, and desires that direct questions may miss.
Pro tip Ask about the last time the customer went through the experience.
Watch out Abstract opinions and hypothetical answers are weak foundations for an opportunity space.
- 4
Extract opportunities
Listen for unmet needs, pain points, and desires in each story. Place them under the moment in the experience where they arise.
Pro tip Check whether the same need could exist for customers of a competing product.
Watch out If the statement describes what to build, it is a solution rather than an opportunity.
- 5
Frame opportunities precisely
Write each opportunity as a specific customer problem that the team could realistically address. Replace broad wishes such as easier to use with the concrete friction causing the wish.
Pro tip Name the person, moment, and exact difficulty whenever the story supports them.
Watch out A vague opportunity can absorb endless work without clarifying what success means.
- 6
Decompose broad branches
Break evergreen problems into progressively smaller causes or needs. Continue until a lower-level opportunity is narrow enough to solve while still contributing to the larger branch.
Pro tip Move vertically from a broad struggle to the specific reasons it occurs.
Watch out Do not confuse adding detail with prematurely selecting a solution.
- 7
Choose and test solutions
Select an opportunity deliberately, generate candidate solutions, and attach tests for the assumptions behind them. Retain the rest of the tree so the team can see what it chose not to pursue.
Pro tip Use the visible alternatives to explain and revisit strategic choices.
Watch out Jumping directly from the outcome to one solution recreates the feature-factory behavior the tree is meant to prevent.
In the wild
Torres starts with an outcome such as increasing engagement with a streaming service. The opportunity space follows the customer's experience: deciding to watch something, choosing what to watch, evaluating whether a title looks good, viewing it, and deciding whether to continue. Under choosing, the team might capture difficulty finding a known title, returning to a show, or judging quality. A broad problem such as not knowing whether a show is good can be decomposed into a smaller need such as checking who is in the cast.
→ The team reaches specific, solvable customer opportunities without treating product features as problems.
Common mistakes
Writing solutions as opportunities
A proposed feature belongs in the solution space. Labeling it as a customer opportunity removes the exploration the tree is designed to create.
Framing an evergreen problem
Statements such as making a product easier to use are too broad to guide a solution. Decompose them until the exact customer friction is visible.
Overloading the top level
A tree with too many first-level branches becomes difficult to understand. Use a small set of distinct experience-map moments at the top.
Is it for you?
Best for
Empowered product teams moving from feature delivery toward customer-centered outcome ownership.
Not ideal for
Teams that only need to execute a fixed, fully specified solution and cannot influence product decisions.
From the episode
Teresa Torres on how to interview customers, automating continuous discovery, the opportunity solution tree framework, making the case for user research, common interviewing mistakes, and much more