With the Opportunity Landscape
🔍 Stuck in Solution Mode? Uncover Hidden Needs: Frustrated by features nobody uses? Dive deeper than user feedback to discover fundamental desires driving customer behavior.
🎯 Prioritize Projects & Win Big: Target Needs with High Impact: Faced with endless demands and limited resources? Visually identify underserved, critical needs to guide development towards maximum impact.
💡 Ideas Galore, But Which One Works? Validate Effectively: Don't waste time validating every brainstorm. Align ideas with identified needs to assess their true problem-solving potential.
🧐 Know Your Rivals, Outmaneuver Them: Map Needs & Find Your Niche: Understand competitor strengths and weaknesses. Identify underserved needs for differentiated strategies and niche opportunities.
🗣️ Lost in Translation? Speak Stakeholders' Language: Simplify complex customer insights with a visual map. Facilitate clear communication and alignment with everyone involved.
🚀 Innovate Beyond the Usual: Unlock Next-Gen Solutions: Move beyond incremental improvements. Discover unmet needs that unlock opportunities for revolutionary solutions.
📊 Prove It! Justify Decisions with Data & Impact: Confidently advocate for product decisions. Use data-driven insights about underserved needs and potential impact to secure stakeholder buy-in.
Imagine having a crystal ball to see exactly which customer needs to address. Channeling the wisdom of the legendary Jay Z, your customers might have 99 problems. The real question is, which ones should your product solve? Introducing the Opportunity Landscape—a tool designed to bring clarity to your decision-making process. It's not just about identifying problems; it's about pinpointing the ones where you can make the biggest difference.
The Opportunity Landscape employs a two-axis approach to map customer outcomes, guiding strategic decisions:
Y-Axis (Importance): Assesses the value customers place on specific outcomes, pinpointing areas with the highest demand for improvement.
X-Axis (Satisfaction): Measures how well current solutions meet these outcomes, indicating satisfaction levels.
Outcomes are categorized into three sections:
Underserved Outcomes (High Importance/Low Satisfaction): Highlighting unmet needs with high importance but low satisfaction, signaling areas ripe for innovation to enhance customer experience. These are your differentiators and value propositions.
Adequately Served Outcomes (High Importance/High Satisfaction): Essential customer needs fulfilled by competing offerings, serving as a baseline for market entry. While insufficient for attracting customers, their absence can deter potential interest in your product.
Overserved Outcomes (Low: Highlights outcomes where customer needs are exceeded, pointing to areas where features could be avoided, scaled back, or removed.
This approach helps avoid over-solving or under-delivering, ensuring strategic alignment with customer-driven value.
With The Opportunity Landscape
Before diving into the Opportunity Landscape, kickstart your exploration by identifying outcomes with the Customer Job Map tool. It sets the stage for a deeper understanding of customer needs.
With the Opportunity Landscape, you'll navigate through a transformative process:
🎯 Assess Importance: Gauge how critical each outcome is to your customers, understanding their priorities.
😊 Measure Satisfaction: Determine how well customers feel their needs are currently being met, revealing areas for improvement.
🗺️ Map the Opportunities: Position each outcome on the Opportunity Landscape using the coordinates derived from their importance and satisfaction scores.
🚀 Strategize and Select: Identify the most significant opportunities—the ones that are important yet underserved—and decide which outcomes your product will focus on to deliver real value.
Leverage the Opportunity Landscape to illuminate the path to innovation, directing your product development to where it can make the most substantial impact.
The Opportunity Landscape clarifies customer frustrations and helps prioritize solutions. Consider an online grocery shopping scenario as our example. By evaluating customer outcomes/needs—such as quick delivery of fresh produce or customized recipes based on dietary restrictions—we assess their importance and how well current services fulfill them.
This analysis reveals three critical areas:
Underserved / Opportunities: Unmet, significant customer needs craving improvement, such as tailored recipe recommendations or flexible ordering options.
Adequately Served /Table Stakes: Basic expectations are met, like prompt deliveries and clear product origins.
Overserved: Aspects that could be minimized or eliminated to reduce costs, like unnecessary packaging or unneeded promotions.
Note: the image above uses the older language we no longer use.
Leveraging this framework ensures we focus on essential customer needs, making our online grocery service a convenient and enjoyable solution rather than a tedious task.
With this customer needs landscape in hand, you're better equipped to identify which outcomes to target for innovative solutions.
Dive Deeper with Our Articles :
Explore our informative article on using the Opportunity Landscape.
Learn to apply the Jobs To Be Done framework in our Certified Scrum Product Owner course. Gain practical experience with the Customer Job Description template and learn to integrate JTBD insights within Agile methodologies for effective product development. Join us to enhance your skills in Agile product ownership and apply JTBD principles to ensure you say YES to the right things and NO to the wrong things.
This concept of Opportunity Landscapes was inspired by the work of Anthony Ulwick, particularly his Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI) framework. To dive deeper into ODI, visit his website: https://jobs-to-be-done.com/outcome-driven-innovation-odi-is-jobs-to-be-done-theory-in-practice-2944c6ebc40e
Having trained over 1,000 individuals on Customer Discovery using Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD), I've observed that many prefer a simpler explanation to grasp the core concepts. Out version of the tool aims to provide that accessible introduction.
However, for those seeking a deeper understanding and advanced techniques like statistical analysis for market segmentation, I highly recommend Ulwick's book, What Customers Want. This book delves into JTBD and ODI with rich detail and practical applications.